Brian Nichols 0:01 All right. And with that on to CX without the BS from Cloud tech gurus, Fred Steezy. Welcome to the program. How you doing? Fred Stacey 0:08 I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me. Unknown Speaker 0:11 Good to see you again. Fred Stacey 0:12 Yeah, thanks, guys. Looking forward to it. Likewise, Brian Nichols 0:16 I know Tom and I, before we hit record, we were talking about how we were really excited to get your perspective, as somebody who's you're in the channel, you have a mini master out there. But before we dig into that, I think what we really wanted to do first of all, for it is get to know you, and kind of get to better understand what the channel environment looks like what the partner world looks like. So I guess with that, Fred The floor is yours. Yeah, Fred Stacey 0:40 you want to know, you want to get to know me personally? Or the course here? Okay. All the above? Yeah, I'll start on the elevator pitch of my my time in the space. So started back in 95 as an agent on the phones, that's 9095, not 89. Yeah, and then I grew into leadership, ran centers, help companies start new call centers around the country and recover failing ones. And then a little over 22 years ECF go, I got pulled into the software side of the business. And I've been in contact center tech ever since. You know, ran Europe, Middle East Asia, for a software company, build sales, marketing, training, sales, engineering, everything but development. Not a code writer, I usually equate it to I've tried to learn Italian. Since I was a kid, and I've never picked it up, you know, writing code, apparently, and learning new languages, same thing. Neither one of them stick with me. So I joined cloud tech gurus, a in January of this year as the CEO, known the team for a long time, especially one of the founders, Darren Prine, mazing. Guy, you worked with him in the space. Tom Milligan 1:56 If anybody out there doesn't know who Darren prion is, you've been living under a rock. Yeah, Fred Stacey 2:01 you know that I've wanted to work with him for years, because the guy's the best business development guy I've ever known. He just knows everybody. It's amazing to work with him. But the team had built something pretty cool. So we're, yes, we're TSD. But we're very, very unique or niche to the contact center market, we have about 150 Different software companies, and about 50 Different BPOS in the portfolio. And we don't, we're not, we're not doing SD Wan, we're not doing circuits, we're not doing anything along that lines, just contact center. So that means that our viewers, you know, who are our agents in the channel, you know, we're all contact center experts, there are consultants that do who thumb, you know, journey mapping, you know, analytics AI, you know, some are focused on the human side, some are focused on the ops, you know, and all of them have depth in tech. So, we're also customer facing. So, you know, we do a lot of, you know, we've got a pretty good brand in the market spend a lot of time the team had built a good reputation and helping companies source contact center solutions for the past three over three years now. Yeah. And so I came aboard to really, you know, help the organization prepare and scale. You know, and it's been a fun ride already seven months in? Tom Milligan 3:30 Yeah. Wow. I think that's really great. I, you know, can you I, one of the things you and I've had several conversations, in fact, you and I met just shortly. In fact, it was I think the week before you started at Cloud tech gurus is when you and I first had our first conversation. And I think that there's a disconnect in the marketplace, or at least in my brain, and maybe it's only in my brain. Can you tell us the difference between besides cool people or whatever, you know, fluffiness you want to throw in there? What is the major difference between you and one of the TSDS? Again, not science related, just but you operate differently? Yeah, Fred Stacey 4:08 yeah, absolutely. We completely operate differently. You know, first of all, you know, we we go direct to market, so we talk to a lot of the buyers, we help analyze the initial level of, you know, what do they need? Where are their pain points, what's their organization, and then we bring in a targeted guru for exactly what they need. You know, that's one, you know, none of the other. You know, one of the things that always bothered me about the traditional channel was the master kind of sits in the back or the TST sits in the background, owns the contract, but doesn't really interact or bring value to the vendor or to the client. Right, and they're in between the partners and the vendor only. So we go direct market. You know, we also, you know, we don't ask her, you know, marketing dollars. We do direct events when we do you know, we're not, we don't we don't ask vendors to pay us money to get to our partners via show, we just it's completely different and solely focusing on the contact center market. Look, contact centers are not circuits they're not, they're not anything else that you normally would deal. And I think the closest thing is some of the advanced security technologies, you have to be a security expert. Well, in order to sell contact centers, you really need to be an expert in the industry. There's just too many complexities. You take the primary C Cas, and you're talking about eight to 10,000 features, you know, and countless systems of integration and different for different platforms fit for different companies, you know, if you've got a primary outbound with a little bit of inbound versus a primary inbound, or you know, tech support versus customer service, they're different different platforms, different integrations, different functionality. So yeah, it's really understanding the nuances and the pains and the challenges for contact center buyers. Because quite frankly, with 1000s, of contact center technologies out in the market, you know, I almost feel bad for modern buyers. You know, I it's, it's tough, it's tough to know, who does what, you know, who's, you know, full of Bs, and, you know, who's, who's actually developing great, you know, great products with good ROI and, you know, really knows how to serve a certain types of clients. So yeah, I, we, I'd say we're, we're quite different in our focus in the way we approach to the market in general. You know, and then, of course, having our, our viewers who are experts in the field, you know, being the ones that help clients through the entire Brd RFP process, by the way for free. Right, yeah, I mean, we've managed 70% of the workload, you know, an average deal of selecting a vendor. That's, that's a tremendous value to the end user to the buyers. Brian Nichols 6:58 Hey, Fred, I have a follow up question to that. And by the way, before I go to my follow up question, I just want to re emphasize something that you said that actually, Tom had said, way back in January when we were kicking off here for our day job, we work at a company called sharpen. Remember, Tom was talking about our go to market partner strategy? And Tom, you were what you said to the sales guys what they had to do when they're going in selling sharpen, got to know your shit, right? And right there, I think that speaks to exactly what you're talking about. Fred, from the cloud tech gurus standpoint is that your gurus know their shit, they are not going in, just you know, tossing out buzzword we talk about buzzword bingo here on the show a lot, right? But really making it a point to go out and build value, right build solutions that people actually care about. But let me go to my question, Fred. And that is what when you're having your gurus go and talk to folks face to face, and I used to work in the channel, I saw this all the time. And I want to see if it's something you guys see as well is one part of it is helping sell a new solution, understanding where a customer is, as you mentioned, going through, you know, is it going to be a tech solution or customer solution, anything that could be a variable in building a great, great contact center environment, but how much of it on the flip side is actually unsettling. And by that, I mean, taking the preconceived notions, the bullshit that we hear in our industry all the time, when you sit down with a customer and or a prospect, and they're just leading with what they've been seeing from buzzword bingo, or seeing the nice new shiny object and chasing from one shiny object to the next. How much of it is you guys unsettling that and saying, Hey, there's a lot of shiny bells and whistles out there. Here's the core stuff that you actually need to be successful. Yep. Fred Stacey 8:38 How much of it? I think the initial phase, there's always a significant amount of that, especially right now. You know, the buzzwords are worse than I've ever seen it, you know, especially we talked about this a little bit before we started recording the artificial intelligence side, the world changed. And because of that, there's a lot of companies out there promising the sun, the moon and the stars and, you know, not delivering much of anything. So you've got to do some unwinding of bad marketing, you know, bad expectations, you know, are poor expectations. That's probably the biggest challenge is resetting company's expectations for how and what they need. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's understanding, you know, do they really need this shiny thing when they don't even they haven't even converted from on premise. They're not digitally native yet. You know, their data is a mess. They they haven't done anything for as far as, you know, preparing their teams or resources or processes for modernizing them, and then they want to go find the latest and greatest Gen AI, you know, and they think they're going to build their own LLM. Because that's what the LLM 's are trying to do is make it sound like it's so easy that anybody can do it. But I mean, we all know building software is not for me, not for hardly anyone, you know. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of it is unsettling. You know, resetting expectations, you know, in our gurus are phenomenal at it right. You know, most of them are operators, they ran large centers, you know, and then they turned it into their own consulting practice. And they they really dive down into, you know, the standard that we all talk about, you know, people processes and technology. So if you don't take care of the first two, you know, the last one is just going to be a bandaid. And oftentimes, it'll cause more problems if you're not properly prepared. Tom Milligan 10:37 Yeah, that's the it's the perfect example of the three legged stool, right? I mean, you got to have all three of those. So Fred, I, you know, understanding your background starting out as a phone agent, working your way up working in the contact center space, would you say 29 years? And now you're the CEO of cloud tech gurus. And the question that I have about that, I started in the call center as a phone agent in 1989. So I'm older than shit. Okay, so. So I started my first job right there in Salt Lake City here in Salt Lake, Fred Stacey 11:12 right? No, Tom Milligan 11:13 I'm in Denver. Why did I think you were in Salt Lake, I don't know, doesn't matter Salt Lake, Fred Stacey 11:18 you know, I mean, it's close to saying we got the better side of the mountains, in my opinion, but Tom Milligan 11:23 we got the better snow over there. Yeah, but I don't give a shit. I live in Georgia now. But. But anyway, that's a that's a salt lake Denver rivalry forever. But yeah, I started out as a phone agent at Franklin de planners, and then just worked my way up the chain. And then I've never left the contact center space, it's something I've always loved for something. I mean, I hated being an agent, I hated that. But I love the environment. And so I've always felt that being, you know, an agent, a supervisor, a manager, and all those different positions all the way up has helped me in my sales career. So talk to us about how you're able to use that with your gurus, with your customers all across the board. Yeah, Fred Stacey 12:04 you know, everybody wants to buy from people they know and like, and you know, that under, they understand that they understand their business, right, they've been there, they've done that. It's such an advantage. Not only that, but you know, you've in, quite frankly, the the problems we had when I was an agent, or you know, a trainer or manager, director VP, you know, same challenges that a lot of contact center space, there's still human issues, they're still the people in the processes, technology has become significantly better. And at the same time, a lot more complex to, you know, the, it used to be in the old days, you know, an administrator or a single administrator could run an entire contact center technology stack, and they generally could punch down the, and I'm going to age myself, right here, Tom with you, they could punch down a block, you know, they could the twisted pair, you know, the T ones, before even ISDN came in, and the D channel came in, you know, you know, you know how to set the signal in and you could replace your own telephony card. You know, those those days, it was it's simpler to the, in my opinion, to administer, and also the expectations and the delivery to the agent. There wasn't, you know, 15 products to integrate with, right, you know, with all of them their own set of data and their own API's? And, I mean, it just, it was different back then. But no, again, I digress. Back to the question, knowing those pains and challenges and living in and really understanding, you know, how what that experience is like, and respecting the fact that a change in a platform the bringing on and onboarding of a new technology and how it impacts the culture, the people, especially with AI and recognizing that these agents are worried about their job. You know, and if you don't set the right expectations, and you don't prepare the organization for change properly, you're gonna run into problems. Yeah, so knowing all those things are, have been exceptionally valuable in my career, you know, all the way through software. You know, even today, you know, the the knowledge and understanding of what it's like to really sit in a chair for six hours out of an eight hour shift and do nothing but answer phone calls. It's a tough job. Ton of respect for the people that do that. Because we were both there. I mean, you know, Brian, did you ever work as an agent? Brian Nichols 14:34 I didn't work it as an agent, but I've been the sales dev world for 15 years. So it's an other side right? I'm doing the dials not kidding. All of it. The inbound dials but yeah, I used to work in the fitness world for a while you deal with customer complaints all day long. Fred Stacey 14:48 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a it's tough and to lead those people to because, you know, our industry is never good at training. No matter how much I yell from the top of the mountain that, you know, just invest in your people, you know, build leadership training programs. Yeah. Still, to this day, we're terrible at as an as an industry and it just shows, you know, despite all the CX, you know, articles and all the sea level talking about customer experiences our own only differentiator, blah blah, blah. You know, they still provide absolutely no leadership training, no mentoring programs, no, you know, no paths to, to leadership, did they just don't do the work? Yeah, so anyways, does that answer your question? Brian Nichols 15:42 I think it does. And I'll piggyback on something that you said there, Fred. And that is how important it is to really take into consideration not just the customer side of things, not just the ROI side of things, not just the tech side of things, but also that human element from the agents perspective, like, and I mean, here, I'll do a quick sales pitch for sharpen but like, that's one of our key differentiators is both improving the customer as well as the agent experience in the agent is, if not one of the most important pieces of your customer experience journey. Because if it's not an IVR, or you know, some some nice little IAVA, or whatnot, that the customer is going into your customer service agent is the first person that your customer is speaking to, in a mindset of both positive or negative. So you want to make sure that your agents are best prepared to have those conversations, and to your point to give them incentive structures to stick around because this job is not easy. So being able to layer in not just the text and the specs, but also give them a path forward. Like that's something that I think it's really forgotten, when we're trying to bring the latest and greatest to the environment of the contact center world. Like you got to take care of your people. And people make the tech work. It's not the other way around. Yeah. Fred Stacey 16:58 Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Other than, you know, the product and the delivery of said product, or, you know, whatever, depending on what you're selling, it's always the people, the employee experience is the number one driver of customer experience. As far as I'm concerned. I've always been in the now we call it e x, you know, the but the employee experience, that's something I learned early as a leader in a contact center, is it my agents were happy and motivated, and did they would they would kill it, you know, they would do a great job and they wanted to come in, you know, attrition is horrible in your average contact center, you know, you got to give them a reason to stay, you got to keep your experienced agents, so you got to give them paths to growth. I think that's necessary for anything, though, you know, in my opinion, you know, especially in modern civilization, you know, if you're not giving people, you know, a place that they can be passionate about, and a work that that they don't have to love it. You know, they have to get behind, you know, your mission. But I mean, let's, let's be honest, every day is not going to be a great day. So ever reason deeper than just getting a paycheck. Yeah, and that comes down to good leadership. Yeah, training leaders, because people quit bad leaders, they don't quit companies, generally speaking. And, you know, for the most part, most people I know, leave because they're working for somebody who just doesn't know what they're doing. Or Tom Milligan 18:28 they're a douche nozzle. Unknown Speaker 18:30 Yeah. Tom Milligan 18:31 So, you know, I'm gonna piggyback a little bit on what you guys were just talking about, about the training side of things, because, you know, we've, we've all worked in contact centers or been around contact centers for decades. And when, when needed, I used to say to our leadership at prior companies, that our agents, the guys who worked for me, they are literally the entire company to most customers, I mean, more and more customers don't go into the branches, they don't go into the offices, they call the number, right, and they talk to an agent, or they text with an agent or whatever. And that agent literally is the face of the company, for that customer in 90%, or whatever the case is ran. And so investing in those agents so that they don't quit read, like you were just saying, so that they have the right training, and then the right to have the right technology. All of those things play such a huge role in in CX. Fred Stacey 19:27 Yeah, yeah, data again, you know, employee experience is what drives the customer experience, you know, that that won't change. With all the artificial intelligence in the world, we're still going to need people on the phones now granted, I have my opinions about the number of people that will need on the phones, but the quality of people is going to increase significantly because you're going to have to be much more complex. The things that can be handled, you know, through artificial intelligence and machine learning will be handled through that way. Eventually, you know, but there's still going to be a need for humans. So you still have to figure the figure out the human side, you know, how do you build good leaders? How do you keep good people that love what they do? Because I've met a lot of people that love talking to customers, they love their job, they love solving customer problems. It's what they do. You know, and they're great at it. Right? And more power to them. Yeah, yeah, I mean, nothing but respect for those people. You know, but they will leave because there'll become even more valuable to other organizations. You know, as the requirements continue to increase for the sophistication and capabilities and empathy and all the things that make a great, you know, great agent, Brian Nichols 20:44 you can't teach people to be good people, right? Like my old CEO, at my old company, and Tom has heard me say this, like 300 times on this episode, but like, or not this episode, this podcast, but like, good people, bring out the good and people. And if you can't surround yourself with good people, if you can't fill the seats, with good people, it doesn't matter how much you train how much you give them the resources, like you want to empower good people. And then, as we were talking about give them a pathway forward. So one of the things and let's maybe take that and a little bit of a side street here to this conversation. So we had mentioned before we're seeing Tech really start to creep into the CX space, and it is starting to make some of the agent's a little nervous. And understandably, so we're seeing a lot of the conversational AI, self service tools, and it's eliminating some of those lower entry level jobs, because instead of you know, John answering the phone every time somebody calls in to tell them what their account balance is, now that, you know that person can go through a self service tool, get that information right there, and then save the live answer for those really complex questions. So I guess, Fred, with all that being said, Where are you seeing right now? Actual, like headcount changes in this next seats? Are we seeing those low level seats start to go away? And if so, are we seeing those folks go to different places? are they focusing in different areas or something in between? Yeah. Fred Stacey 22:17 So I mean, this is kind of a complex question, when you start to dive down into it. I think, first of all, there's a segment of companies out there that were born digitally native, that have developers as a core part of their company, that have rolled out products, you know, engineered, developed, deployed, and supported products for their entire life, those companies are already a long way down the path. You know, and I'll give you a case in point, the Klarna article that came out a few months ago. You know, Klarna is a more of an international across the pond payment, you know, application company, they were able to reduce 70% of their headcount over 70%, it was 10s of millions of dollars in costs. And legitimately they are saying that it did not, it did not impact their customer experience, it actually stayed steady at night got a little bit better. So those companies are already building direct on LLM, you know, they're the build, you know, they are the same companies that bought Twilio early on and started to build that into their platform. And the same companies that bought Amazon connect and started or C pass in general, and started to build those. It's a small percentage segment right now. I mean, we're not talking about even 10% of the market. You know, and quite frankly, less than 10% of the market should ever consider building, you know, because, again, unless you're a product company, and you know, how software based product company, right, and you know, how to develop, you know, or build, design, build, deploy, implement, support ongoing for the rest of your life as a company, unless you know how to do those things. You should not be building your own product. That's just the reality of it. You know, they I remember early days and software people used to say, well, software is easy. You build it once and you sell it a million times. It's like, yeah, if it was that easy, everybody would be building software. And don't get me wrong with a low code, no code stuff. It's a lot easier today. But you still have to design, build, deploy, support, you know, and support is not, it's not just hey, I've got a problem with this, you know, come help me type of support. It's integrations, it's long term, you know, changes in architecture, it's, you know, eventually as you build code on top of code, you know, you've got to rewrite the application. You've got to plan for that stuff. Yeah. And it's, it's not for the the average company, I'd say like I said, 10 Center last shouldn't be billing. Those are there down the road. Those are having a huge impact on the number of agents, what they're doing with the agents. You know, I've heard a lot of people try to claim we're going to need a bunch of prompted engineers. No, long term. No, we're not, you know, UI UX is are already starting to change. It's all becoming conversational, you know, eventually, I've seen applications where, you know, you can pretty much say in conversation, in conversational terms, what you want, and it spits it out. You don't need a prompt engineer for that. Now, do you? Should you be learning this stuff? I think every agent, every supervisor, every manager should be reading, learning and tuning in to what's going on in artificial intelligence, because I believe that all of us will need to have some depth and understanding of that down the road, you know, because that's going to it's such a major part of our lives. So Tom, I see you're gonna say something? Well, I Tom Milligan 25:57 just think about what you said about AWS and Twilio? I mean, nothing, no knock on them. And and, you know, kudos to those those companies like Klarna, or whoever else that has the wherewithal to go out and build stuff on there. Yeah. Two things to say about it. Number one, I've never been at a company where you've got a whole bunch of developers sitting around hoping for a new project. So and, and even fewer of them that have contact center experience, building a contact center technology, even if you're given the full toolbox. The other thing that I always said about you know, Twilio, what is it Twilio? Flex is what it's called and Amazon connect, is, you know, I can go to Home Depot and buy a house. It just comes in a million parts. But unless I have that experience, that knowledge and the ability to put all those parts together, then it's going to be a pretty shitty edifice. So Fred Stacey 26:54 yeah, again, yeah, less than 10%, in my opinion. Tom Milligan 26:57 And I think you're being very generous, I'd go for that. 1%. But yeah, Fred Stacey 27:01 I am being generous, because I am seeing a lot of advancements in the low and no code. You know, I think, again, if you're a software company, or you're a digitally native with software developers on your team, you know, you could put together the project plan and, and build it yourself. And I get the reason why. I mean, look, yeah, we don't, you don't have to. You don't have to be real up to date and modern news to understand that outages happen. You know, I mean, the more than, more than what anybody really ever imagined it as of recent, there's been a lot of significant outages. I mean, you know, take take CrowdStrike and Microsoft's whole debacle just this past weekend, Take That aside, because that's like a, I don't know what the odds of this ever happening again, but that was pretty rare. You know, but just the telephony outages and the connectivity outages and facilities mean that stuff happens. Now, the good news, modern cloud, not everybody, but modern cloud have multiple redundancies, and they've got ways that you can get as close to 100% uptime as you possibly can, you know, then you can never get 100. Because I don't care what anybody says, you know, I don't care how good your architecture is, whether you're containerized and whether you've got fails on fail safes on on every different, you know, system with inside that makes up a CMS, sooner or later an outage will happen that will take down a customer or customers, right? That's just the reality. They but you know, I sidetrack so much. To get back, you know, to the agent impact. If you guys don't mind, I want to pull it back there. Because I think that's an important conversation. Because there's that that 10%, let's call them and then there's, you know, let's say there's also the bottom 10% That will never, ever want to build, they don't need anything. They're actually using simplified, you see with some contact center functions. They never plan on paying more than that, you know, maybe they've got some basic omni channel, I would call it multi channel that's connected to their CRM, you know, which is also very basic. There are those companies that will never, you know, probably to replace their five or 10 agents. You know, and that's what they'll always say, and that's okay. And you know, but then there's this very large segment that's trying to solve this exact or trying to answer this exact question. And there's every CFO in the world that falls in that 80% And the middle somewhere they ever received CFO was thinking they salivating to drop that much money to the bottom line, and you know, seeing those numbers. CFO wouldn't be doing that. job, if they weren't thinking about it, that's business, you know, when you can draw up costs to the bottom line and increase your profitability to invest further and growth in products. Yeah, that's that's a company's job, right? Create something great that serves a market. That's a job of a company. So a CFO is responsible to make sure that they're doing everything they can to do it in the best, most efficient way possible with capital. So every CFO is salivating. The The boards are asking everybody, what's your AI strategy? Yeah, and then the markets inundated with probably, I bet I get a new vendor reaching out to me every week. If not every other day, I'd say right now, with some new, you know, artificial intelligence based technology, that, you know, they had the best thing since sliced bread. And I have to look at it. And, you know, a, it's again, I go back to I feel bad for modern buyers. Because there's so much noise out there, more than there's ever been. Yeah, more than I've ever seen. By far. Tom Milligan 31:10 I feel bad for modern sellers to because the buyers are so inundated that, you know that they're given us the Heisman you know, stay the hell away. Because, you know, you're all saying the same shit. Yeah. Fred Stacey 31:27 Yeah. Or why should I replace what I have when it's working? And I keep hearing about these outages or poor implementations or lack of return on investment? Why the hell should I do anything right now? Because you people, your vendors out there can't figure this stuff out? You know, why would I believe any of you? Yeah, I mean, the sellers, the buyers, you know, the people developing, you know, the ones I really feel bad for these young tech startups who built something, and then all of a sudden, the next iteration of the LLM is basically null and void and all that work. And the investors who bought into it, but this is, this is like 9890 98 and the.com. You know, everything in AI is up into the right now, I think it's finally starting to, we're starting to see signs of correction. But, you know, it's, should I say, go back to Brian's question, the so the impact today in products and technologies that can really drop, you know, drop money to the bottom line for contact centers, is probably equal to somewhere around 25 to 30%. If you really wanted to go at it, right, if let's say you've got a modern CCAFs, you've got your CRM set up, you got your data, Lake, you know, you got everything ready. You know, and then you can bring on things, even without everything ready, just some of the pieces ready, you can bring on certain things like agent assist. I mean, that's been proven, as long as you're on a, you know, stereo based, you know, audio format, you know, you can get live analyzation of what people are saying sentiment analysis, you can help the agent, find the right place, do a little RPA magic in the background, and away you go with a good knowledge base, right? There's certain things you have to have in order to make an in, you know, an agent assist type of technology work. Voice Analytics is a no brainer, right? Yeah, I mean, that drops money right to the bottom line, go from less than 1% analytics to, you know, 100%, you know, with complete visibility into all kinds of unstructured data you could never imagine. And there's still a lot of companies out there that haven't adopted that. And that one's like a no brainer, ROI. So as the the agent assist, and some of the modern bot technology can drop, you know, take care of that easy stuff. Now, we've been doing bots for a long time, right? That's nothing new. What's new is the conversational, you know, generative side, which actually is reducing latencies and creating almost like human like conversations right? Now, legislation will probably force us all and I think it's good practice anyways, to tell everybody that they're talking to an AI, and give them a choice for now. You know, but it's, there's, there's impressive tech out there, guys. I mean, you know, I see it every day. And we don't partner with because they're too early stage, but the tech. It's amazing. And this stuff is moving faster than what anybody really knows. And I think that's also causing the sellers and the buyers a lot of headache, because people are like, well, it's moved in two years since open AI. launched in November of 22. It has moved this far this fast and two years. What if we wait another year and all of a sudden I can replace everything? Yep. Yeah, that's the thought that's going through a lot of people's heads. And then, of course, you know, this year, we've got an interesting, you know, more elections in the world than ever and One year, our own, which is our own election, which is super interesting, you've got economic and macro things going on, you know, a couple of live wars. I mean, there's, there's all these dynamics that are making this year, even tougher on all of the people we've mentioned. You know? So it's interesting times, guys. Brian Nichols 35:24 All right, Fred, we've had a lot of good things we've outlined, we've given people a lot of suggestions, a lot of actionable tips and resources. But this is Cx without the BS. So we need Fred from you today, if you could be so kind outline the biggest pile the biggest piece of bullshit you have seen in the industry, let's say this this past calendar year, what say you? Fred Stacey 35:45 The past calendar year, I think I'm gonna have to call BS on. You know, I hate to say this, because I've talked about a bunch of technologies that can impact using artificial intelligence. But let's just put this out there. I think in general, a lot of the solutions that have been brought to market over the last calendar year, you know, and a lot of the vendors that are building stuff, claiming it's artificial intelligence, and it's machine learning. I think that's, that's probably where the marketing side of artificial intelligence in our industry is BS. Yeah, that's the biggest pile right now. Not that there aren't products that can deliver. But I think in general, when you look at the marketing and messaging to the market, yeah, it's, it's crazy. Yeah, I think that's a tough one, guys, because there's so many things, you know, there's so many things that I could call BS on. But we were brought about that one for right. Okay. Well, Brian Nichols 36:48 as a Tom, you hear some recurring themes by Tom Milligan 36:51 chance? Yes, exactly. And the thing about it is, it goes back to what you said earlier, Fred, that because of the marketing bullshit. And by the way, the reason Brian just said that you're not the first person who's literally brought up just the marketing side of, of the AI revolution, or whatever, the the marketing is the bullshit, not necessarily the tech, no, the marketing, and so these poor buyers, and then the sellers of actual technology are also victims of this bullshit. Fred Stacey 37:21 Yeah, well, this, this sellers, and look, I mean, I love marketing, I love marketing and sales. You know, but I don't, I don't know that it's making it from my suspicion is in a lot of organizations, it's not making it from development, engineering and implementations, to the sales and marketing team. You know, and properly describing and setting proper expectations. Unlike any other industrial revolution, this is changing. You know, in cycles of quarters, this isn't decades, you know, this isn't, you know, 30 years to deploy automation. In fact, certain factories, software, you can deploy it in days. And it's cloud based, and it's cloud based, so it can be deployed, deployed anywhere, depending on, you know, data rules and all that stuff. You know, so, I mean, I think, I think the companies that do not connect the dots between their entire product team, all the way through implementations to, you know, professional services, and sales and marketing. They're all they're all not talking. It's my only explanation, because I want to believe that most people try to do right by clients, I want to believe that. But I also know being, you know, a startup guy and being in software for many years that sometimes you build it, and you launch it before it's really ready. And then you let the market dictate where the product goes. And unfortunately, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of racing, to growth. In artificial intelligence, much as in, you know, after COVID. There's a lot of racing to growth and Sass companies. I think the AI companies are going through that same kind of push. And it's forcing people to say things that they haven't really thought through the implications to the industry. I mean, it reminds me, and this isn't the first time right. I mean, you know, used to be nobody gets fired for hiring IBM. Well, they came into our industry with Watson and told everybody in the industry that Watson was ready for call centers, almost, what 10 years ago, are they Yeah, and it and it absolutely cost a lot of people their jobs. Yeah, because they trusted that, you know, it's IBM, they'll deliver. Yep. You know, now with you know, with the work that Google did early stage, and now that open AI and you know, all the LLM 's are doing the NLU, NLP engines are getting better, more effective, efficient AI I think now it's finally here. It's just people are over promising and under deliver. And, you know, it's almost like they feel like they can they can get away with it. You know, it's, it's, I want to I always like to blame Salesforce for the inability of companies to own their implementation support and professional services and really deliver on their promises. Because Salesforce built and more power to them, right. They're the behemoth now. But they built a model on the idea that, hey, we just develop software, everybody else, our ecosystem can learn how to implement support and develop and, you know, take it forward. But contact center start that way. No, I mean, I missed the days of, you know, companies like what we used to do companies I worked with, where we would literally fly somebody out in less than 24 hour notice with a telephony card to get a contact center back up and running. Yeah, when's the last time you heard a story of somebody saying, Hey, I got the support engineer, I needed on the phone right at that moment. And they stayed with my team and work through the night to get my contact center backup before shift started and call flow increase. Nobody does that stuff anymore. Nope. I mean, you know, nobody commits to really delivering, you know, on I mean, really delivering and doing absolutely anything. So, yeah, there's my rant. Okay. Tom Milligan 41:31 Well, well, Fred, first off, thank you for being here. This is I think it's such a great perspective from agent all the way to CEO of a, of a master agency, basically. And everything in between and seeing the buyers, the sellers, the agent's the technologies, the everything is such a great 360 degree view. And I appreciate you being here. So before we go, tell everybody where they can, if they want to learn more about cloud tech gurus if they want to learn more about Fred Stacy? Yeah, where do they Where do they find both of you? Fred Stacey 42:04 The easiest way is find find me on LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah. First of all, cloud tech gurus.com. You know, you can find us all over LinkedIn. You know, we're pretty active. You know, I'm just saying, you know, Darren, Brian and myself are out there a lot. customer facing and yeah, so reach out to me on LinkedIn, connect with me. If you're in the industry, I'll accept it. If you send me a bad DM trying to sell me something. After I accepted, I will delete you Brian Nichols 42:36 to come. Yes. Nuka the worst thing ever. That's the BS. I see. I used Fred Stacey 42:41 to actually try to help those people. And after so many years of doing it, I'm just like, look, you know, I've tried, if you can't figure out that those crappy DMS don't work, then you know, it's on you, man. Thanks Brian Nichols 42:56 for accepting my LinkedIn request. Have you considered buying blah, blah, blah? Nope, that doesn't work. Sorry, folks. Fred Stacey 43:04 So find us on LinkedIn, find us online. You know, LinkedIn is always the best though. And again, I accept invites all the time from people in the industry. So I love sharing, you know, content on there. Sounds good. Standing, read. Brian Nichols 43:19 Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate this. I know Tom and I are going to wrap up here and share a few thoughts. But we'll make sure we include all those links. So folks can go ahead find you find cloud tech gurus. And obviously, folks, if you want to go ahead and continue the conversation, please reach out to Fred and of course, let him know you heard him on CX without the BS. Fred. Thanks for joining us. Fred Stacey 43:41 Thanks, guys. Thanks, Fred. Brian Nichols 43:45 All right, Tom. That's gonna wrap up our sync up here with Fred and I gotta say, another 10 out of 10 episode. I Tom Milligan 43:53 absolutely love that guy. I mean, he knows he knows his shit. Brian Nichols 43:56 Yeah, well, and that goes back to what I said in the show. And I I had to bring that that back from the the archives, because I remember that distinctly, we were at our company kickoff, and you were you're selling to the guys like, Hey, you want to be able to effectively sell what we sell here. You got to know your shit. And when you go and talk to these partners, folks like Fred, who they are experts and in specific areas, so like he said, cloud tech gurus, they're focusing explicitly on CX, they're not slinging circuits. They're not doing cybersecurity. So you're meeting with their partners, the customers want to know they're experts. And then from the standpoint of find the person from Cloud tech gurus, I want to know that your sales guy mister or missus, and provider, I want to know they know their shit. So that just speaks to not just going out and again, a recurring theme, slinging marketing terms or buzzwords, but really knowing your shit how it actually impacts your customers and frankly, with knowing when you're a good fit, and being transparent when you're not. Tom Milligan 44:55 Yeah, well and I think, you know, buzzword compliance is important. But if that's all You got, you're just gonna sell to the small guys, or you're gonna only get so far because anybody that's been in this business for more than five minutes can see through the buzzword bingo. And, and they're going to they're going to know that you're you're full of shit. And so even though I've been in this business for 34 years or whatever it is now you know, I don't you know, I don't know all the buzzwords even I mean they like Fred was just saying things are changing so fast that I know enough to get dangerous so I can do the buzzwords. But then I bring in my experts like like a Fred or somebody or one of his gurus who knows more about what's what's happening on a very specific scale or a specific industry or specific technology. Brian Nichols 45:46 And then niches right like that I used to say to my team, the riches are in the niches and, and that is where the gurus are going to have success. Because if I'm a guru who focuses on retail, and then you have a guru who focuses with credit unions, you're gonna start to see things that other folks don't see, you're gonna start to hear reoccurring themes that other folks don't hear. Because you're in that world, you're immersed in the language, you're speaking the language, you're talking to the folks who are using this every single day and seeing how they're using it. It's one thing to say, we have the technology, we have the specs, it's another thing to see how the customers that you're bringing this to, you are actually leveraging it in the real the real world. And this goes to I mean, why it's so important not just to have the next shiny object, but to specifically outline how that shiny object is going to help solve the very real problems of your customers. And if you can't create a story that shows not just how it solves those problems, but specifically how it's going to solve the problems for them and their industry, that it's going to be white noise. So I mean, I can't agree more, I guess this is a recurring thing that we're seeing that marketing is getting really bad out there. When it comes to sling. Just the buzzwords left and right. So I guess it's a call to action and marketing. Get your shit together? Tom Milligan 47:00 Yeah, I think we may be have to find some cmo on here to defend themselves, we might have to specifically, I think we have a few. But hey, if you're a CMO of a C CAS or UCaaS provider works in the CX space or an AI provider of some sort, and you're out there slinging bullshit. First off, stop. And then come up, you know, give us a shout here at the podcast. And we'll see if you can come on here and defend yourself. Brian Nichols 47:25 Or to that point, if you disagree with us, you think actually, you know what, we need to sling more buzzwords, we need to get AI in front of more and more people. Yeah, come make your case come make your argument to the audience. And hey, Tom, I'm gonna ask you some fun questions. Because we are CX without the BS, so just be prepared. Tom, this has been a great conversation, I guess, where can folks go ahead and reach out to us they want to continue the conversation or find more episodes of CX without the BS? Tom Milligan 47:50 Well, first off, if you're seeing this on YouTube, make sure you hit the little Like button, leave us a comment. If you're listening on any of the, I don't know, 100 podcast apps that this is found on, make sure you do a quick rating and review for us. That's always very helpful. You can also reach out to us at CX without the bs@gmail.com. And we try to respond to those. But yeah, we'd love to have you on the show by and also, of course, Brian and I are both available and very prevalent or prominent on LinkedIn. We're everywhere. You can't get away from us. Brian Nichols 48:25 Yep. And I'll just echo what Fred said as well. LinkedIn is definitely the place to go. So if you are watching us here on LinkedIn, or you're watching one of the clips we've shared here on LinkedIn, please don't be a stranger. Head down into the comments. Let us know your thoughts. Continue the conversation. We'd love to hear from our fans. And yes, we might even go ahead and reach out to you and see if you want to be a guest on CX without the BS. I think that's where we're gonna go ahead and put a pin in this week's episode. Tom, it's always a pleasure going ahead and get into sync up with you talk about all the things we're seeing in the industry with some industry experts. Any final words for the audience as we wrap things up today? Tom Milligan 48:58 Nope. Well, yes. Cx without the Bs is a podcast, but it should be a mantra in our industry. Brian Nichols 49:08 Here here, and let's make that a mantra, shall we? With that being said Brian Nichols signing off. You're on CX without the BS for Tom Milligan. We'll see you next time. Tom Milligan 49:20 Hello, and welcome to CX without the BS. My name is Tom Milligan and I'm here with my co host, Brian Nichols. What's Brian Nichols 49:26 up Tom? Tom Milligan 49:27 Hey, man, it's good to see you again. As always see you Yeah, for sure. It's Brian Nichols 49:31 been a little bit since we last connected what's been going on in the world of Tom Milligan? Tom Milligan 49:35 Oh, you know, I mean, first off you and I were both planning on being in Nashville and a couple of weeks for a big trade show. So I've got a big pile of swag sitting next to my desk here that I'll be bringing with me that's always fun. What about you? Yeah, Brian Nichols 49:49 still still the same on my plate getting prepped for set event out in Nashville. So that's gonna be like a five hour drive for for me probably five hour drive for you just go in the opposite direction. So looking forward to that should be a lot of fun. And of course, we're gonna see a lot of cool people out there. Some folks who've actually been on the show. Tom Milligan 50:06 Yeah, it's gonna be fun to catch up with them. And, you know, we will try to take some pictures posted on some on LinkedIn. So hopefully we'll be able to, to meet up with a few of our, our former guests. Brian Nichols 50:18 Yeah, and probably future guests to Tom's sneaking suspicion. Tom Milligan 50:23 Yeah, good point. Speaking of guests, ah, let's talk about our guest today. Brian Nichols 50:29 That's called a segue for folks who are playing along with the home game. And Tom Milligan 50:33 what's the best part about it? You guys is we don't plan that segue. It just happened. That was a beautiful thing. Brian Nichols 50:38 We are professionals, professional. What I'm not going to go ahead and venture to guess but we are professionals. Exactly. Tom Milligan 50:43 So today's guest is someone that many of you will know His name is Fred Stacy. He is the CEO of cloud tech gurus, which is a TST a technology services distributor that exclusively markets to the contact center market so they don't do all the circuit slinging and everything else that a lot of the other guys do. But Fred is also unique in that he he's been in this business for 29 years. And he started out as a phone agent which is near and dear to my heart because that's where I started as well. But he he puts that hole I think you know, Fred and I have known each other for just over seven months. I mean, we met in January or December of last year. Really good guy and I think he's going to bring he's going to he's going to share some pretty cool stuff with us today. Brian Nichols 51:28 Love it well you know what, who am I to to keep the audience from enjoying a phenomenal conversation so you know what, Tom? I think we'll go ahead and dig right into things what Unknown Speaker 51:37 say you Amen Brian Nichols 51:38 let's go let's do it. All right, here we go on to another episode of CX without the BS this time with Fred Stacy from Cloud tech gurus boom, Tom Milligan 51:51 we're done. Okay, says it's still recording on my side and record Transcribed by https://otter.ai