Tom Milligan  0:01  
Hey, Artie, it's good to see you again. How are you my friend?

Aarde Cosseboom  0:04  
Doing great. Thank you guys for inviting me. Pleasure to be on the show. I've seen I think all of the episodes so far. So even though Brian, this is our first time meeting, it feels like I know you spent hours with you already.

Brian Nichols  0:18  
Well, hopefully all good things.

Tom Milligan  0:21  
I will say this, I've known Brian now for about nine months, almost the same amount of time. I've known you already. And but I work with Brian literally every single day and I'll tell you, the guy doesn't change. He's just upbeat. Fun. Laughing he's, this is who he is all the time. And if this is how you are at home, Brian, your wife is. She's a trooper.

Brian Nichols  0:43  
She sure has to say the least. And I have a 15 month old so add that into the equation for sure. Yeah,

Tom Milligan  0:49  
the two of you guys to still dealing with the little ones. My youngest is 22. So 22 years.

Brian Nichols  0:57  
Little bit of a difference. But yeah, a little bit. A

Tom Milligan  1:00  
so So already, let's get into this today. We you know, like we talked about it in the little intro about a little bit about what you get what you do. But let's talk about clarity CX what is it? How long has it been around? Give us give us the elevator pitch?

Aarde Cosseboom  1:16  
Yeah, absolutely. Clarity CX, we're we'd like to say we're a peer to peer Consulting Group. We've been around for about four years, four and a half years. I'm the co founder, I have a pretty small team. We try to be as agile as possible, which means that we don't want a lot of bloat. We don't want a lot of employees doing lots of less meaningful tasks, we want to make sure that our team members are sharp, incised and can move to what our customers need. Needs are we focus on contact center, we like to call it CX, anything having to do with technology for the contact center. And that's a pretty large range. So you can think of things like chat bots, voice bots, speech analytics, WFM, W Em, so workforce Tools, Data Analytics, even the underlying infrastructure to deliver phone calls, chats, emails, all of that as well. So network connectivity, along with the core. So like IVR ACD is or what we call, traditional context. And our see kestrels today and CRMs. And we try to focus on technology because as you can see, by my background, I'm a little bit nerdy, and a little bit business like little Stormtrooper in the background. And I gravitate towards technology. Although my history I've been a contact center leader, I've been a people manager for 15 plus years before we started clarity CX. So I know how to run a contact center. I know how to lead people, but I really gravitate towards AI technology and anything that's new and innovative.

Unknown Speaker  2:55  
Yeah. Go ahead, Tom.

Unknown Speaker  2:57  
Well, okay, I'll

Brian Nichols  2:58  
take over Yeah, I'll just say already, like, we see right now, this is definitely the route, everyone's everyone's going new technology, like, Whatever, whatever the new shiny thing is, but and we talked about this many a time here on the show. It's like how do you know which shiny object to take chase after. And one of the things we really see is it's not just impacting the technology that's available now for the contact center. But it's also changing the way that people are searching for these solutions. So talk to us more about what you guys are doing at clarity to help when a business owner or a partner like they're trying to figure out who's the best fit because elephant in the room. There's literally dozens of CX providers out there see Casper riders who can say, oh, I can do it all. So what does that look like when you're trying to actually help bring the technology to the folks who are searching for these solutions? Yeah.

Aarde Cosseboom  3:46  
I love the question of kind of do a roundabout answer because we're on CX with no BS. And there's a lot of BS out there, especially when there's technology sales involved. We try to brand ourselves not as sales reps or county executives or whatever you want to call or rebrand. We are true consultants, we say peer to peer consulting because we used to be in their shoes, the buyer shoes who used to work for nine to five organizations, all the consultants on my team. We've been in the contact center, we've been the frontline team members answering calls, making outbound calls, we've been Team Lead supervisors. So we know we've earned our stripes. We know what it's like to be in the trenches. And we know that buying technology. There's a lot of hoodwinking, there's a lot of BS, there's a lot of fluff. If you see the conferences over the last 20 years in the contact center space, I won't name them by name, but these big trade shows and conferences a little bit more popular pre COVID When people enjoyed going to Vegas and getting out of the office for a week and partying with peers, but the conferences they had themes so For about a five year span, there was a theme, the first theme was migrate to the cloud. And then the second theme was omni channel. So deploy not only phones, but chat and emails with digital age. And then things started to change. And the new the theme after that was CSAT scores. And you saw all these really cool positions, open up, and NPS and CSAT. And all these survey driven type results in creating data analytics around that customer journey mapping, you saw some really cool titles like CX, or CX O, Chief Customer Officer, all these cool titles that came out of that revolution. And then now we're into the AI revolution. And we've kind of been there for the last eight ish years. And about eight years ago, it started as really robust chatbots. And then voice bots. And then speech analytics became popular sentiment analysis intent. And now with the revolution of chat, GPT, Gemini and all of the others, like, in the last, you know, year and a half, two years, now, everyone has a.ai, or an AI in their name. And it's all the same stuff, it's all a little bit of BS, it's a lot of our stuff is the shiny product. And it's better than the last shiny product. But in reality, a lot of the AI tools out there, they're not built truly on AI. It's really just machine learning, supervised machine learning, there's a lot of human, sweat, sweat, blood and tears and time that has to go into it to maintain it and make sure that it's running and operating properly. It does gain efficiencies. So there are some benefits to it. But then also, it's a little bit of snake oil. So you can see I'm a little bit jaded about AI. Although I created AI myself for my my technology called Palomar. And I know we'll talk a little bit more about it in a bit. But Palomar is essentially our AI tool to help customers find technology. And the AI that we have in our engine is backed behind Gemini, Google dialogflow, Amazon Lex and chat GPT. So it's a it's pulling in lots of Yeah, we use we use meta as well. They're a llama product, but lots of different technologies pulling information from the internet in real time. Because you know, the internet smart, it's just trying to figure out how to search and find things. That's hard. So that's our philosophy about AI. It's really, how can you use it to be productive? Or how can you use it in a way where human or man hours just can't? Can't sell for it?

Tom Milligan  7:51  
Well, I'll tell you what I listened to what you just said. And I think the only thing I would change and everything that you just said is I would remove all of the little caveats where you said, it's a little I'm a little bit jaded, it's a little bit of snake where it's some BS, you put a lot of nice qualifiers on there. But the bottom line is, there's so much bullshit out yep. Like, there's probably more bullshit than not. And I think Mike, Michael Dell scenario said it best on your very first episode when he said, If I see another company put a.ai At the end of their name, I'm going to throw up or I can't remember exactly. But it's, you know, like you said, Everybody's doing it. This is the latest, you don't have AI in your title or in your on your I mean, if it's not plastered on every single page on your website, you're apparently not even buzzword compliant. And you can't even sell anything in this business anymore. Yeah,

Aarde Cosseboom  8:50  
and it's, it's weird. You've seen the.ai become popular, but about eight years ago, people were saying the word bought and bought was not a negative connotation. I was like, look at the Chatbot the voice bot the whatever the and now. And maybe this is just marketing and branding. Bought has a kind of negative tone to it. It's because a bot is a little bit more mechanical, there's less black box behind it, whereas the term AI, marketing wise, it's, oh yeah, it's just AI, you throw your question in there, it's going to output it's gonna go in the black box and then come out, it's gonna have the perfect thing for you. But in reality, a lot of those AI tools are really just bots with a little bit more shine on them. Which is, which is sad because there is true AI out there. And it is pretty amazing. But a lot of people claim that their AI so yeah, I don't like the.ai I don't like AI in any names. Much like I'm not a fan of the on premise or bought related technologies with the past.

Brian Nichols  9:54  
Yeah, for sure. And by the way, one thing already like you brought something up, I just want to back to it. AI as we know it right is relatively new. But going back even further to when you mentioned it was it was more of a chat bots. And like, I mean, that was eight years ago. So what is it that's caused the lag time is as a matter of trying to really make sure that the product, the AI, the bot, whatever you want to call it is up to snuff? Or is it just folks are a little weary of the adaptation, or is it something else? Yeah,

Aarde Cosseboom  10:25  
so I've done a lot of research in this space have been a keynote speaker and a lot of conferences around AI specifically in the conversational AI space. And if you think of AI, any AI, I'm generalizing here, there's the engine that runs AI, it runs off of the oil that it runs off of is data, information that gets plugged in. So you see things like chat up at Gemini that's running off of open internet information. The Internet is a vast source of information, it can be used for great purposes, it's basically querying or searching the internet for something, and then formulating a response. Now the secret sauce of conversational AI, which is a little bit different, and it makes more sense for us to talk about it. Because in the contact center, that's where the majority of the conversations are between b2b or b2c direct to consumer or business to business. And they have mountains of data. They have mountains of data over voice in the form of voice recordings, they also have mountains of data with regards to chat. And this is a little bit different data, some of this data can be specific to a business. So let's say an insurance company has insurance related questions and insurance related answers. And the AI can build out a knowledge base or an agent assist tool or some sort of speech analytics around that area, that specific area of business to say the conversation was good, the conversation was bad, they should have said this, they can say this. So that's one bubble or area of commerce, conversational AI. The other bubble an area, which is a little bit more general is conversational AI itself, which is understanding a person's natural language. So when they say a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph, and understanding the intent or intents of the question or the comments, and then curating a formulated response, in that formulated response can be done in 1000s, or 10s, of 1000s of different ways, in still get a desire to desirable outcome, positive outcome, negative outcome, whatever it is, and then you start to see the emergence of chap CBT, Gemini and all these other MLMs that are essentially just conversational AI tools, the information from the internet already exist, before those products existed, you can go to Google and type in a search and you're gonna get a result. And you can type in your own natural language. This is just another layer of that, understand what the intents are, and then also outputting drafts or multiple different variable type responses in text form, or nowadays it can be invoice form, it can also be in different languages. And that's the true power of conversational AI. So I think to kind of bring it home answer your question. Conversational AI has a lot of data behind it, because there's a lot of conversations that happen out there in the world on social media, b2b or b2c with companies, whereas other AI in this world does it's not pronounced doesn't exist as much. You'll see a lot of video AI out there that has hallucination. So if you Google Video, AI, and you watch that video, it'll show things where it's creating video, or images strung together, and things are changing in an unnatural way, maybe gravity changes, or the object in their hand doesn't exist, or there's six fingers on a hand. That's because there's not enough data in the photo and video world to feed the AI. Once there's enough data there for it to consume. It's going to understand it. And it's going to be able to put those rules on it to say, oh, humans don't have six fingers. Never show six fingers, or, you know, a hot dog should never be floating off of a table. It needs to be stationary to a plate or to that table, things like that. So it's all about the data. And if the data is not there, it really can't create true AI. So if anyone's trying to sell you AI, ask them where their data sources, how much data do they have? Are they pulling their own or are they pulling it from open? I don't know, if they'll data lake is large enough, it might actually be true AI.

Tom Milligan  15:05  
Well, I'm going to tell you, that was a fascinating, basically discussion. I mean, it's clear that you know what you're talking about. I'm a sales guy. So I know enough to be dangerous, you actually understand what you're talking about. I'll tell you sharpen. And again, we're not here for sharpen. But Brian and I both work for sharpen. We talk about usable AI. And, you know, hot dog floating off the table is probably not unusable. But it's certainly not great as for most of us that are the only AI like, just last week, I posted a tic toc where I took a single screen a single picture. And using AI, they took that one front facing picture and made me dance. And I turned around and somehow knew what the back of my head looked like they got it just right. And I mean, I can't dance like that. So that's usable AI. Right. So what I think that's a great segue, talking about AI, an actual useful AI, we touched on it a couple minutes ago about your palomar.com which is your you know, your brainchild, you put it together. And it helps people find the right technologies to tell us how it works. And I mean, isn't it just a filter? I mean, why is it why is it AI instead of just a Google search?

Aarde Cosseboom  16:34  
Yeah, good question. And you can go so palomar.com. It's our website, you can go to Google. And you can type just plain old Google and Chrome or Firefox or wherever. And you can type in what's the best Chatbot. And it'll actually output some text from if you're on Google Gemini, if you're from if you're an edge or Microsoft, it's going to be chat, GBT. It's gonna give you what it thinks the best Chatbot is, but some of the information about the best chatbots in the world are not accessible through Google searching or crawling. A lot of that information lives on websites like your guys's website, like sharpen CX, or, or your competitors or other technology providers. So what makes Palomar a little bit different is that you can go to Palomar, you can say, What's the best Chatbot? Or I'm interested in Chatbot? It's not going to give you an answer right away, it's going to ask you, what is the reason why you're looking for a chatbot? What are you trying to solve? So it does a little bit of consulting, it does the next step, which is we understand your intent, your you have a buying intent to buy a chatbot tool. But we want to know why. We want to know what your budget is, we want to know how you want to implement. And it sounds like a long back and forth between the tool. But really, it can be as short as three questions or as long as 20 or 30 questions depending on how detailed your answers are, or how how nuanced your your responses are. And it's going to curate the questions based off of how you respond. And it will also curated based off of the bubble in which you're interested in. So buying a chatbot is different than buying a voice bot. Buying a voice bot for French speakers is different than buying a voice bot for Spanish speakers. There are a lot of different nuances that are important to the questioning before providing results. And we do this in consulting today. Do you think of a traditional consultant? That's what they do? They do a discovery call, they ask you questions. It's really annoying kind of sounds like you're talking to a therapist. But by the end, the reason why they're collecting all that data is because that consultants brain, or maybe a cohort of two or three consultants brains together can say we've we've seen this before, this is what we recommend. Now replace the consultants brain with all the information that exists on the internet, which is way larger, much more detailed, more real time because consultants can't go to review sites and review every single product every single day. Otherwise they won't be wouldn't be able to talk to their customers. So that's what Palomar does. We pull information, open source enter information from the internet. We have a data warehouse, but none of the data warehouse. We we do not curate our own data. We're not a review site. We're not collecting information from users. We're not collecting information from our team members. We're collecting information from open internet and we're pulling that information into our data warehouse. Usually it's about every 45 minutes, although sometimes every hour. That information is current up to date. And then we're aggregating it to the questions that are being asked by the Palomar AI, live questions that are being asked, it's going to derive some sort of intent. So it's gonna say, we know this person wants a voice bot, we know that they need French, and Spanish and English. And there are a tile shop in Montreal, and they have very low volume. And their budget is relatively small. So we know enough information to pull information from open source internet. So derive four or five or 10 solutions. And what we do is from a very unbiased standpoint, because it's being pulled through AI, we do a match score. And then we also pull information about that product or provider on what we call supplier card, to try to make it as simple as possible. Because if you've ever used a review site before, it's like going to TrueCar and saying, I want a car, there's so many cars out there, and some of them are new and some of their use. It's like flipping through a dictionary to find a word put into a sentence, we'd rather say, what sentence Are you trying to create, and then we'll give you three options of sentences, or five options. And then we get to just just choose one. So that's what we created with Palomar. Really our ideas to help people get from the early stages of buying intent, I'm interested in buying something too. I have four or five options in my hand, and I can trust those options, because the bot itself or the AI collected the information of why I'm interested in it. Hey,

Brian Nichols  21:41  
already, one of the questions I had for a follow up. And this is something we're seeing a lot here at sharpen is, you know, we're seek as for the SMB. So we're going after the customers who either they're overlooked by enterprise players, or just folks who maybe they just didn't think they needed a contact center environment. But now with the advancing in technology, they're seeing that this might be an avenue, they can start to go down and explore. So even for those folks who they've never, you know, they've never really dug into this world, they might not even know what they're looking for. It sounds like Palomar can still help them from really those infancy phases and saying, Hey, you're brand new at this, let's just get some basic information and even start to give them some outcomes. Even if they don't really know again, what it is they're actually looking for. Yep.

Aarde Cosseboom  22:28  
Oh, I love it. And we our main menu. So after you go to palomar.com, you hit get started, it's going to ask you some basic questions can say, What's your name? What's your email, just just in case you drop off, and we need to get you back into the funnel to using Palomar after that our Main Menu, and this hits right on what you said, we've got five different options. One is I know what I'm interested in. That's called CX tools. Like I know, I need a voice bot or I know I need speech analytics, they go down that path, they answer questions and then get results. Another section is I'm interested in learning more about CX technology. This is more educational, it's the what is an IVR? What is a WFM? What is a speech analytics tool for for contact center? It'll educate them, and then we'll walk them through the path of now are you interested in looking for suppliers? Or do you want to go back and learn more about other areas, another area that we have, so those five will kind of go through them quickly. The third one is I have a current technology and I don't like it, I need to replace it. And that's a very common buying anytime someone says, oh, for the love of Pete's Sake, if this, I know I know, I could swear on here, but I tried to be PG, this product I have goes down, it doesn't have 99.99% uptime. It goes down every Friday, and I just can't stand it anymore. I need to replace it. They can go to Palomar and type in what their product name is. And then and it'll answer with some suppliers. Of course, it'll draw some more detailed questions like why are you replacing this tool? And why why what do you use it for today, but then eventually give you results. The other one that's interesting is you're trying to solve a business problem. So my agent attrition is too high, my CSAT score is too low. My customers are unhappy with us and churning. These are all basic business. So problems, you can go down that path. And then you can suggest technology areas that can solve for that. And then you can drill down into that and then get solutions. And then the last one, which is probably my favorite is and this is always a interesting topic for buyers, CX innovation. So essentially, if you run a contact center, there's really two things that motivate innovation and the contact center. One is you saw any tool, you thought it was cool. Now you want to learn more about how to do that for your organization. So maybe it's implementing AI, or maybe it's speech analytics, or an agent assist tool. The other motivator for a buyer in that role is their boss comes to them and says, If you don't innovate, or our customer service, you know, you're not gonna get promoted, or you're gonna get fired, or whatever your jobs in risk. That is the area where they can go to where they're not solving a business problem. There's nothing fundamentally broken with what they have today. They're just interested in leveling up their whatever it is, maybe it's technology stack ecosystem, or it's, or a service to the customers or an agent experience. And then the last thing I'll kind of touch on really quick is the majority of times that people are interested in buying technology, they fall into three categories. It's the innovation piece that I just mentioned. The other category is I have something that's legacy that's going to break or be decommissioned, so I have to replace it. And the third one is, I'm starting a new organization, we've never had a contact center before. I need I'm launching an e commerce website, and I need people to be able to support them. I need to have one 100 Number on my website and chat. I need to build something from scratch. Where do I start with that? And using Palomar to answer those questions is exactly why we designed it.

Tom Milligan  26:32  
I think it's fascinating. I think the whole thing is fascinating. I have one last question. Well, first off everybody, it's P A L O M A R R. So there are two R's there. Maybe there's a story there you can tell us but the the thing I want to ask about that is this is I mean clarity, CX, I mean, your your main company is is a subject it's an agency or a partner with with TSDS and other other vendors. Palomar is not only technology agnostic, it's also partner gnostic, if I understand it correctly to a walk us through how non clarity CX employees or partners can benefit using Palomar. Yep. Oh,

Aarde Cosseboom  27:18  
absolutely. So, yeah, clarity, sex, we are Channel Sales. So we are consultants, but we make our money based off of whether or not a customer chooses a product within our portfolio. That's what keeps lights on. That's what keeps the lights on for Palomar. And that's what keeps us keeps us employed keeps us doing what we love, which is helping people with with contact center technology consulting. How M R is very interesting because it is absolutely agnostic, it is open to the internet, so anyone can use it. We like to say frenemies, other sub agents, TSDS. Other consultants, they can use it themselves, and then suggest the results to the end customer. We recommend that actually the refer or fill out a registration form on our website. So that we can sell together we can partner together, we can consult together, we're trying to be the self proclaimed experts in the space for contact center everything technology. So hopefully, we can add services, we can add support to that other sub agent or consultant that's helping their end customer. The other thing that's interesting about Palomar is that we have over 400 suppliers within our portfolio. And we have more than that listed on Palomar. So two things go with that. One is it is product agnostic. If if someone uses Palomar and they find a solution in which no one can benefit it, benefit from it monetarily, that's totally fine. We call that leakage. It's fine. We're helping we're doing the greater good in the community. We're helping them figure out what solves their problem. That's that's fine. But 95% and actually more than that, it's more like 98% of the products that are within the Palomar portfolio. Also, we have partnership agreements with and the majority of those you don't get through traditional TSDS. You don't get through a large telarus Sandler partners have on any of those those large partners. So instead of offering our customers a very small, here's 50 things to choose from. We would rather do what's called a blue ocean, give them all their options, and the ones that will win, hopefully will win. Will the one are the ones that are in our portfolio and the ones that will win that aren't in our portfolio. We approach those suppliers and say Hey, did you know that you know, 20% of the people that go to this area of product, you're listed as number one or number two, and you're probably winning that business? Do you want to win with us? Do you want us to help help you with that pipeline and make sure that it doesn't drop off? And the majority of the suppliers say yes, absolutely. And then they sign up for a portfolio.

Unknown Speaker  30:21  
Nice. There

Brian Nichols  30:22  
you go. Well, okay, already, this is probably my favorite part of the show. But we're gonna keep it PG today, for the sake that you wanted to keep it PG. We'll do that. And you kind of teased this a little bit earlier. But let's go back, right. So you see it in the industry. There's BS everywhere already, what is that biggest pile of BS that you've seen, it could be this year, it could just be across the UI general theme across CX, what say you?

Aarde Cosseboom  30:49  
Yeah, there's so many, I won't touch on the AI piece, because we already kind of talked about that BS, don't put AI in her name unless you actually leverage AI. And if you do have the receipts, like show like that you have a data lake show that it's literally not a curated data lake that you own instead, or what's called supervised learning, where there's humans that are actually doing the actions versus true AI. But I think, I think I want to go down a different path. So the biggest BS that I see in our space for technology, and I'm not going to call it individual suppliers. But we've gotten to a point in which all of the suppliers in our space, I'll say, mostly all, like 90% of them, have enough feature sets, that they're comparable to other products. So a lot of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Frost and Sullivan insights, all of that, like, these are the top 10 best suppliers, literally, you can list all of the top 30 suppliers and go all the way down to 29 and 30. And they're going to have this the comparable feature set that's needed for the average contact center. Yes, you're gonna have contact centers that are unique butterflies, or snowflakes that need the one off thing that only you know, supplier a has or supplier B has. I'm not saying that I'm saying for the general contact center, the majority of the products out there, even if they don't make a list are probably going to be good enough, if not way more horsepower than what you need. So I feel like there's a lot of BS around the feature matrix matrices, we check all these boxes in your peers may not have seen a lot of sales cycles, where people talk a lot about features. And we need the features, you need the features, you need the roadmap, we need the features, and then they do the RFP. And all of the providers have all the features that they need. And and then some. So I think there's a lot of BS about from a sales side as a technology provider saying, we have more features than our competitors. You really don't you have, you may check more boxes or have invented new terms to check more boxes. But in reality, like you can do omni channel, you can embed you can integrate with databases, you can use AI to an extent. You don't have to just keep inventing areas of products so that you can have 400 checkboxes as opposed to 389

Brian Nichols  33:33  
as Tom and I call it, what does that Tom? buzzword bingo?

Tom Milligan  33:37  
Yep, that's exactly right.

Brian Nichols  33:39  
There's maybe your own buzzwords, apparently.

Tom Milligan  33:41  
Yes or? No, in this case.

Brian Nichols  33:43  
Exactly.

Aarde Cosseboom  33:44  
All right, another tech box that describes the word chatbot in a different way. I'm gonna pull my hair out like it's, it's the same, right? Yes, you have AI in chat form. That's called a chatbot. Like just call it what it is. Don't call it like aI conversation insights on digital like that just

Brian Nichols  34:05  
it's not a matter of the what you do, but rather, it's how you do it that really is differentiating these companies that mean that that's really what I would take away from that. That kind of overview already. That was great. Thank you so much. Yeah,

Tom Milligan  34:16  
absolutely. Already, as always, really glad to see you again. And as I mentioned in the intro, and at the beginning, normally known you for about nine and nine and a half months and feel like it's been like yours, just love you, man.

Aarde Cosseboom  34:32  
Yeah, love you guys, too. Brian. I know we just met but like I said earlier, it feels like we've gone a lot of back a long way. Big thank you for having me on the show. Happy to jump on later on. If you guys want to do a follow up and any of the areas of interest. Obviously I'm a AI conversational AI. Nerd. So if we ever want to drill into that stuff, let me know.

Tom Milligan  34:54  
We'll do I'll tell you what we're probably going to do next time is once Palomar I mean Palomar. only been live for a few weeks, right? Yeah, two weeks. So what's gonna happen is I see this is usable AI, right? This is AI, that can change an entire sales process in our industry. So I'm totally excited to see over the next months and years that, you know, we're not I'm not going to jump to like, remember the old days when it was omni channel in the contact center, right voice is going to die. It's all just going to be email and then it's all going to be chat. And you know, it's going to take over and now everyone's saying that AI is going to take over everything. I think they're still gonna need to be salespeople. But what a great tool to open the door and to get a lot of information and so that you can narrow the field so you're not trying to boil the ocean. In your sales process. I think it's great. I'm just excited to see what it does in our business. Yeah,

Aarde Cosseboom  35:52  
we're we're extremely excited. I mean, if you see like Zillow what Zillow did to the housing real estate market, we still need realtors. Zillow displaces a percentage of that people can self serve, they can use a Zillow realtor on the website and buy a house and never talk to a human ever. But the majority of people still liking the like to talk to a real person and see the house in person. Same thing with true car Carvana. Like people still go to dealerships, they still want to shake someone's hand and grab the keys on the keychain, pull the sticker off the window like that, that will never go away in our industry. Palomar is not designed to displace human headcount. What we're trying to do is allow people who want to do research on their own, come to their own conclusion, essentially self service, they can get there. And then they can either do it on their own. Or they can say, You know what, let me raise my hand, let me talk to a consultant, let me go on site and do a test drive to a car, let me do a walkthrough and an open house. That option is there. But hopefully they've done enough research to, to know what car dealership to go to or what neighborhood to look at next. So that's what we're trying to do for the industry. We're really excited. We don't think we're going to stop just at CX technology, we'll probably broaden it to all technology software as a service solutions in the future. But for now, we want to get really good at one thing that we know. And that's contact center technology.

Tom Milligan  37:22  
Fantastic. Love it out story already.

Brian Nichols  37:26  
I think that's yeah, that's a great spot to put a pin already. Again, part one of the conversation for sure, we're gonna have you back on as more exciting things come down the road. So otherwise, we'll make sure we include all your links in the show notes. Thank you again for joining us already as it is a pleasure.

Aarde Cosseboom  37:42  
Pleasure is all mine. Thank you guys for having me. enjoyed the conversation and looking forward to future conversations as well. All right, thanks already.

Tom Milligan  37:56  
Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Are we doing the

Brian Nichols  37:58  
intro first, right? Or? No, I gotta go into the outro on the outro fuckup. Okay. All right, Tom, already, I think is what the man when it comes to talking about AI. I mean, not only was that a crash course, for anybody who wants to get the basics of AI, but it also was a deep dive into the specific areas AI is doing some really cool stuff. And frankly, we're AI is nothing more than just machine learning. I mean, that, for me was really informational. And I don't know, I'm just gonna say it, I think the audience is going to take away a much better understanding of what AI is why it matters. And frankly, what to avoid with all the buzzword bingo, we talked about so often, like, AI is not everything AI is just a tool to trying to accomplish your end goal, right. And we just gotta we got to keep going back to that mindset. Tom AI is a tool. But already, I think he's showing how to use the tool in the most efficient manner. I love that conversation. Let's say you,

Tom Milligan  38:57  
I freaking love it. I am keeping it PG. In honor of already. I will tell you that. You know, there are two things that hit me during that conversation. One thing I didn't know about already, which was that he ran contact centers prior to getting into the sales world, and which makes me even feel more bonded as a buddy to him, because that's what I did. I ran contact centers for a decade before I started selling. And so having that real life, user experience before you try to start selling that technology, I think it's I mean, it's made me a better salesperson, and I assume it's made him a better consultant. The other thing, which I freaking love what he said, was that numbers, I think he said number one through 30 of the technology providers, especially in the CCAP space, we all have 90% the same feature list. And I mean, I've been saying that for a long time. In fact, I've probably said it on the show at least once that, you know, you win deals in the fringes in that 10% area because you know why use the Example. Sharpen, does not have a really great dialer solution. We're an inbound CCAP solution. If a customer comes to us and says we need a predictive dialer, we don't do that. And so that's not a good fit for us. And so that's the part of that 10% That we don't offer. But the 90% that we do offer absolutely overlaps perfectly with all of the what are the, you know, the Forrester guys, the Gartner guys and everybody else? So that 90% thing, it really hit me where he was talking about how the matrices are, you know, they're kind of irrelevant because the features overlap so much, except for that five or 10%. I love that part. But

Brian Nichols  40:41  
yeah, and I love that what Palomar is doing is it's, you know, you all think of Google, right? When you sit down to Google, and you type in how do i and then Google gives you like, seven different options of to continue typing. And this is what people often ask, it's taking that mentality, but applying it to the going out and actually hunting for these different types of solutions. So it's helping give the context, I just wanna go back to something I said earlier, it's not so much the what, but the why it's the understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, whether that's to RDS point, you're trying to do something new, you're solving a problem, you're wanting to get the latest and greatest whatever that thing may be. Now it's starting to help you like it's, you're starting out at the top of the pyramid, and you're just working your way down, right, it's a game of Plinko. Basically, that's the mentality I think we should all take away from today is that AI is just a tool to help us making more educated informed decisions versus just the gut emotional stuff. We all make the emotional decision making processes, but we then go back and we validate that with our facts, our figures, our logic, our reason. So this is putting all of that together, here's why you're making the choice. Now we're showing you that you are in fact making the right choice and you can validate that so across the board Palomar just a plus

Tom Milligan  41:56  
bingo and working with clarity CX as your consultant. Right after you've gone through the Palomar process. Go for it. Clarity is one of my favorite partners out there.

Brian Nichols  42:06  
Hear hear, Tom? All right. Well, with that I know we're already hard pressed for time. So any final words for the audience today, Tom, as we wrap things up, no,

Tom Milligan  42:15  
other than I will tell you this. I would just say make a comment on our show on whatever platform you're seeing it on. Give us a rating and review shoot a note to us if you'd like to be a guest on the show. We're both available on LinkedIn. We're both here at sharpened cx.com So we'd love to hear from you if you want to be a part of the show.

Brian Nichols  42:35  
Love it all right, well how about this we're gonna go ahead and put a pin in today's phenomenal episode of CX without the BS make sure you've hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platforms. Also, you can catch your favorite video version of the show over on YouTube hit that subscribe button head down below the comments. And to Tom's point, if you've seen some CX BS, let us know what it is. We might even talk about it here on an episode of CX without the BS. So with that being said Brian Nichols signing off for Tom Milligan. We'll see you next week.

Tom Milligan  43:10  
Welcome to another amazing and exciting episode of CX without the BS. I'm Tom Milligan

Brian Nichols  43:16  
and I am Brian Nichols.

Tom Milligan  43:19  
It is so great to be here with you Brian. How's your week been?

Brian Nichols  43:22  
It's been good Tom. I'm right now literally drinking through a firehose. I was off for two weeks visiting family in the Northeast I live in Indiana so my wife's family my family all in the northeast, we took two weeks with our 15 month old to go on a half car cross country adventure go see some family but I'll tell you what, two weeks on the road out of your your home out of your routine with a 15 month old that just loves routine who it's been. It's been a little bit of a getting back into the swing of things but you know what, we're having some fun and we're gonna have some fun here today on CX without the BS. How are you? How was your vacation? How was July 4?

Tom Milligan  44:01  
Oh, it was fantastic. As some people know, I actually run another podcast with a friend of mine. Her name's Pam, she was actually a guest on our show. She and I host a podcast called The talking face. It has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with dating and relationships and you know, getting older and all that kind of crap that happens. And anyway, I went to North Carolina and spent the weekend up there meeting with her and her family and getting to know her a little bit better. And that's we had a great time but like you like your daughter, I like routine. So being out of out of my apartment here out of the studio for almost a week. Just kind of you know it can't you have to kind of take a day or two to get right back into. But I'll tell you what, before we get started, you know, thinking of daughters, I don't have any daughters. I have four sons. My youngest one is 22 years old. You have a 15 month old daughter and our guy Today, his name is Artie costume if you don't know already, I think today is the day you're going to meet him for the first time. Already. He also has a 15 month old little girl. He and his lovely wife have a beautiful little girl and they they live out in Southern California. I believe he's in Orange County. Our guest today, like I said is already costume. I met him literally at the same show where I met Michael, Dustin York, our first guest on the show at the IntelliSense channel connect show. And just like Michael rd, and I have just become really great friends. This guy is so impressive. I'm sure that what we're going to talk about today is going to blow your way. But this guy, he's he's he's a sales guy. But he's also really a geek. He's He's geeks out on technology. He's an author. He's a podcast host so you know, he should know how to do this pretty well. He's a huge Star Wars fan and as our listeners and viewers know both of us also huge Star Wars fans. And then the other thing that I think one of the reasons already and I bonded so well is that people who followed me on any social media know that I've been through a really crazy personal situation of crazy divorce over the years. And he did as well so he says that he's on his second lap in his life. But he and I have had some really great conversations about divorce and what it's taught us and stuff like that. So rd is just a really really great guy in addition to being a great business person and a great consultant and so I'm really excited to bring him on so are you about ready to get this going with him?

Brian Nichols  46:44  
For sure and by the way Tom just elephant the room is that not the type of person you want to do business with is just good people I mean, I've said it before I'm gonna say it again my old CEO Mike delegate Stratus ip also a partner in the channel good people bring out the good and people that was a saying that was on our wall at the HQ because it's true you want to do business with good people why because good people bring out the good in people and from what you've told me already he fills that role so so well so I'm looking forward to meeting already you know, even though it's through this but hey, we're gonna make it work and have some fun and also I'm looking forward to learning all about AI so let's say you Tom Shall we shall we get already on to the show?

Tom Milligan  47:26  
Let's bring him on.

Brian Nichols  47:27  
All right standby already caused a boom here on CX without the BS.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai