TSP Talk Ep48. Embracing Modern Business Communications Technology

[00:00:03] Hello everyone, it's James Davis from the Pax8 Academy again and this time I've got George from B-Boy. How are you doing mate? Doing well my friend, how are you? Oh good thank

[00:00:26] you. Here a bit of an accent, where are you located in this wide world? Well for, I know I think everybody knows where New York is on the map. Not quite in New York, I'm in Philadelphia or suburban Philadelphia for that matter but I can get, you know,

[00:00:42] I split my airport travel between Philly Airport and Newark which is right outside of New York City. So northeast of the US here, that's where my mail gets delivered when I'm not on a plane, that's where I end up. Oh it's awesome. Well I'm excited

[00:00:57] to have you on because talking about a topic today around modern communications for business technology and you've been around this for a long time, you may not look at but you've been a bit of a veteran. So I

[00:01:11] want to understand first to just dive in is what are you seeing in general with partners and how much they're embracing that sort of technology to help their clients? That's a little bit of a mixed bag. There's a lot of flavors of the

[00:01:26] week I like to call them, you know, like hey I've signed up as a reseller for this company and this company and this company and this company but like kind of goes counter to the methodology of IT services and managed

[00:01:37] services which is I never standardized on anything. So you got a lot of people in that bubble right? I call it like the agent bubble and then you have a lot of people who have, you know, are dabblers right? I think everybody in

[00:01:49] technology land loves playing with new toys. I mean I do, that's why I got into it but sometimes the new toys you know is like hey well I can cobble together something throw it up on us you know a cloud server somewhere or

[00:02:03] maybe hosted in my own data center server or whatever and then they realize that there's a scaling problem at some point right? So they've created something that works okay if you look at it in a bubble but as you

[00:02:14] scale to your customer base or even internally you know like you got to keep the lights on you got to keep these things going like just like all other technologies. So like there's the I called the DIY guys right? That's

[00:02:25] bubble two. You know bubble three is hey I've gone full deep end I've signed into like a wholesale style relationship like I'm you know become my own you know shop right from a telephony standpoint from your communication standpoint and whether they've stood up a second business or

[00:02:41] they rolled it up underneath of their technology business you know they're actually you know they've put some hard dollars and time into it hoping that it takes off. So that's bubble three and then bubble four is like just don't do

[00:02:54] anything right? Like I recommend it, I refer it, it's not my bag, I'm in the IT realm go to somewhere else let me know what you find or don't call me if it's not you know I'm not gonna fix it right? If it breaks call somebody

[00:03:07] else and then like you know they really just don't have a great answer unless they force their hands. So generally speaking those four categories you know are the majority of not just your market right? You know APAC and I'll

[00:03:22] show you New Zealand but here in the US this is very similar and over in Europe it's very similar so like these percentages slightly shift but not by much but if you ever did a survey or looked at a survey even in the last

[00:03:33] four years of like hey what are you using? It looks like a hundred slices you know of the pie and very very not standard conversation especially even with you know the newer players since the pandemic teams voice zoom phone that

[00:03:48] kind of thing no standardization right? Like is the partner actually managing it? Are they generating revenue off of it? Are they expected to support it but are they charging for that support? All of these things fall down into this

[00:04:01] conversation so unfortunately it's a mixed bag unlike everything else MSPs adopt right? Like security backup infrastructure you know cloud right? They've standardized across their customer base not in this category. Why do you think

[00:04:16] that is? A little bit of just how time has evolved right? Like the copier guy was a copier guy, the security guy was security guy, the phone guy was a phone guy, the IT guy was an IT guy, the electrician in the cabling guy was that guy

[00:04:33] and like at some point everybody just kind of stayed in their lane right? Because like that's not you know wasn't software like it is now. Now it's just another app that overlays on top of what's already there and so you have to view it

[00:04:46] differently right? Like obviously the pandemic forced the agenda I would say down in Australia the MBN forced the agenda you know so like these are things that are like shifting the tide a little bit but I think it's

[00:04:59] hey I'm dealing with it. I haven't taken it by the horn and said hey we're going to look at this category as a revenue generator, we're gonna control our time burn, we're gonna make sure that there's revenue there that's more that's worth

[00:05:11] our time right? Because that's the problem. A lot of the people historically look at this and say all right I've signed up I'm in bubble one I signed up as a partner of a bigger company let's just use

[00:05:21] Telstra because they're the big elephant there and like I signed up as a partner a business partner for Telstra okay I send opportunities to Telstra all right I get this small piece back in return and like that small

[00:05:31] piece doesn't even cover my labor rate right? So the second I recommend something I'm in it and the second it comes back on me I gotta deal with it but like I'm not necessarily charging for the time it takes to deal with it

[00:05:44] after I've recommended it and so like when you get a call into your service desk and they're like hey you know you signed us up for the service with we're gonna say Telstra here and like it's broken are you gonna say hey

[00:05:56] just call 1300 Telstra? Like what do you do? Do you say sorry I can't help you? Of course the natural inclination is we're gonna help them because that's what we do we're in the helping business so like unfortunately it's a little bit of a

[00:06:08] square peg you know round hole or I would call it a crap sandwich right? You get pushed in between two pieces of bread and you're stuck in between and it's a very uncomfortable situation when you're there. So of course the

[00:06:20] question is well if I get stuck delivering free time and I'm not generating enough revenue to make it worth my while I'm not dealing with this like why even but? It makes sense I heard this conversation over and over and

[00:06:36] over again it's just not worth our time because of exactly what you said and what I'm hearing just from what you've been talking about so far is there seems to be a lack of understanding about the category to

[00:06:50] then develop a proper strategy of what they need to do so maybe we should explore what modern communications actually is like what sort of components are there we've mentioned VoIP is one sliver but it's a pretty small

[00:07:03] sliver of this isn't it? Yeah I say this all the time like making the phone ring like people figured that part out right like that's not super complex think of communications like I said earlier it's another app it's

[00:07:20] sassap that's what it is right if you look at Microsoft Teams it's sassap right they integrated pieces into it but generally speaking it's software so at the end of the day if you change your mindset to hey this isn't just an appliance now this isn't just electricity now

[00:07:36] this is an app that sits on the endpoint that sits on the network this is gonna have to play nice with all the other things that we're doing then you look at it differently and you start to see

[00:07:47] business applications that go way past making the phone ring like yeah I think everybody's gotten used to the work from anywhere I mean I surely live that life to be honest but you know at the end of the day like the whole

[00:08:01] hey some days you could work from an office some days you're working from the beach some days you're working from home some days you're working from the you know your car whatever that's real I think it's more real now

[00:08:09] since we've gone through what we've done you know globally in the last few years but being able to tie into the business applications being able to get meaningful reporting business intelligence tying into you know the the actual things that run

[00:08:22] these businesses on a day-to-day basis changes the conversation now you look at it as more of a hey how does this make us more efficient how does this make us more accountable how does this actually generate potential cost savings and or how do we do more with less

[00:08:38] right so you can look at it from both sides of that and now all of a sudden yes that ringing part that messaging part that community that chatting part you know that transcription part that recording part that like all of these pieces now can tie in

[00:08:53] to all of the things that you actually need to run whatever the organization is and so when you zoom back and you look at that hook right from all of those angles now all of a sudden it's completely different conversation right we're saying hey

[00:09:08] we're going to centralize the way for our people to track collect and ultimately you know report all of these these client interactions these can you know there's so many different ways that this stuff comes in and if you do that correctly and you get it

[00:09:25] logged correctly and you get it reported correctly now all of a sudden you have data points that you never had before you have actual points where you're like hey if i can measure it now i can do something different because i know what my starting point is i

[00:09:40] know what my baseline is so like you're like well george i thought we were talking about void but this is a completely different conversation no like that communication chat messaging voice video all the same track now it just is and so you can and you can

[00:09:57] tie in the social media messaging you can tie in what's up you can tie in you know chat on your website you can do you can link you know integrate into slack and teams you can do all these cool things

[00:10:07] and then you can turn around think of it the msp for a second connect your ps a right connect your auto task your connect wise your halo your synchro whatever connect your documentation tool connect your ps a or your rmm and your remote access tool and now all

[00:10:22] of a sudden i've supercharged the conversation i've automated steps and i've made my people way more efficient because now like it's actually doing things for me in all of my systems as i'm going along rather than hey i gotta stop what i'm doing on the phone

[00:10:38] look somebody up create a note create a task create a follow-up then the call is done finish my notes then i have to send it to somebody else and like by the time i'm done how many steps did i take

[00:10:50] a lot of steps so like i just give you that example is what the msp's world is now apply that to the msp's and custom same challenges apply different tools different tools same challenges apply so if you take that aspect you zoom out you say

[00:11:06] well james um yes i know my customer is paying somebody for this category got it um so making money here at least i know where i'm starting at great void got it but what about the rest right that's where the modern

[00:11:21] communication conversation comes in and then all of a sudden you know and again you don't have to go full bore into it right away but you have the the ability to expand into what's available today versus what you thought was available 20 years ago 10 years ago

[00:11:37] eight years ago it's a huge shift in mindset from our traditional fixings that are broken or we manage the infrastructure or even for like the s-s or dump dump in a bit of technology and run it's it's this ongoing journey of business consulting

[00:11:55] this is the us elevating ourselves to being a technology advisor to solve business challenges because what i just heard from what you were saying then was all these all these technology components well depending on your client

[00:12:10] they might not all apply or they might apply differently and you need to understand how their business actually operates now and what it could operate as well so then you can design a journey to uplift their modern communications to do what you said around

[00:12:27] driving efficiency enabling more revenue generation like this these are those sort of positive things that you know void was a necessary evil in some ways everyone needed a phone but now it's how can you do more more with less like you said

[00:12:43] and enable that work from anywhere so 100% James let me say one thing though it also helps prevent data leakage right if you're taking messages on your mobile and your facebook and your linkedin and your you know your your chat tool separate over here your email

[00:12:59] separate over here your teams is over here and like all of a sudden this data is on islands right and like you're hoping that the human being is just a robot and like they're just so efficient that this always gets where

[00:13:12] it's supposed to go the reality is that that's not the case right so like if you don't have a way to get all of that in the right place and like you know keep it organized and integrated and collected

[00:13:25] you know like you're hoping that it gets where it's supposed to go it just doesn't always get there but i think that's a perfect example of how to sort of think about this you know you know how we're evolving our businesses what you just said there

[00:13:39] where it's data governance practices we're all we're all worried about cyber security how is this communications being done securely how how is this then tying into AI technology that's coming and how we governing the use safe use of that and then how we how we

[00:13:58] governing and enabling the interactions and integrations between all these systems to make sure that they're maintained and improved it's it's one of those pillars that we should be looking at in our business and i think 100 percent i think a lot of people here like you know that

[00:14:16] everyone's techy right so they're probably hearing this and going oh i i know i've got to start asking more questions around the around my client's businesses and getting to understand but most people need to understand a bit more about the technology so

[00:14:30] we spoke about cloud void you know probably even four or five years ago most people were still didn't really know cloud void was a thing but we're here now you mentioned some other technology there like what

[00:14:41] what in this space should people be thinking about in terms of the the technology side for the for the functions that are possible yeah i mean i think what people don't realize james is that there's a lot of micro services happening across all these

[00:14:56] different sass platforms so to your point you brought up ai i know it's kind of a marketing thing right now it's like the next thing right first we were in cloud then we went into cyber security now we're in ai okay well not all good but imagine taking

[00:15:09] all of these pieces right you're messaging your your call recordings your call logs your now all of that metadata right and you're now feeding it into something like azure cognitive services and probably people don't even realize that that's a thing it exists this

[00:15:24] is the foundation of what is now going to grow into the some of the ai features that you're now seeing in things like co-pilot which is really brand new right so imagine i could feed that data into what i call microservice right like you're only

[00:15:38] taking that data you're feeding it into the big guy's machine and now they're trying to do pattern recognition sentiment analysis trend you know tracking and they'll do the transcription as well as part of that right and then like now all of a sudden you're

[00:15:53] getting the machine learning part the ai part of this right to apply towards information that you didn't even think about right that's where the microservice tied into the platform makes a big difference let me flip it around and even another way

[00:16:09] how about just taking different use case applications and feeding it into the conversation james we had the mgm casino hotel hack a couple months ago i don't know if i categorize it as a hack it was a hundred million dollar hit to the organization i got it

[00:16:26] but they just bamboozled the person on the help desk who took the call right they went to linkedin they found out that james davis works for you know mgm casino hotels they called in they said my name is james davis and

[00:16:36] they got a password reset that's just table stakes right i didn't have to like and you know embed malware or something right so once they were in they were in and then you know they had access to that

[00:16:47] persons you know rights rules permissions like it wasn't exactly a hack right so how about just simple user verification as a microservice right hey i have your information from our crm system i see you know

[00:16:59] you know i'm gonna send you a random code to your information on file have your cell phone or have your email whatever i'm gonna send that in please you know just send that back to me i want to validate you or

[00:17:10] hey how about i already have their information in the system when they call in i'm asking them questions through the auto attendant process to call flow and maybe even assign them a pin code like you

[00:17:22] would your atm card and they have to actually pass that before they can get to human being right to validate them and you get this with the credit card companies and everybody else right so like that's a microservice and you're

[00:17:34] like it's a security conversation guys like i thought we were talking about communications this is modern communications we're feeding multiple pieces of data from multiple tools integrated into the platform in order for you to now add layers of defense

[00:17:49] you know you know i don't i don't know if i would have talked about void pin security i mean other than hey somebody who's put their password as one two three four i don't care what technology it is that's too

[00:17:59] easy to guess and you probably shouldn't have done that but this is a now new net new answer right that didn't exist before that you would have had to ultimately either build or find in a separate tool and now you have

[00:18:09] another islanded system it just changes the conversation so there's just so many examples of this let me let me throw another one at you there's a lot of tools out there like pager duty right or like you know escalation tools alerting tools right and

[00:18:22] like you know you're like what does it have to do with void well hold on whether it's an alert from an existing tool what if it's microsoft letting you know that somebody's forwarded their email what if it's your rmm system saying a server is unreachable

[00:18:34] you know whatever it is right could be multiple different tools right sometimes you would categorize those as critical right hey like somebody should take a look at this right away we shouldn't sleep on it so how do you notify those people right

[00:18:47] i'm gonna text you i'm gonna call you i'm gonna email you but like i need somebody to acknowledge and being able to escalate that to the next person the next person the next person in like an answering service style

[00:18:58] fashion because it's so important that we can't wait until tomorrow like gotta take a look at this now same could be said for the messages being left by the customers not every msp for example does the 24 by

[00:19:10] 7 sometimes they go hey these are our normal hours if you want to leave a message in emergency we'll get back to you possibly you know or maybe they do send it to an answering service whatever

[00:19:19] but like when you don't have that resources in place what do you do pass the cell phone around i don't know so you know how about the same escalation path right for somebody calling in they they acknowledge that they leave a message this is emergency right i'm

[00:19:31] going to be charged for this maybe and then like that goes to that escalation path that's already pre-scheduled automated and like you're waiting for somebody to interact from your team that's a microservice on top of a platform that does messaging and

[00:19:43] communications right so like this is really matured and gotten so advanced that you're now taking business use cases and you're actually solving them but by the way the phone still needs to ring right we got that that's happening but like now we're actually solving

[00:20:01] other business challenges in most examples i'm sure you could spend hours just going through all these you know micro examples but just the ones that you showed us we're from an msp perspective my brain was going straight to

[00:20:18] examples for clients like that what you just said with the on the on-call and escalation system it's a whole bunch of construction companies that work 24-7 now that need this kind of thing that what you mentioned around there with the

[00:20:31] ngs of verification it's not just for our help desks things like medical centers and um accountants and stuff that have PII information need to start doing this and like you said the big companies do this because they've had the big systems to

[00:20:47] be able to do it and we couldn't bring this technology to SMB but this is the sort of stuff that we can bring productivity tools to enable our clients that will generate the money create efficiency but have security weaved in the story

[00:21:03] rather than trying to go security first and try to flog a dead horse that people just won't buy into it because it's not tangible well we just give them technology that's secured by default it's it's a completely different story

[00:21:16] you're 100 right and this is the challenge with all technology right like as a technology provider the evaluation process that you have to go through when you're adopting any new net technology now has to have some I just think common sense right

[00:21:34] I'm sure there's just frameworks right every everybody has them and we can talk for eternity about all the different ones but like some basic basic checkboxes could be solved with not a lot of effort if you just ask the

[00:21:46] right questions in the beginning right and like you made sure hey if I'm required to be held to this then at some point my customers probably going to be have to help to this standard too let's just double check and make sure that we're doing things

[00:22:00] the first time instead of having to do double work after the time and so I mean that's maybe a you know I don't want to go too far into another direction James but like companies that built their solution with the MSP IT service provider focus in mind

[00:22:17] they're building it that way by default right but when you try and take technology from enterprise or you know just general business and you try and you know kind of twiddle it down into this I called sandbox right MSP land sometimes it looks good it sounds good the

[00:22:34] name's good you know you feel good about it but it was built for really another category another vertical another size organization and so unfortunately you know you'll find later on down the line that it wasn't the right fit because it wasn't designed properly

[00:22:51] from the partner's perspective and I think that's where you know sometimes you get some discombobulation I agree it's that I guess what we're seeing these days is a lot more of that enterprise technology shifting down into the SMB space and probably the majority of owners out

[00:23:11] there are still viewing things from the past perspective technology is shifted client needs is shifted their expectations is shifted but we haven't changed our mindset and hopefully through this conversation so far people are getting light bold moments going I I'd need to do this differently

[00:23:31] what if we're starting to go buy into it yep I want to I want to dive into modern communications I see the point how do we how do we develop a strategy around this how are we going to make money off this

[00:23:44] well number one like anything else data is important if you don't know what you're working with you're kind of going into it blind and no offense I remember when I started MSP back in the day I was absolutely blind I just

[00:23:57] wasn't I think the wind's blowing that way today you just got to have to figure it out as you go along that's the muscle and feel part of this and I know everybody's been through that phase or

[00:24:06] maybe you're going through it now I don't I'm not blaming you for that right understand that at some point you just need to pay the bills got it but once you do an analysis of what your customers are using that's the

[00:24:20] first step right like hey do an internal analysis what are we using as you know inside the organization then turn around and even if it's just asking the question you're not in a position to even offer or sell anything go to your customers who

[00:24:33] you probably are already communicating with for everything that you're offering today doing today and just say hey listen I'm just curious what are you doing for mobile what are you doing for messaging what are you doing for you know telephony void

[00:24:43] you know if you don't mind I would just want to like collect that information on file so that we have it you know if you have any bill copies and account numbers and just want to put on our system in case we ever have to be

[00:24:51] involved I don't think your customer is going to push back on that information request right like it makes sense if you haven't already done it definitely do it and then you can sit back and say

[00:25:01] hey like across all of the customers that I'm supporting what am I working with are their contract terms like do I have a cluster of customers with anyone technology vendor or not and then you begin to zoom back and say what's my Microsoft investment with

[00:25:14] these people do they already have licensing that you know can maybe change a conversation here because we're already offering them 365 in one shape or form or for zoom or whatever google and then like once you've collected all that information then you can step back and say

[00:25:28] alright now I know what my customers are paying well my customers are using what let what age of the technology it is right because it could be something that hasn't been looked at for ages and now I can begin to create a

[00:25:39] strategy as an IT service provider and say you know what I want to go back to my ticketing system I want to find out all of the tickets over the last one two three years where we had to provide support on those vendors

[00:25:51] where we haven't even been charging for it what now you have two sets of data time data which has a dollar amount associated with it everybody has a labor cost customer vendor data and customer price point data between those three pieces

[00:26:08] I have more information now than I did when we started this conversation two minutes ago and I can then sit back and start to understand alright if we're going to do this we need to number one understand what our costs are understand what our time

[00:26:23] investment is in terms of labor rate and investment but then also make sure that I have enough of a flexible technology understanding and like ultimately the tools that I'm trying to acquire here have enough of a spectrum where you can solve for a

[00:26:39] little customer a medium customer a big enterprise customer because if you end up with too many tools in one category you've just created your own problem again right like you're not going to go and deploy the same edr you know multiple edr solutions across your

[00:26:56] customers you're going to standardize on one same would go for any of these other categories that applies here so so one of two things is going to happen you're going to go out you're going to have a criteria list and you're going to solve a solution

[00:27:07] that you're going to adopt internally and offer to your customers or you should go back to your customers and say keep doing what you're doing but I now going to add a little bit of time and money investment into the agreement to cover

[00:27:21] vendor management because if we're going to you know and you got to have that data already right hey we had 10 tickets over the last 12 months where we had to call Telstra for you to solve your you know your issue with this particular service and like

[00:27:35] when we wrote this up for you like yeah we knew the internet needed to work but like this is a kind of something that was you know not covered right and so like have the data to go back and confidently have that conversation

[00:27:49] I love that as a starting point and the fact that you pointed out we already have this data we've been doing this for years we've been supporting this technology whether we wanted to or not we've had to be involved and what you said there around

[00:28:03] getting actually being more deliberate about gathering information from the clients around who they're engaged with what they're using the clients won't push back they already think that you know it all anyway and you're managing it like that's the general that's their general thought process

[00:28:22] so we're starting from we actually own the technology we all joke about if it's plugged into the power in the wall well we own it don't we like that's so this is that elevating ourselves up and just taking ownership in it

[00:28:38] in a proper way that we can monetize and as you were talking I was thinking one of the big things around this technology is maybe we do decide to change it and there's better solutions for our for our clients it's that enablement piece we're talking about

[00:28:55] business technology this is stuff that the end users use all day every day so if they've got it I'm just using the phone if they've only been used to the phone but we've worked out a strategy with our clients to add messaging into it and these escalation

[00:29:11] software it's going to change so how do we how do we monetize and how do we develop a strategy that's going to help transform that business and the way they use their technology it's I mean you said it earlier

[00:29:24] I'm going to double down on it we should be past plumbing right making sure that the network's working and the internet's running and the computer turns on like that's plumbing right the water has to flow I got it like we should like we should be very far down

[00:29:38] business consulting right a little bit of strategy right like and a little bit of hey let me bring something new to the conversation with the customer that shows them that you understand that you know the business part of it is probably

[00:29:57] as important or maybe even a little bit more important than making sure that the computer is working like we we understand the computer needs to work but like what about the rest the strategy behind the business so it's

[00:30:07] just like we said with VoIP right hey the phone's gonna ring I promise you that part's easy okay it's it's pushed forward into a different category now multiple categories actually where now the conversation is can we consolidate the way that people are

[00:30:24] interacting right and capture that information and now make that useful and the second you understand the software mindset the SaaS mindset of this it's going to change your position on it to be honest and ultimately it gives you a leg up with your customer because I promise

[00:30:44] you I promise you all the mbn advertising they're getting all the big tech you know internet provider telephony providers are getting they're not talking about this stuff they're really not right like they're just hey I am a commodity

[00:30:58] I'm selling in volume let me give you a deal and sign you to a long term contract this is not the conversation that's happening and so when you come in and have that conversation they're going to be

[00:31:07] surprised to be honest they're not going to be like nobody's ever asked me these questions before what are we talking about and that's going to open up a whole different dialogue I know a lot of people will be sitting there and they'll be hearing this and

[00:31:20] going yes yes yes but I don't know what to ask my clients so if you would if you were to dive into let's just say it's a medical center what sort of what sort of questions would you be asking the business owner to start uncovering this and

[00:31:35] develop the strategy with the client yeah how do you make sure that people show up for their appointments and how are those people scheduling those appointments in the first place so immediately I have two things are you reachable

[00:31:52] and are you making it easy for your customer to actually get to you and two once it's set that we're going to have an appointment because that's usually how medical you know works did you get there right at the time you're supposed to

[00:32:07] so appointment setting appointment reminders those two things are communication messaging comes a part of that and by the way still phone still phone actually no joke I've been trying to book an appointment with uh you know my my so I was I was getting treatment for

[00:32:24] something I was referred to another doctor I spent the last four weeks trying to book an appointment with this doctor and like literally calling calling calling oh go to our portal went to the portal tried to register you know couldn't get to a point where I could

[00:32:38] schedule appointment call back wait on hold again I'm like why am I struggling to actually get to the point where I can say hey I just need to see someone can you give me a time like it took me a month

[00:32:50] I just got to hold them today like it shouldn't be that hard it should be easy by the way I don't know I'm pretty sure that it's the same case in your country as it is in the US and the more people you see the more you know

[00:33:05] money is rolling through the account right like it's a touch point right like you gotta see them in order to charge if you're making it hard to fill the appointment rooms you're making hard to fill the exam room you're already behind so I actually

[00:33:17] mentioned it finally when I got to a person like you know what I had to do I had to press an option that wasn't the I'm a patient or I'm a I need to schedule something I had to be like I'm a doctor or hospital

[00:33:26] press this button and I'm like hey can somebody help me like because I can't get help anywhere and then finally I got the human being and finally I got an appointment and I was like man this was hard

[00:33:36] this was too hard so like think about hey that you know using modern technology can I text can I get an appointment can I chat can I get an appointment did somebody remind me that there was

[00:33:47] appointment did it give me an option that if I was not going to be able to make the appointment I press that button or apply back yes I want to reschedule where it automatically gave me more options like this is table steak stuff now but by the way

[00:33:59] I still sometimes need to get a hold of a human being and by the way you shouldn't make your call flow so difficult that I'm literally struggling to get to that human being I want to get to that person quickly

[00:34:11] you know I think I just saw online if I'm on hold for more than three minutes 90% of people are going to hang up you know like this is like so you know sorry I'm a little bit you know salty about this topic I

[00:34:26] literally that's real world I just went through this so that's what I would say when it comes to medical I think right there just what you explained of it's the holistic thinking here and I if we just circling back to the

[00:34:41] voice side the phone will ring right like the phone was ringing they probably only have one receptionists they're struggling there's a way to enable that and it'll probably make the receptionist more productive in it in of itself all of these benefits but also

[00:34:57] just to flip it around I've seen medical centers with like five receptionists because they can't keep up because they're not leveraging technology and us being able to help them understand what technology is available it's bad to say it but like maybe they only need two receptionists

[00:35:14] so you've saved the money you've say you've empowered more productivity better client experience and you've increased profitability these are those sort of business consulting level conversations that you can have compared to that plumbing of you need technology for technology's sake very different and what's coming

[00:35:36] next James is the AI part of it right back to microservices like what will end up happening I don't know if you saw this not a couple years back google invented like a pilot where like you could literally have it call

[00:35:49] and like set restaurant appointments for you and it sounded like a person called in and like the whole thing like that's real and it's got it's about to become in the next two years affordable where you could overlay that on top of the communications

[00:36:03] platform and like begin to take human being time and automate it legitimately and like have that experience not be clunky to the point where somebody's like I'm not doing this get me to a human being that's not far around the corner and once that happens

[00:36:18] to your point I think it could cut down you know I'm sure some people don't want to hear this but to your point it could cut down on actual bodies in the chairs it's such an important topic that's why I got you on it's something that

[00:36:30] too many people are avoiding like we've spoken about but this is a huge opportunity like if you just boil it down from a traditional MSP or an SI or a VA we're our traditional services are commoditizing

[00:36:48] the highly competitive and as you highlighted at the start of this session there's very few people playing in this space in the SMB space so very few blue ocean stuff here and huge stickiness and unique differentiation compared to your competitors down the road

[00:37:08] and you can charge highly premium for all of this because it's valuable stuff if anything for whatever it's worth there's still the if I know what my customer is using and I know what they're paying and I can at

[00:37:21] least give them the equivalent of the services they're getting and save them money because some people don't look at this stuff for years eight years ten years you could use that cost savings assuming you're not offering them anything new which I hope there's

[00:37:35] you know this conversation sparked some of that idea but let's see you offer them nothing new take that cost savings and get that existing budget to apply to the other services you're trying to get your customers to adopt at

[00:37:45] the very least that's the wedge to get them to pick up some of those security things that for some reason they don't want to pay for but they're already all you're doing is redirecting their funds I love that I love that because

[00:37:57] it's so it's so true there is that opportunity to come in sweep in be the white knight to go save money and let's let's use that elsewhere I love that concept again we could I'm excited about this and we could

[00:38:09] talk about this all day but we covered a lot of topics here what do you want to what do you want people to take away from this session and what should they do as the next action step if they're bought into what we're

[00:38:21] selling here well takeaway should be just like everything else that you're doing sometimes things stay the same but in technology they change a lot do not sit and wait for technology to pass you by and then have to catch up

[00:38:39] try to keep up with technology on all of your categories I know sometimes it's a a hard thing to do but like that's why a lot of us got into this business right we love that part of it the bleeding edge

[00:38:50] this has changed this category's conversation there's a lot of use cases that you didn't think about we know we touched on some of them in this in this call but the start the takeaway is there is money to be made here there's efficiency to be gained here

[00:39:06] and this is something that if you haven't looked at it or you haven't looked at it recently take a second look do some homework you might be surprised what you find I love that and I think

[00:39:18] what I'd add to that is yeah we can't be an expert in every domain but treating this as more of a business consulting function if you aren't going to deliver this directly find a partner that actually works at this expert level

[00:39:33] not the local telephony guy down the road that just flings commodity services because you want to you want to lift your clients you want to you want to become that technology advisor lift yourself up and bring bring that expert partnership in don't keep treating this as a commodity

[00:39:52] that's fair I agree with that 100% so it's been awesome George thank you so much for joining us today I hope you've had fun as well and I hope everyone that's listening has learned a lot and thank you so much for your time appreciate it thanks mate