Enterprise Connect 2021 Interview with Chris Botting

[Chris Botting]

Oh thank you padres a pleasure.

[Robert Ballercer]

Now IntelePeer has been making waves in omnichannel communications with ai-powered solutions. Now specifically you allow businesses to create a consistent and responsive customer experience across multiple communication paths. Now that’s easy to say, that’s pretty much the industry jargon, but I would prefer you to tell our audience exactly what is IntelePeer and what is it that you do.

[Chris Botting]

Yeah, great thank you. So IntelePeer, uh, we’re a leading communication platform as a service provider. We’re best recognized in the co-creator part of the market, which is distinct from the developer segments. Uh, our customers come to us often because they tell us they need a CPaaS type of solution, but they can’t wait months for their developers to deliver scale. They need it done today, and part of this is reemphasized through Covid as well, is customers need problems solved now. Enterprise grade enterprise quality, enterprise scale. So we deliver these intelligent omnichannel solutions, powered by automation and AI, as you alluded to before, that for these enterprises who are looking to improve customer experiences and employee experiences and to overcome the challenges of today’s, uh, customer experience. So we’ve developed and designed our CPaaS architecture to allow for three different solution delivery models which is one of the fundamentals that distinguishes us in the marketplace. First of all, we have a large library solutions are already built and being used in the marketplace. We could very quickly tailor those to the specific needs of a company and we can maintain these for you or you can take them on and maintain these applications for ourselves. We do this and you can do this using our low-code and no-code tools. So it’s very easy to build and maintain the applications yourself. Of course, we have a rich API set and developers can choose to develop their own solutions if it makes sense to your business. As far as the APIs go, we have just signed and will be announcing shortly a significant worldwide technology application solution provider, very recognizable name, to rebuild their applications on top of our platform and more details will be forthcoming. Of course with any of the above models, you can very easily integrate to your CRM, your support systems, your ERP, your workflow applications, to leverage your existing investments. For example, a very common use case would be if somebody’s calling into your company, you can quickly take their phone number, do a database dip into a CRM and see if they’re a customer or not. If they’re a customer, they get one center treatment. If they’re not, they get another set of treatment. Just a quick example on that. So given this approach we serve a wide range of horizontal markets in vertical markets. We have a horizontally oriented platform with vertical applications. In healthcare we’ve recently provided a significant cost savings solution to SimonMed, who’s one of the largest outpatient radiology and imaging practices in the US. We’ve cut their voice and data cost by almost 50 percent from five and a half million dollars down to about three million dollars using our voice and SMS services. Uh, despite SimonMed’s continued growth, I mean they’ve gone from 98 different practices to over 170 sites in locations now.

[Robert Ballercer]

I love this I love anytime I can hear concrete examples of a solution being deployed. Do you have another one?

[Chris Botting]

Well certainly in the transportation and logistics market. Covenant Transport. These are truck drivers and they needed to be more efficient, more effective, and with the Covid situation they needed to be more distanced from the, uh, the people when they need to fill up with fuel. So we did an AI enabled voice application to support their truckers and to support the trucker’s accounts. So now, even in a noisy truck environment, they can call in and ask for re-upping on their fuel card. This is a simple example.

[Robert Ballercer]

Chris thank you for the examples. Again I really really appreciate it whenever a company comes in and they show us exactly how their solution’s been used and what I like about your examples is they cut across different sectors. It shows how useful and how flexible you can be. Now that’s great for an overview, but why should the attendees at Enterprise Connect go to your booth? What is it that you’re going to show them in 2021?

[Chris Botting]

We’ll be showing our omnichannel AI based speech and digital conversational interaction solution. So what you think of for an intelligent voice assistant, an IVA. We provide that kind of capability for voice. We also provide it for digital channels and that’s pretty unusual in the industry. Because of where we sit in the deployment model and our architectural approach, we are able to provide end-to-end analytics over the life of a customer engagement, which we refer to as our Atmosphere Insights and analytics. So for example, if you call in or message in through our application suite, we start the timer, we start the gathering of data and analytics based information at the beginning of that interaction. If you do a database dip to figure out who the person is, we capture that. If you get routed through a workflow solution, we capture that. If you end up with a contact center agent and they transfer you to another agent, we capture all that information. So based on that analytics, it’s not only the actual specifics about the call, but you can look at your customer journey and figure out if it’s actually broken or if you can make it more efficient and more effective if we’re able to show you every single step that the customer experience. So we’re very excited about that. In the third area is we’re going to be showing some glimpses of what we internally refer to as Project Lego. So Project Lego is essentially a self-service marketplace, which contains some of the widely used horizontal applications that I’ve gone through already, some of the most simple ones would be outbound notifications and routing management. Back to our CPaaS as the customers see what we can do they often engage us to add in more and more solutions on the platform. They can do that by talking with us or they will be able to do this through our Project Lego as well. And our products and services are designed to improve the overall customer experience for enterprises while satisfying their needs for scalability and demand for rapid and seamless deployment models. Covid 19 has really heightened businesses sense of urgency due to the unexpected demands.

[Robert Ballercer]

I want to talk a little bit about that urgency because I think we’ve all felt it and we’ve seen an explosion of CPaaS solutions in the last 18 months out of necessity. Businesses have had to find a different way of doing business of connecting with their workers and making sure that they can efficiently work from home, from a remote office node, wherever it might be. Now in your mind, how has the last two years changed, not just your market, but your company? How has the last two years changed IntelePeer?

[Chris Botting]

So we’ve seen a few different areas. One is around the sense of urgency, as you mentioned. Others are just overall business challenges, like the ability to hire people and bring them on, and then cost savings is always a key area for us, and for any company, right. So around the sense of urgencies Covid really underlined and emphasized the need for a fast and streamlined communication – whether it’s employee facing or customer facing and it drives demand as the organizations look to upgrade and optimize, not just the customer experience, but the overall communication interaction cycle. So one example here: we designed and developed a Covid hotline solution for several states and healthcare providers who are under immense time constraints, as you can imagine if with the Covid flare-up. We have the need to very quickly stand up a call-in solution for scheduling. We stood up one solution in less than 24 hours that scheduled over thirty thousand appointments, took over one million calls per week and up to a hundred thousand calls an hour – and yes that was eight hours from getting the requirements to standing up and executing and delivering the solution.

[Robert Ballercer]

A deployment is typically something that you measure in weeks and months not in hours or even days.

[Chris Botting]

You’re absolutely right and you know oftentimes we hear customers tell us the other vendors say we need quarters to do that if they can reach that kind of scale. So IntelePeer, very interesting company, so we’re a CPaaS company, we’re a SaaS company, but we have telecom routes. So we have a good understanding and in our own telecom network, which is highly scalable, it’s highly resilient, it’s five nines reliability, and worldwide reach.

[Robert Ballercer]

As we start maybe turning the corner, I don’t want to jinx it, and say that we are turning the corner, but as we start to look at possibly bringing workers back into the office, how will IntelePeer respond? How is your solution going to help in the creation of the new hybrid office – not just connecting businesses with its workers, but connecting those same businesses with their customers all in one solution?

[Chris Botting]

We have a customer, and can’t mention the name, but they’re a major U.S. fitness chain and as they started to reopen the fitness chains, they started thinking about what are their business needs. They had some good conversations with our experts. We have a lot of people that have a lot of deep understanding and expertise of how this stuff works, right. So the conversation started talking about janitorial services. We’ve been allowed to reopen. We need to go into our fitness studios and clean them up, so we need to focus on that. As we’re in the process of getting the facilities ready for our customers, we need to notify our staff, we need to notify our trainers, our fitness trainers, so they can so we can start scheduling who’s going to be doing the fitness classes. Then we need to start notifying our customers to start signing up for these limited fitness classes that will help us drive customer retention. It will also start filling up our classes and getting the capacity up to the levels we’re permitted to level at and it helps with scheduling and general information. So through these conversations, we came up with a, you know, great solution to solve all these kinds of problems. Those are not dissimilar from what almost every company needs to go through. You have Covid protocols you have so you know if you have a, you know, a person who becomes ill, you need to notify all your employees quickly. Uh we did as recently did a solution for a school district in Virginia. Uh they had a Covid flare-up and they had a telephone tree and they realized part way through the tree that they had one administrator to call 248 different parents. With this solution, press a button, SMS notification all 248 at the same time.

[Robert Ballercer]

If a solutions vendor isn’t having that kind of a conversation, isn’t taking their client through that that step, through those that process of looking at I need this, then I need this, then I need this, then I need this – it’s not really a CPaaS solution, it’s a CPaaS program. It’s a service and that’s that’s what I love about you bringing us through these case studies because it’s showing the process. This this is what attendees should be thinking if they come to the IntelePeer booth.

[Chris Botting]

A challenge is knowing what you know. A much larger challenge is knowing what you don’t know, right, and with the expertise that we can bring to bear, we can help surface a lot of these use cases. So it’s, you know, it’s not hard work for developers to use a solution. I’ve spent many years developing software myself and coming up and designing and coding the happy path when everything goes right. The question really comes around to what is what are the unhappy paths what are the things that I don’t know as a developer who’s trying to develop my own applications and solutions. What am I missing getting buy-in from the company and delivering a solution that is holistic and resilient and robust.

[Robert Ballercer]

I’ve been speaking with Mr. Chris Botting. He is the chief product officer and chief revenue officer at IntelePeer. Chris thank you so very much. This this has been a fun conversation. Now if people wanted to find out more about IntelePeer, more about the services that you offer, more about what it is that you could do for them as you bring them through the process – where should they go?

[Chris Botting]

Come visit us at Enterprise Connect. It’s a great forum and we’d be happy to have a conversation with you. We’re intelepeer.ai i-n-t-e-l-e-p-e-e-r.com. We have offices in Denver. We have offices in south Florida as well. If you’re in the area, please give us a call stop by.

[Robert Ballercer]

I’m father Robert Ballercer the digital Jesuit and stay tab because we’ve got plenty more from Enterprise Connect 2021.