Mark Johnson (00:05): 

Thank you. Really excited. Sweetwater has been a really awesome long time client of Converged and just always had a great working relationship. They're a very cool company as well, especially anybody that's into music, knows quite a lot about Sweetwater.

And so we want to talk a little bit about Sweetwater today, and then we're going to switch over to Alton here and talk a little bit about 8x8. So just want to introduce you here, JP, and just see if you can tell people a little bit about yourself, how you got started with Sweetwater, your title and all the different hats that you wear there at Sweetwater. 

JP Eagleson (00:52): 

Sure. Yeah, super happy to be here, Mark. Thank you for asking me to participate here. So I'm JP Eagleson and I live in, and I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is where Sweetwater is headquartered. And if you live in the area, you would know that it's just hard to miss Sweetwater.

They're a large private employer in our county. And then just a huge sponsor of the arts. So I'm a big fan of the home team. I'm a big fan of Fort Wayne. I'm a big fan of the arts, and I love just everything Sweetwater has done for our local community. 

So when an opportunity came available about three years ago, I made the jump to Sweetwater. My role currently is as the director of IT infrastructure. So as you said, I wear many hats, but specifically my responsibilities include compute, storage, networking, telephones, security, platform engineering, data engineering, help desk, enterprise, desktop, IT education and marketing teams. So many different disparate teams. 

Mark Johnson (02:07): 

Yeah, just a few hats. 

JP Eagleson (02:09): 

Yeah, just a few. 

Mark Johnson (02:12): 

So fortunately, I've had the opportunity not only being a customer of Sweetwater, but joining you guys on campus sometimes, and I like to describe it to maybe other people as Willy Wonka meets Amazon. And can you kind of just explain to folks that might not be familiar, just a really unique organization and just what makes Sweetwater tick? 

JP Eagleson (02:42): 

Are you calling me an Oompa-Loompa, Mark? 

Mark Johnson (02:47): 

No way. 

JP Eagleson (02:47): 

No. 

Mark Johnson (02:49): 

I might have seen a couple though when I was there. 

JP Eagleson (02:52): 

Yeah, sure. You're right though, people are often surprised when they visit. I think they think Indiana, they think fly over state and cornfields. And while there certainly are cornfields, we strive to be a destination for our customers. We have people that travel all over the country just to visit our campus.

So we want to make it a great place for people to visit. And we also want to make it a great place for people to work. For our customers, what that looks like is just a world class music store. So most people know us through sweetwater.com or maybe a sales engineer that they work with.

But if you were to come here, there's also a ginormous in person brick and mortar music store. We also have a diner, a coffee shop, a music academy. There's several stages where you'll often hear people playing, including a large outdoor pavilion where anyone can come and listen to live music. 

And then for employees, what that looks like is all of those things plus a whole bunch of different amenities. For example, there's a gym with a personal trainer.

Then, probably my favorite perk is we have an on staff doctor and nurse that myself or any employee in their families can come visit at no cost. So when you say Willy Wonka, yeah, that's all those things. But then to give you a sense of scale, there's about 3000 employees on our campus and about well over 10,000 endpoints. We ship upwards of 15,000 invoices in any given day.

And then from a phone perspective, we make about 30,000 outbound calls on an average day. And then we send or receive about 30,000 text messages. 

And then one of my favorite stats, since we're talking about scale here, and it's not phone related, but it's just cool, is that we ran over 300 miles of ethernet cable in 2020. So, that gives you just an example of just how large it is. 

Mark Johnson (04:55): 

Wow. Yeah. And maybe not Oompa-Loompas, but I hear tell that you might see a famous musician or two just kind of throughout the hallways sometimes as well. 

JP Eagleson (05:09): 

Yeah, every once in a while. 

Mark Johnson (05:10): 

Yeah. So if you don't know about Sweetwater as well, highly regarded as one of the world class e-commerce success stories, always winning awards.

But one of the stories that I've heard on the tour is, you beat those sales year after year in terms of your growth, and I know last time as we were working on this project and talking about this project that not only did you do that, but on Black Friday with calls in and out, that there was the zero hold time that you guys were able to accomplish as well. So just kind of wanted to hear a little bit of how that works. 

JP Eagleson (05:59): 

Yeah. So we know that our customers can go buy a guitar or whatever music instrument or pro audio gear thing that they desire anywhere. Where Sweetwater wins is just on a fanatical degree of customer service. And as part of that, we really want you to talk to a human. And when you mention Black Friday, which is rapidly approaching, we're preparing for it right now, we like to think of that as our Super Bowl. So, that's very much an all hands on deck type of day. 

Last Black Friday, we had about 600 sales engineers and customer service representatives fielding about 32,000 inbound calls. And you're right, no hold times. We rarely have hold times on any given day, and when we do, it's usually less than about 10 seconds. There isn't any super complex strategy to that, right, we just simply have a huge dedication and willingness to invest in great customer service. 

Mark Johnson (07:11): 

Yeah. And I think when you talk about sales engineers, and really in our world and yours too, what that translates to is actually like a call center agent. And so that's a big contact center. So we'll pivot there to a little bit with the technology. I know that even in the past with our relationship, we started off working with you guys with ShoreTel and then Mitel and Twilio has always been a big piece of that. 

Now, I know with ShoreTel, one of the things that you really liked about it was you're able to crack open the box, make it do whatever you really wanted it to do. And so translating that into the cloud, I think was probably... is there technologies out there that will help you accomplish that? So if you can just talk a little bit about where the history of ShoreTel, Mitel converge, Twilio, kind of what brought you to where you're going to today. 

JP Eagleson (08:28): 

Yeah, you're right, we really value products that we can customize. And with Mitel, that's what really attracted us to that original solution. We need those customizations because they're important because they almost all revolve around our customer experience, which I just talked about is critical to how we win.

For example, in the Mitel contact center, some customizations we have, just all of our sales engineers have individual agent queues, they have customer facing extensions, they all have customizable call recordings. We roll over sales calls based on sales engineer availability to 50 different neighborhood queues. And then we do a lot of different intelligent routing. Depending on if it's a new customer or an existing customer, we'll route specific customer calls to specific agents based on their skill set, based on their performance, and then just any other behaviors we may want to encourage. 

Mark Johnson (09:40): 

Yeah, it's complex, which I think was where we're going. And you guys are continuing to utilize Twilio as a component of what you're doing with 8x8 as well, correct? 

JP Eagleson (10:00): 

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to that customization piece, there's a lot of things that we already have built in Twilio that we want to build off of. Some small examples, all the SMS texting that I referred to earlier, that's all done through Twilio. So our sales engineers can choose to communicate with their customers via text that way.

If you happen to make a pilgrimage to our music store and you buy something in person, we have a customer pickup app where we text customers when their package is ready to pick up from our distribution center, which is also on our campus, and then we'll route incoming calls for our band and orchestra group, which is a new line of business that we've entered. We'll route those calls depending on what area code that customer might be calling from. So just all those small examples let us to believe that with Twilio Flex, we essentially have unlimited customization. It's been pretty hard to beat. 

Mark Johnson (11:06): 

Cool. I think there's a good pivot, too. So just talk a little bit about some of the things that got you in a place where, hey, Mitel needs to move on. We'll talk about that in a second. But I know the beginning part of the process, I know you guys were dabbling around and looking at different options out there before we got into the formal process of looking at other providers and you were doing some POCs.

And you're talking about the sales engineers, the agents, these people are on phone calls, very high end large sales, and how important voice quality, the actual dial tone that we sometimes take for granted was a big factor. Can you just talk a little bit about the engineers and the voice quality and some things that you tried out that maybe- 

JP Eagleson (12:12): 

Yeah. 

Mark Johnson (12:12): 

Didn't fit the- 

JP Eagleson (12:14): 

Sure. I think I'll leave the vendor nameless, but I guess what I'll say is that as part of this trial and error process, that it turns out that when you have highly trained sound engineers that just latency and call problems are simply unacceptable. So to a layman like myself, I might not be able to hear it, but they certainly can. Many of our customers are obviously professionals and that takes away from their customer experience. So it was important that we had a really high quality call experience. 

Mark Johnson (12:50): 

Great. Thank you. I'm going to pivot just a little bit here to just talking about, you guys said, All right, I think we're ready. I think we're going to move to the cloud for voice. That was exciting. I was part of that. We brought together four groups that came in and you said, we want to do it all in one day. I was like, Hmm, okay, that's going to be a long day, but if they're up for it, we're up for it. And so we got together, it was all virtual and we called it... I think we've just kind of been joking around that we called it speed dating with vendors. So can you just talk a little bit about that process? 

JP Eagleson (13:40): 

Yeah. There were just a lot of reasons that we needed to move away from the Mitel system. So just to give some history and then I'll dive into just how we engaged with Converge, we knew that we needed to pick a new system that provided that great customer experience and that call quality that I talked about. And we needed to have a solution that would continue to grow with us.

The Mitel system served us fine for eight years, but we've just grown tremendously since then. And it's just beginning to show its age. We've got 12 on-prem servers that are paying to maintain, it's difficult to troubleshoot. Adding extensions is a manual process that's fairly error prone, which is a problem when you have 600 sales engineers and thousands of extensions. Costs were going up for new phones, we couldn't get support for any of it. And we had all these capacity issues. 

We were just honestly worried that the Mitel system would stay together long enough for us to move to load off of it. And we just needed to quickly identify and move to a new system and we needed to do it in a hurry. So we had previously partnered with Converge on that Mitel system and through that, established relationship and partnership where we knew that we could trust them and that they knew our business really well. So as you mentioned, you organized basically a speed dating round of four candidates. I like that term. 

And it was a super great process because you were able to be in our corner and then cut through much of the noise and the fat that normally comes with the traditional sales process. And you did that by managing all the vendors for us and the expectation and the timeline. And in the end, that just saved us a huge amount of time and headache allowed us to quickly narrow down those four candidates to just two candidates, which we then did POCs with. One of those candidates obviously from this webinar ended up being 8x8. We engaged with both Converge and 8x8s Center of Excellence to quickly vet out their service and then we eventually picked them. 

Mark Johnson (16:13): 

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit more about the Center of Excellence. So through that process, this was also something that was pretty time sensitive as I recall. And you're, Hey, can you get on site pretty quick here? Which we did and Center of Excellence joined us and we started building that system. I think the system was up and running when we were on site.

Center of Excellence and Alton can speak to that when we talk later. But if you can just talk a little bit about the process of the Center of Excellence and essentially all of us working together. I know we took all flows that were just built in the system, it was easy to send them over and your team and Center of Excellence built those out. But if you can just chat about that real quick for the folks here would be great. 

JP Eagleson (17:17): 

Yep. Cool. Yeah, so we basically came up with this big checklist, right? Here are all the things that we need in this new amazing phone system. And then we gave that checklist to 8x8 and you all were able to come on site with us and over the following weeks just knocked that out of the part really quickly.

And if you pair up all those concerns that I had with the Mitel system, you can see why we ended up picking 8x8. It was a cloud solution. So I didn't have to worry about maintaining 12 on-prem servers, simple user extension build out. So I didn't have to worry about that error phone process. 

The hard phone was super simple to configure, a great soft phone application. Our users love it. I got a lot of feedback about the soft phone. Got a dedicated TAM with the whole deal, better intelligent call reporting APIs that allow us to integrate with Twilio, which as I've mentioned is super important to us. And then they were just very transparent during the entire POC process.

I could tell working with them that I could trust them. They tell us, Hey, these are things we can do or we can't do. Just very transparent. So I felt good about that partnership. I felt that they had a similar service oriented way of doing business. So we were just very impressed with all of that. 

Mark Johnson (18:45): 

Yeah, awesome. I know how important that is to you guys and just familiarity. Well, I appreciate the time. Any last lessons learned that you could share with the group on here. We do this stuff every day. I know you don't. You do music every day, so interested to hear any words of wisdom on these processes. 

JP Eagleson (19:11): 

Yeah. To have a partner that knows you, but it streamlines the sales process. I think that is the best thing that we did throughout this entire thing is that part. Outside of that, it's doing all those things that you do as part of any large project implementation.

I happen to be a big fan of the crawl, walk, run, sprint methodology for any project like this one. We want to start off slow, get that early feedback from our customers and then just quickly iterate on it and accelerate. I'm guessing that there's quite a few IT people attending and I think most of them would agree that tech is very easy, people are not. Vulture change is hard. 

So it's important to have great documentation and training, especially when you're changing someone's workflow. So something that I wish I would've done better in the beginning is have just better documentation for our end users early on in the migration.

But because we did that crawl, walk, run, sprint, we're able to get that feedback early on and then quickly course correct. And then finally, it's probably easier to say than to do, but just to invest in the right people. I credit everything that we've been able to accomplish to the just fantastic IT engineers and managers that I get to work with at Sweetwater. They make my job incredibly easy. 

Mark Johnson (20:48): 

Sage advice. Well, thank you so much. 

JP Eagleson (20:50): 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Mark Johnson (20:51): 

I really appreciate your help and as always a pleasure to work with you anytime we get a chance. 

JP Eagleson (20:58): 

Yeah, great. 

Mark Johnson (20:58): 

Thank you very much. 

JP Eagleson (20:58): 

Thanks for having me, Mark. Yeah, take care. 

Mark Johnson (21:01): 

Yeah. And again, any questions that you guys have for us, JP, just pop them in the chat here. But I would like to introduce our next guest and there he is. You can kind of see his guitar. I'm not putting anybody on the spot today, I'm not going to play my harmonicas and Alton's not going to be playing his guitars, but he might as requested do a private concert sometime in the future. But anyhow, I digress. 

Thank you for joining us, Alton. And again, just for you and for the audience here, Alton was a part of this project. Alton and I worked... he was one of the speed daters and got to introduce the 8x8 product to Sweetwater and has been following along on this project. So, that is also very popular within the 8x8 as a subject matter expert. But I'll let you introduce yourself, your title, your background, and all the things that you do at 8x8. 

Alton Harewood (22:21): 

Thanks, Mark. First of all, I'm Alton Harewood, I'm the Englishman in Montreal and hopefully that's put a tune in people's head. I'm actually both British and Canadian and I've had many roles. Obviously my background and experiences in the CCaaS, UCaaS arena, but I've run a contact center, I've used that knowledge in project management, in consultancy.

And today I'm a global solutions architect, mainly working in the pre-sales arena. But honestly, I stick with my customers where I can, and we build roadmaps for the future together, often with great partners like you guys, Mark, at CP. And my expertise on the product ranges through the whole range. So unified communications, contact center and communications platform as a service. And I try and help our customers put together the best plan for now and moving out to the future. 

Mark Johnson (23:16): 

Awesome, thank you. And part of our process as a partner is we stick to the Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders, that's who we were talking about with the speed dating. Can you just talk a little bit about 8x8 and why they are always in the leader section of Gartner? And just a little bit about what makes you guys special. 

Alton Harewood (23:44): 

Yeah, no, definitely. I would like to perhaps start there by talking about the fact that we've been around longer than people might think. We've been around since probably 1987. Originally, the name 8x8, it came from the video processes that we used to build actually. And then over the years, we've amassed a huge number of patents. In fact, I report to CTO, Bryan Martin, who himself has built probably about 140 of those patents.

So that's why we've been an 11 times Gartner Magic Quadrant for unified communications as a service. We're constantly enhancing experience. We're constantly looking at our core quality and we're introducing new things, too. 

For example, coming soon on the 8x8 work platform, the UC platform, is this idea of having a sales experience where account executives and sales folks can automatically have the opportunity information from Salesforce come up as their talking, but not just a screen pop like we typically think, but also elements of the opportunity that are very important to them, coming together in one place and enabling to enrich the conversation.

So if you think about that, we're all about communications enrichment, how can we make it better? How can we tie it into AI? How can we do things smarter? And I think those things lend themselves to us continuing that pace in the Gartner Magic Quadrants. 

Mark Johnson (25:09): 

Awesome. Yeah, we feel the same. I think one of the other things too, when we talk about 8x8 and one of the areas that we feel like you guys are leaders in hands down is Teams. So we're always talking about Teams and we're always demoing the different Teams integrations.

And everybody does it a little bit differently. We really like the direction that you guys have taken, the Teams integration. Also, I think you might mention something new that's coming out in that area. So I'll let you expound on that. 

Alton Harewood (25:48): 

Yeah, for sure. So Microsoft Teams, when it really came to the fore as everybody on this corner know is through COVID, but prior to that, actually 8x8 was already looking at how can we do better with some of these very powerful tool sets to voice enable them. Because, of course we've got our 99.999% service level guarantee in our contracts. And when you're coming in with voice quality at that level, you don't really have to think about voice quality. It's just there.

That lends itself to putting that into the framework. And what we did, we took the direct routing option for Voice for Teams, which is our offering. And of course, you need that Microsoft license with that for. I think the PPM license, I think it's about $8 US. 

But what we do is we bring that completely into the team's experience. So there's no separate applications, it's all inside Teams, so it's kind of invisible to the user at the desktop unless they're using extra capabilities.

So we also support facts, we also support SMS within that one experience. And so as an individual user, you could have those things flowing into your team's experience as well. The thing that you're alluding to, I imagine is the fact that some customers don't want to pay that $8 Microsoft fee, but they want to benefit perhaps from a company like ours that has what we call our X series of licensing. We've got the full voice capabilities.

And so what we've done, we've built a native teams app called the 8x8 phone app that will sit inside Teams, we'll leverage the capabilities and quality of 8x8 to voice infrastructure, but will feel just like being in teams to the user, generally speaking. 

So this is aimed more at those sort of low usage outbound customers. It's a metered solution. We always recommend Voice for Teams as the first path, but if you have 800 voice for Teams users and 200 or 50 or whatever of these users that really just make calls here and there, you can take advantage of that phone app as well for those users and just also save on the cost of the Microsoft licensing associated with them.

So it's a pretty cool new offering and we really say Voice for Teams is going to give you the best experience, but if you want to reduce those costs, think about how things balance up, really don't want to be paying something for nothing, then this is a way forward for you as well. 

Mark Johnson (28:13): 

Yeah. And please, if anybody has any questions about this, we're going to be sending out... Alton did a nice little short two minute demonstration about some of these in a screenshot of what that phone app looks like.

So hot off the presses, breaking news and please let us know if you don't have a chance to see that, but we can answer more questions on that as well. We were talking about obviously with JP, the Center of Excellence, the COE group, and I know that you work with them all the time and I really do feel like this is very unique and it's not for every single customer. It is a team of people that if you have to go deep and you really want to kick the tires, that this was an amazing opportunity for this particular opportunity with Sweetwater. And just wanted to hear you talk a little bit about the Center of Excellence. 

Alton Harewood (29:18): 

Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity. The Center of Excellence. I think having worked with them for several years now, I've been at 8x8 six years, so we introduced it within that timeframe. Because we were finding that a lot of customers, particularly as you move from on-prem to cloud, but sometimes even when you move from cloud to our cloud, because many customers do that too, they kind of want to try before they buy.

So if they're serious about this, and if we can set up specific success criteria that allows both parties to sort of say, Look, if we can show you this and this. Like with Sweetwater, we needed to show the quality of our solution, we needed them to be able to question and investigate the APIs and the ideas that they had. And those made up the success criteria of that proof of concept with our Center of Excellence. 

So that enables us to say, okay, let's engage. And we don't just engage with, there's a remote offshore resources doing it all in the background. We will actually put up a complete tenant as we call it. So a complete system. Whether it's the contact center or the unified communications platform that is actually the platform for everything.

We'll put anything up that the customer wants and have that ready. And like in your case, when you got on site, everything was there. And then we have a project manager as we do... Center of Excellence options are both in North America and the UK. And we'll have resources in both locations to make sure that anything that we're doing is led by resources that are close to you, close to your time zone, able to communicate with you easily when you need support through the process. 

I love working with these folks, but I think their depth of knowledge is so good. Their dedication, it's a bit like that Sweetwater ethos of, I'm going to give everything I can for this. For me, as I'm looking at it, I think anyone can promise that we're going to deliver you this, don't worry about it. But this is more than a promise, it's putting actions where our mouth is and it's putting that investment into the relationship that 8x8 is willing to do. And I love being part of those kinds of engagements. 

Mark Johnson (31:25): 

Yeah, and it follows along just with our methodology as well. And I think that's why this was such a neat collaborative piece, just the sweet spot for both of us and just talking about that partnership with us and Sweetwater and, you, the Center of Excellence as well. 

Alton Harewood (31:52): 

Yeah, well Converge does things, as you mentioned in a special way. The speed dating was fantastic. Honestly, it kept us on our heels. You helped us as a partner to prepare for it, making sure we understood what Sweetwater wants. So yes, we pulled out a lot of the gump, as we call it in England, so that it was a very crisp and clear messaging and it was focused around what your customer wanted to hear about. I think the collaboration, the communication, the way that you directed us and helped us understand their needs was amazing. And they've reflected that too. JP reflected that too in his comments.

So you kind of made it easy for us to do well just as you did for each of the partners involved, the vendors involved. But we really appreciated it because it did give us a chance, especially when we added the Center of Excellence option to really prove ourselves for your customer for Sweetwater. 

Mark Johnson (32:55): 

Well, thank you. Likewise. So just going to wrap things up here in a little bit. If you have any questions, please submit them. Anything else? I really would love for you to talk about some of the... and I know that you've kind of layered this in here, but I think it's just really important for people to really understand some of the core tenants.

The things that are most important to us, first and foremost is reliability when talking about a partner. And, all those pieces that go into that for you is why you're in all these deals. It's very important to us. And so we'll let you share that and if there's any Q&A that afterwards, we can tackle that. Or Liz, if you have any questions. Thanks. 

Alton Harewood (33:53): 

So yeah, to your point, the 8x8 voice quality and then 99.999% financially backed contract SLA that I mentioned earlier, it's a huge part of our ethos. It's quality, it's connecting with our customers at a level that shows them our commitment. Those are things that really make a difference, right? Because if you take a look at generally what customers are looking for, if all they can think about is my voice quality is poor, or I've got challenges here, those are very basic things that they shouldn't have to worry about. 

I was just looking at one of our demo systems just now, because our guys were out in Barcelona doing an event and I'm looking at MOS scores higher than 4.5... right at the 4.5 level. The MOS score is that level of quality right out of the US based system that some of them are working from. And that's reassuring. That's how it should be. So that reliability, the uptime, and we've had uptime of one on some of our platforms now. So we're really feeling confident about huge level of high availability that's been introduced and driven through the organization. 

But the biggest thing is when we partner with you, we partner with you, we put in the resource time, not just during the sale, but we'll come and help you through your time with us and hope to continue that time so that just feel confident moving forward with 8x8. 

Mark Johnson (35:24): 

Well, thank you so much again. It's always a pleasure. I've enjoyed working with you and prepping with you on this and can't wait till we get to work on another opportunity together soon. I'm sure you're highly in demand, so I know it's a good opportunity if I see your name pop up on the team. Okay. So just some housekeeping again, thank you everybody. 

Liz Krause (35:51): 

Hey Mark. 

Mark Johnson (35:52): 

Yes. 

Liz Krause (35:53): 

So we do have a question that came in before we wrap up. It is, somebody asked while JP was talking, so I don't know if this is a JP and 8x8 response, but it was, can the texting to the customer be achieved via Microsoft Teams versus Twilio? And was Microsoft Teams a consideration or evaluated when engaging that piece of the 8x8 contact centers? 

JP Eagleson (36:27): 

Yeah, sure. I think Alton can talk to the 8x8 technical aspect of it. At the time we were not like a Microsoft customer, we weren't really a heavy user of Teams and we already had a large partnership in many customizations with Twilio. So I don't remember if we evaluated that part. I think the SMS portion and customization with Twilio was already happening prior to our conversation with 8x8. 

Alton Harewood (36:54): 

Yeah. And from an 8x8 perspective, as I mentioned, our integration of Teams, it does include 8x8s under the covers capability of providing SMS and facts within the team's experience. So it's literally you have your 8x8 icon on the left of your toolbar and you can click in there and SMS to and fro with your customers at an individual level.

We also now have, it's not a released thing, but fax as a service where you can use APIs to drive it. And in our CPaaS platform, we also have SMS very similar to Twilio, where you can leverage our APIs maybe out of your CRM or out of triggering it from other things. Realizing these digital communications is so important. 

Mark Johnson (37:41): 

Great question. Thank you. Yeah, I think what we do every single day is we're looking at the Gartner leaders; 8x8. Twilio's kind of a different breed, but is really important to business as teams. Yes, very important. And we're looking for all the ways that the millions and millions of new Teams users can utilize it because that's the UI that so many folks have and there are just so many different options. And that's what we do as an organization, as Converged, is really to find out what is going to fit your business best to deliver these different tools. So good question. Thank you. 

Liz Krause (38:38): 

Another question, Mark, and this one wasn't asked by anybody in particular, but we do get asked this quite frequently, and I know you do when you work with clients, so I'm sure that this is relevant to many people on the call today. But can you go ahead and explain and elaborate some of the advantages that a company would have using Converge, working with Converge rather than going direct as it relates to pricing? 

Mark Johnson (39:08): 

Ooh, asking a sales guy about pricing. I'll try to net... No, easy question. Like I said, we do this every single day and there are so many amazing technologies that are out there, and then there's a handful of really amazing technologies that are out there. And so everybody kind of delivers their technology in a different way and they have different bundles of features and bundles of costs and bundles of minutes. And I like to refer to that as moving the deck chairs around.

But I think that based on sometimes how the platforms are built, 8x8 has continually been around since the eighties, which I didn't know that, but I know that they've been delivering unified communications for 20 plus years on a pretty regular basis. 

So we are in this every single day. And based upon the market changing, the technology changing, the great news is that over the 20 plus years that we've been doing this at Converged, you get more for your money almost every year and that's just as the technology changes.

So because of the fact that we are in it, we know where we can push and pull, where you might not need this particular feature for your business. That's why we do a deep dive discovery. Then we bring in the vendors to try to address the solutions for those. And sometimes it's a multitude of platforms that might be the best fit. 

8x8 has multitude of platforms that Alton just described. They have their UC platform and they have a combined contact center platform that's really matured. They have a CPaaS platform where you can build things or they can build things for you, bundles of minutes. And so you can take from different pieces of those technologies and we're like the orchestra conductor to do a punny thing here with Sweetwater, which is terrible. JP hates it, I'm sorry. 

But that's a little bit of what we do. We consult, very customer centric and protecting our customers to make sure that they're making the right decisions. So I always take the long road in my explanations, but did I cover the base there, Liz? 

Liz Krause (42:04): 

I think that's good. I think that's very good. Thanks. I'm not seeing any other questions. 

Mark Johnson (42:15): 

Okay. JP and Alton, we covered the bases, but yes, thank you everybody. 

Liz Krause (42:22): 

Oh, you know what? I'm sorry. There is another question here actually. Some of these are just comments. 

Attendee Speaker (42:36): 

I can ask a question directly if you want. 

Liz Krause (42:39): 

Yeah. This one is any CRM connectivity on top of it? I'm assuming that's talking about the 8x8 connectivity with CRMs. 

Alton Harewood (42:55): 

Yeah, I can answer that for you. So 8x8, both within our unified communications and contact center, which as I said, are actually part of a single platform, has integrations to most of the major CRMs. And we also have customization available to integrate to other CRMs.

So Salesforce Dynamics, obviously if you're a team shop, Dynamics might be the direction, but Salesforce Dynamics, Zendesk, ServiceNow, all of those are out of the box integrations with 8x8, both for your users who may not be in the contact center or your contact center users should that be something you're interested in needing to move forward. 

Liz Krause (43:38): 

Thanks, Alton. And in response to the previous question about the texting, so just to clarify so they can... I'll just repeat it verbatim. Thanks for the initial response. So we can publish a chat bot on a website and point that to an SMS enabled DID on 8x8 and manage that conversation via the 8x8 contact center. 

Alton Harewood (44:04): 

So we actually have chatbot capabilities with the 8x8 contact center, and we're actually introducing conversational AI very shortly where that absolutely can be done. And then obviously if the self-service experience goes through SMS or through web chat or through whatever the channel is, we're then able to transfer it to an agent, should an agent be necessary.

So yes to the answers of the actual question, which is, can we put something somewhere and direct it to this. If you want to do it simply and provide an SMS portal for your customers, then we also support SMS within the contact center as an inbound channel where you can have agents answering those SMSs rather than automation doing that. But it's entirely up to you. We've got the ability to support both. 

Liz Krause (44:56): 

Okay. 

Mark Johnson (44:59): 

Those are real conversations that we'd love to have. Just so much going on in AI right now. 8x8's a leader there. We have those conversations every day. So any kind of enhancement, voice biometrics, authentication, the list goes on and on and on and on, we love having those conversations. So would love to take any of those offline. 

Liz Krause (45:25): 

Yeah. And we have a question here, and this is one that'll have to be taken offline, but I just want to let the person know who submitted this. Just any type of pricing comparisons, that is something that we can help you with. So we will follow up with you after this event. Someone will reach out to you and we'll address specifics on that of as to what type of savings and what kind of savings you can receive. 

Mark Johnson (45:54): 

Yeah, that's my wheelhouse. I love having those conversations. I've been in this business for quite some time, 25-ish years or something. So doing a comparison on what you're doing with premise today is something we do all the time. And again, trying to serve our customers, get them to a place where they're saving money is typically what we see. Or making things budget neutral. We are very successful at accomplishing those things. 

Liz Krause (46:38): 

Perfect. All right. I don't have any other questions that have come in, so back to you, Mark. 

Mark Johnson (46:47): 

Okay, well, yeah, thank you again. The DoorDash email will be going out. Please let us know if you do not see that. You'll be receiving some follow up emails. We are always available. I'm available. I may be one of the people reaching out to see if there's anything else that we can provide. And just want to thank everybody for joining us and our special guests for joining us, Liz and your team for putting this together for us. And everybody have a very great day. 

JP Eagleson (47:25): 

Thanks, Mark. 

Alton Harewood (47:27): 

Thanks, Mark. 

Mark Johnson (47:28): 

All right, take care.