Vanessa Gates 00:00

Hey everyone, welcome to Masters of Support, Playvox’s first podcast series. I am Vanessa Gates. And joining me today is Louis Bucciarelli, CEO of Playvox and Kristyn Emenecker, our Chief Product Strategy Officer here at Playvox, So excited, and what a wonderful way to kick this off with two awesome playvoxers here with me. So thank you both for taking some time out of your busy schedules to meet with me and, and to talk some fun stuff. If you’re ready. I’m ready, we can get started. Awesome. So Louis, I’m gonna put you on the hot seat. And we’ll start with you. I want to go ahead and ask you, can you please share with us some industry trends? What are you seeing?And what direction do you think our industry is going? As we approach the second half of the of the year?

Louis Bucciarelli 00:49

Right, thanks, Vanessa. So I think we’re in a really interesting time for our industry. And you know, some of the things that we think a lot about at Playvox are three trends that we see impacting the business. One is we see with a pandemic that accelerated this trend to work from home. And so agents are now you know, not many of them are not in office, they’re working from a home location. And we don’t see that changing near term, we’ve done some research within the business that shows that agent satisfaction is higher, people are like enjoying the work more having that flexibility of from working from a work from home environment. And so we expect that trend to continue well into the future. And the second trend we talk a lot about is this migration from on prem to cloud solutions. You know, this is a trend that’s been happening for some time in the contact center industry, and is only accelerating with the work from home, as people need remote platforms that they can access from anywhere. And the third trend we see is we see an increasing shift from voice to other channels. And that’s interesting, if you think about like individuals, us as consumers, and like how we want to interact with brands, a lot of us would much rather prefer to interact over a chat session over email, rather than picking up a phone to make a voice call. And so those are three trends that we really see within the industry. And it’s something that we spend a lot of time thinking about how our value proposition that products that we can build can better meet the needs of a changing industry.

Vanessa Gates 02:15

That is great. Thank you for sharing that. I think like that whole new normal that we’re in now, whatever that is, honestly, this post pandemic, are we even at the endemic now? The work from home in the in the flexibility, I think that is the new now. And I’m, at least for us in our industry, I feel like many of our competitors are learning to kind of gravitate to that, and how to provide tools and products to to meet those needs. So really quick on Playvox. You want to talk about how we have been, you know, always cloud based?

Kristyn Emenecker 02:59

Yeah, I can definitely do that. I mean, I actually I was just gonna say, first of all right on to everything that Luis said, right, so I, I do pick up my phone, but I actually only pick up my phone when I want to chat or text, not because I want to actually use it as a phone. Right. And so I think that I think that that’s the generational change that’s happening, right? My kids are teenagers, they don’t use the voice, they might send a voice message, but they’re not actually dialing a phone for anything. And so I think that the generational change, both in our workers and in the consumers that are that needs support, right, we’re talking about customer support. I think that that also is driving it but yeah, from it. I mean, from a solution standpoint, I think these trends are just could not be more perfect for Playvox. It’s like Playvox was born at the right time for these things, for this new generation transformation of customer support, because we were born in the cloud. So that means anybody can access it from anywhere, right? We don’t have sort of that, you know, old school mentality, all of our solutions are, by sort of our nature and our preference, very, very, on the cutting edge. from a technology standpoint, that’s the type of tech that we’re consuming all the time. It’s built for this newer generation that is focused on the employee where employees are of varying generations and want to communicate in different ways than the old office world of the past. And it you know, really is very focused on all of the ways that people communicate with the companies they do business with not just the telephone like like we’ve heard in in podcasts and you know, online thought leaders talk about forever so I’m super excited about this opportunity to really talk about the new the new era of, of customer support and playbacks is rolling it but also everybody else is rolling it right all the cool things that are happening out there,

Vanessa Gates 05:02

for sure for sure. Okay, so with that all being shared with us, Kristen, you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit as far as how is Playvox positioning ourselves to kind of seize the strength of these trends? I know you’ve talked about it a little briefly, but do you want to go a little bit more into detail and kind of what makes us different from our competitors?

Kristyn Emenecker 05:22

well, I mean, I think we, I think we talked about it, right, we’re, you know, we’re cloud native, we are, you know, really digital first focus. So we’re, you know, that’s our orientation is the digital world, and all of the channels of communication that uses, right. So our customers tend to be, you know, ticket centric, they’re using a conversational CRM, we can talk about those topics going forward in the next few weeks. And I know we will. But you know, this is really a huge part of how support is done. Now, it’s not the, you know, the phone bag. So if you’re like parents generation, this is a, this is a new generation, and it requires new tools. And I think that’s really, this is the place where Playvox fits within the market. I would also say we’re, you know, we talk about all these, this new generation and the generational shift. One of the other things that makes Playvox very unique, and that I’m sure will come out organically as we have these conversations for this podcast is that we’re very, you know, culture forward. And that means forward in terms of being progressive in terms of lots of, you know, diversity, obviously, you know, not a lot of female CPOs. So, that would be one example, right, I’m here. But, you know, lots of diversity in terms of where on the globe, lots of diversity in terms of ethnicity, and background. You know, Vanessa, Louis, myself all different, you know, backgrounds that we have many, many more, that would represent that different generations, different ages, different perspectives. But we also are really, very, very focused on our values and living them every day. And, you know, we find that a lot of our business comes to us because people want to work with a company that closely aligns to their own personal values. And it’s something that we’re really proud of, we continue to invest in giving back. And it’s something in fact that, you know, we want to keep raising our own bar on right. So I think we’ll continue to talk about what’s the next level? And how can we be better sort of, you know, corporate citizens and citizens of the world? And how can we make sure that we’re giving back,

Louis Bucciarelli 07:38

I couldn’t agree more Kristyn and thanks for bringing us to that point in terms of like values, you know, fairly simple ABCDE, which I absolutely love, because it’s easier to remember, always be learning be a good human change is, good. Do it now. and enjoy the little things. And I think one of the incredible things about playbox is that, you know, as we’ve scaled the business, I joined, we were about 25 employees, and today, we’re over 250. And as we’ve gone through this amazing growth, very quickly, we’ve still retained these core values in our business. And I think that definitely resonates not only internally, with our employees and staff and colleagues and peers, but externally with our partners and customers. And it’s something that we take, I think, enormous pride in just that consistency and how we operate, both internally and externally, within the market. And that brings me to the next point, Vanessa, which is, you know, if we can talk a little bit about our customers, that’s all right, we just have such amazing brands that have been trusted Plox to be their partner, you know, whether it be Twitter or afterpay, or Sweaty Betty, or Zendesk, you know, all of these just to name a few of all of the amazing brands globally that have selected Playvox, to work with. And I think there’s many, many more customers, in addition to those that have also shared their perspectives on Playvox whether that be at G2 to crowd or trust radius, and it’s just something that I take immense pride in, is that we have a great community of customers that are supporting Playvox and sharing their recognition for really the true partnership that we bring to the business and the value that we generate for them and for their customers as they seek to deliver amazing experiences through their contact centers.

Kristyn Emenecker 09:18

Yeah, as I was just gonna say

Louis Bucciarelli 09:21

Quick Shout out to our customers,

Kristyn Emenecker 09:23

no, yeah, absolutely. I was just gonna say actually, next month, I’ll be at CCW, this CCW industry conference in Las Vegas during a presentation with one of our awesome customers from Turo the car-sharing company so yeah, so they’re incredible.

Louis Bucciarelli 09:42

Can I just say like, I absolutely love to row. Yeah. The other day and it was just amazing. You show up the keys there. I had somebody seemed like, you know Castilian Uber driver will roll up at the airport and then you get in the car and you drive off this time that goes in Newark like the driver rolled up. handed me the key and like, I put my bag in the back. And I was like, what’s that? Like?What just happened? It’s amazing.

Vanessa Gates 10:07

I love Turo, just because you can be selective on the type of car. So you know, if I want to ride on in Tesla, like that, then hey, it’s definitely fun, for sure. So, shout out to Earl, you are being very innovative in your services. Awesome. So with all that being said, and this awesome podcast that we’re kicking off, Kristyn, do you want to talk a little bit about what our listeners can expect? As the series rolls? Yeah, well, okay,

Kristyn Emenecker 10:41

so as an avid, avid podcast listener, these are, you know, this is one of my favorite topics. And, and I really haven’t found the podcast that covers sort of all of these things. And I’m so excited to have Playvox Masters of Support sort of get started, because here’s the things that I want to hear about and that I think our audience wants to hear about, right. I want to know, what are the trends?What’s happening, I want to hear from innovators. I want to hear from thought leaders do great to hear at Playvox, but also other people, right? I want to also get practical tips, right? So I want to understand, what are people doing today to create more engagement in a remote world? Right?What are how have they cracked the code? How do they solve something really challenging? What are some things that I can use today, honestly, no matter what, whose technology I’m using, right?So you know, all of those things I know we’re going to be bringing and more. And I cannot wait just to to get the audience’s feedback to take it in to think have more and more innovative ideas. And to just keep this thing going. Because I feel like what we picture it as right now Vanessa is amazing. And yet, I feel like when we are talking again, in six months, it’s going to be just so much better. We’re just going to keep raising the bar, and I am excited to sort of raise the bar together with our audience and just keep coming up with new ideas. So I can’t wait. For sure.

Vanessa Gates 12:11

Yes, I know, I’m so excited to being the host for this. And we have just an amazing lineup of some industry influencers, some great thought leaders in the CX and the DX world. So I’m just really, really excited to bring them on and to have some time to kind of be providing them with some thought provoking questions and just kind of see where they’re going, and where our industry is going. So that’s just really, really exciting. And I’m just so happy that playbox has had this opportunity now for us to share these little nuggets with our industry. So yeah, I think where we have set ourselves for a really great platform, and we’re ready to kick it off and move forward. So I’m just excited. So with with that being said, this is our first episode of Masters of support. We thank you, Louis, we thank you, Kristyn, for taking time out to be here with me and our listeners to hear what you have to say. And I’m just excited for the continuing of the series. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am Vanessa Gates, I thank our listeners for being here today with us. Everyone, have a great day and be a good human. We’ll see you soon. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks