[00:00:00] Hey folks. Brian Nichols here on CX without the bs. It's been a while. Uh, I've been a little busy, namely, I've been on the road and I've been traveling. I've been traveling all over doing trade shows, expos, and I've learned quite a bit. And I want to talk about what I've heard

and what I've seen over the past few weeks with all the travel, so first I went out to the CVX Expo out in Phoenix, Arizona. Had a phenomenal time. The company I worked for, we were a sponsor of one of the events that was there in the Palomar. AI Cafe, uh, which was a phenomenal experience. By the way, Palomar is a phenomenal technology advisor, so highly recommend them.

Great team over there led by Artie Kaboom, who is actually a past guest here on the show. Uh, they, his company was formerly called Clarity CX and was recently rebranded there to Palomar. So Artie is doing some phenomenal work, uh, over there with his team. But anyways, long story short. Was able [00:01:00] to have a great time over at the CV Expo.

Um, CV ex Expo that is with Artie and his team. And then, uh, after that, the following week was up in Grand Rapids, Michigan

at the C3 Technology Advisors Tech Summit and, uh, we were again, one of the sponsors of the event up there. And it was a phenomenal turnout. Uh, that event was all customer facing. Uh, so we were actually talking to end users at the tech summit, whereas. Out in Phoenix, uh, the event was more technology advisor, M-S-P-C-E-O type of focus.

So, uh, very different perspectives that we got to hear from, but a lot of, some, uh, a lot of interesting things that I, I came across and some, some big takeaways I wanted to share after I was visiting those events, because to start out.

When I went to the events, one of the things I noticed was that vendors were showing up and they were selling magic, right? I had a, another podcast I did with a guest and he [00:02:00] used to call it PFM or Pure Effing Magic, right? And this is what I was seeing from vendors. They were presenting the magic. And the magic of course.

Was it something AI related? Right? But on the customer side, the customers were more asking like, Hey. Can we just do the basics well before we start adding the PFM before we start adding the crazy magic tool, whatever it may be. And this was the gap I really noticed was that vendors are promoting the AI hype, whereas customers are asking for answers to real world needs, if that makes sense.

You know, it was funny when I went to the event last year, um, at the C3 Tech Summit. I noticed that majority of the vendors were your traditional vendors, right? They were your CAS, your ucas, your cybersecurity companies, your connectivity companies, [00:03:00] your SD wan, et cetera. So that was last year. Then this year I noticed that. Almost half of the companies who were there as sponsors, not only were half of them brand new, almost half of them were AI related. Right. And every time I would go booth to booth trying to uncover like, what, what is this, what is this company doing now?

Like, what's, what's their shiny bell or whistle? Right. Um, I, I kept on seeing. Promises of automation, promises of replacing people. I kept on seeing zero human support. It was all automated support, real time. Great, but no people. And then ai, that's basically running the business, right? And, and meanwhile, what I was hearing from actual customers when I was having conversations with folks who were there was, Hey, this all sounds cool.

The AI stuff sounds [00:04:00] cool, but my support tickets for my existing solutions that I have already spent money on, those are going unanswered, and yet I'm seeing similar companies or subsets of existing, uh, companies that are out promising the world. Yet I know as an existing customer, I'm not even getting serviced where I'm needing help today.

Like I had one customer actually stop by saying, I have this one request in for voicemail transcription with a big UCaaS vendor, mind you, and they said that it's gone over three weeks with no response. That's unacceptable. So, I'm sorry, three weeks with no person reaching out. That company just doesn't want to earn somebody's business yet that exact same company was a vendor at said event, and they were promoting some brand new AI [00:05:00] feature

to their ucas suite. But you can't answer a support email that's been in your inbox for three weeks. Make it make sense, right?

See customers, they are overwhelmed. There's so much information that's out there, a flood of new technologies and vendors saying that they can do everything. And anything with the magic, do everything button called ai, but they're skeptical and who can blame them, right? Because you have these exact same vendors who have been promising the world with legacy solutions who still drop the ball on the basics.

Big, big issue. And the other part of it is that customers don't want PFM right? As much as vendors try to promote the PFM, right? We see it all over LinkedIn. It's whatever new AI buzzword bingo feature is gonna be slapped [00:06:00] onto whatever solutions out there, it's gonna be done. And they're gonna go gung-ho promoting it, right?

It's gonna, it's gonna solve all your problems. It's gonna solve world hunger. At least that's what they promote. The reality though is that customers, their first priority isn't AI at all. Frankly, their first priority is predictability. It's visibility, it's reliability, but it's support. It's real support.

They're tired of being treated like a number to a vendor and, and show of hands. How many of us have felt like that in life where you call a company, please hold 20 minutes on hold, 40 minutes on hold. Didn't the Super Bowl have an ad two or three years ago making fun of the fact that we called in and we are put on hold and it was the couple dancing to the on hold.

Cisco, [00:07:00] uh, call center music, right? Remember that? We all experience it. That's why we all laughed at that video. 'cause it was real. We felt it. We've all experienced it firsthand. We've gone through it. So when you have folks who are treated like numbers consistently, but then they are offering solutions that are supposed to help improve the CX experience, or getting some mixed, mixed signals, if your CX experience for me as a customer is inadequate.

How the hell am I supposed to trust you as a technology for my customers? I can't. That's the reality, and that's what I heard firsthand from folks. They were getting tired of the promises, these AI magic do everything buttons, and they're saying, dude, stop shoving features down my throat [00:08:00] that you're not even gonna show up in support if it breaks in the future.

Because you did that with stuff that I currently have with you and you're not fixing it today, like voicemail, transcription with that one example of that very large UCaaS vendor I mentioned. So vendors have forgot, oops. The foundational rule of of customer experience of cx, if people don't trust your core service, they will never trust your ai.

Point blank. Clients won't adopt advanced features when the basics feel broken. And again, who can blame them? You're telling me to buy the next shiny bell or whistle when the current bell or whistle I bought from you in the past is still broken or you're not helping fix it. No, I just want the basics and just done right, and that was a reoccurring theme [00:09:00] again.

I want the basics and I want them done right. Interesting. Right. In an era where we're always promoting the next big thing, a lot of folks were simply saying, I just want what works and I want it done well. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Not whatever the next AI magic's going to be. Just want the basics.

Gimme some good old fashioned UCaaS that does what they say they're gonna do. I don't want a UCA vendor who's doing 14 different things. There are UCA vendors out there, by the way. They're like, yeah, we're a phone company and we're a cable company, and we're an SD-WAN company, and we're a cybersecurity company, and we're a dot.dot.

Okay, great. Are you doing all those things 1000% perfectly? No. Hmm, interesting. So instead of doing 14 different things, meh, why not do one or two core [00:10:00] things really, really well? By the way, my day job, that's what my company does. Just a heads up. So if you ever wanna talk about that from a UCAS perspective, we can have that side conversation, but that's the perspective we take.

Into battle every single day. Hey, we're you Cs? We're month to month. We are, uh, a hundred percent US based support. You're gonna get a live answer in 10 to 12 seconds. You're gonna have, uh, no minimums, meaning we can support true SMB customers. And oh, by the way, if you need a call center op, uh, option to your existing unified communications, uh, needs.

We can go ahead and incorporate that into the existing platform. No, no. Seek has required, right. So again, happy to have that side conversation, but we only do ucas. We're only focused on business, business telephony, and we do it really, really well. Um, so AI hype, again, it's not the hype itself that is the problem.

It's misalignment. [00:11:00] Vendors are designing for themselves. They're trying to think of what, what can we showcase versus what are customers asking for? So when customers are asking for stuff. Give them that stuff. Don't just give them stuff for the sake of giving it to them. Right. And, and for example, uh, my, my day job, again, we are using AI to help with like unified communication, call transcription and ai, searchable summaries and next steps, and CRM integration for.

Pulling those, uh, summaries that are AI generated into the CRM. So it's tangibly like functionally better stuff versus just an AI do everything button, right? It's stuff that gives value to the existing employees, not something that's supposed to replace the employees. See the difference there too. Um, and by the way, this is something that I heard.

This is the other topic I wanted to focus on. What I was hearing from customers directly and something that I've really been [00:12:00] preaching in the greater CX space for a while, and that is that the world of unified communications is no longer just business phones, right? It is. It is CX and if you are a technology advisor and you're not asking about CX questions when you're having that business phone talk.

You're, you're not doing your job right. And on the flip side, if you're a customer and you're buying phone services and you are not asking about CX solutions from your UCaaS vendor. Then you are missing out on a lot of things that your comp, your competition is already leveraging themselves, right?

They're already using some of the CX tools that your unified communications vendors like my day job, can easily bring to you at little to no expense in many instances, especially if you [00:13:00] go with us for your overarching unified communications offerings. Right?

So as I was talking to the customers who attended the tech summit up in Grand Rapids, as well as the attendees from the technology advisor, M-S-P-C-E-O kind of standpoint, at the CVX Expo out in Phoenix. Um. I started to really think back to a book I wrote, and, and I'm not meaning to turn this into like a, and here's my book, but here's my book.

I wrote a book, uh, it, it was called the, it is called the CX Compass. It's over on Amazon. And really it was a tool for technology advisors who were unfamiliar with how to have the conversations around CX customer experience for their more traditional SMB customers. But. It was kind of giving them the blueprint.

Some may even say the compass to showcase how to start to have these conversations, especially with [00:14:00] existing customers who you're already selling business telephony solutions to. But then, you know, how do we expand the conversation beyond how many phones you need there? Fred? Six. Great. I'll go ahead and get you a quote, right, like, let's turn this into, by the way, Fred.

How do your customers reach out to you guys, right? Like, tell me what that looks like and, and to then start to ask some questions around that. Like, be a true consultant, figure out how they're currently doing business, and then offer a, a different way of doing things beyond the, well, we've always done things this way.

We've always just had the people call them back. Why would, why should we talk about, um, you know, call Q back? Why is that a thing? Like we, we just had people listen to the voicemail. Is there a benefit to voicemail, uh, transcription that's sent, then sent to email, right? Like, these are things that you can start to have conversations around that are gonna differentiate you as a [00:15:00] technology advisor, not only from your competition, but in the eyes of the customer.

It's gonna differentiate like in their own mind. Are we getting the right solution currently? Who, who bought that solution? Was that something that we were recommended by somebody else? Like why weren't they asking these questions? Right? And by the way, to the customers who are out there, you need to start asking about these questions.

Um, I, I often talk to like, end customers post sale, and I, I wanna understand why they went with us. So I'm talking to them and I'm like, tell me more about. The sales process, what made you go with us versus our competitors? And I would say 65, 70% of the time, they will always bring up something in the world of, you helped me see something, or understand something that either I hadn't seen before or I simply didn't get of why it was important and you helped me see that and now I can't unsee it.

[00:16:00] And when I hear that, I, I say, Ooh. Interesting because that tells me that other sales folks aren't asking these questions. These very, very important questions. And if you're not asking these questions, what a a white space for you to just. Absolutely crush it in your respective niche, right? Like if you are working with warehousing and you start to uncover, there are certain ways that people will go ahead and reach out to that warehousing, to, to, you know, do whatever with right From a customer experience standpoint.

And you can start to develop a blueprint to help those types of warehouse customers be successful. But through your sales process, educate them on things they can bring to the table to make their their. Existing solution better or in your goal to outright replace it. Right. But it's gonna make them start to ask questions like, dude, why?

Why didn't my sales guy at name competitor here bring this up? Why didn't the technology advisor I worked with for the past 10 [00:17:00] years bring this up? Are they just enjoying the higher revenue margins they're getting on my older technology? 'cause you know, older technology, if they haven't negotiated rates in a while, probably is gonna be a lot more expensive.

Especially as costs have gone down in the race to the bottom from a telco perspective, even despite inflation, right? I've seen pots lines, right, that are still going upwards of a hundred bucks a pop and some folks are just like, yeah, should we replace those? Is there, is there an option to replace those?

I'm like. Why, why weren't you aware that you could be saving oodles of cash? Replace those pots lines, get rid of the PRI do something different, right? But then they're like, wait, how much less am I spending for my, my monthly services? What, why? Why have I been spending this much money for five years? I had no idea.

Right? These are the conversations that you are gonna be able to differentiate as an advisor. And by the way, if you're a customer. [00:18:00] Think about what you can bring internally to leadership saying, I just help cut. 40% of our costs. I just helped increase our ROI by 15% year over year for the next three years by adding a call center functionality that's gonna help us do, like, make sure we're not missing any time a customer calls and there's a real dollars and cents associated to that customer interaction, right?

Like you can help them. Tell a story internally beyond just selling it internally, right? But like make them the superstar. Like make that champion truly the champion. They're not just a champion for you internally to help sell you. They're giving you access. They're opening doors, they're making introductions to key players and stakeholders, but you wanna make them a champion.

You want them to be rewarded. Dude, we went with your idea Bill, and this has paid off. So much we're gonna promote you no longer. Bill Hel, will you be Bill? Uh, bill the IT director. [00:19:00] You are now VP of IT Bill, like how cool would that be for Bill? And you helped make that happen because you helped him become a superstar, a champion at work.

That's cool. Like that's a win. And that's something that a lot of salespeople, they don't even think about, right? They're just like, I just need to sell this. I gotta, I gotta get my monthly nut guy at quota. Oh, I'm gonna get X if I don't. Right? Like, just be different. Be different. Like, try to be a different salesperson and you're gonna achieve way different results than 80% of your competition, which by the way, 80 20 rule, if you're in the 20% doing things differently, by default, you're gonna stand out and you're gonna win.

And to go back to, um, the book I mentioned, I wrote it is called the CX Compass. I wrote it. I did. And it is entirely built to be that, that how to guide for you as an advisor to go in and start having these conversations because I get it. Like [00:20:00] the reality is that as an advisor. You probably have just been selling circuits, right?

Or just selling basic phones. You didn't really have to ask those more customer experience, customer journey questions, so this might be outta your comfort zone. You might not be used to having this kind of a dialogue. So the goal was to give you. A, a tool in your tool belt from a sales process to go and start to have these conversations.

It is not that long at all. It is no more than 52 pages in length. Um, it's a quick read. I was just curious to reread it myself on a flight back from Salt Lake I had back in September. Um, and I read it I think in less than an hour. Um, a lot of it is very easy to digest. We got lots of. Like bullet points.

Um, you know, there, there's some visuals to help, you know, sell the, the, the, the ideas behind what we're illustrating here in the book. So if you're interested, I will include a link to the Amazon listing, or you just go to Amazon and search the CX Compass book. Make sure you put the book [00:21:00] part as well.

'cause for whatever reason, I think there's something called like a cx, like weighted compass or something like that. I don't know. So make sure you add book the CCF Compass book if you search it on, on Amazon. Otherwise, just go down below and click the, uh, click the, the link there to the Amazon listing. Uh, it's, it's like 10 bucks guys on, on Amazon.

It's, it's a, it's a quick read. It's a cheap read actually.

And yeah, I, that's right. It's 4 99 over on Kindle. So if you like Kindle, you can get it for less than five bucks. Um, yeah, I'll make sure I include that link there in the show notes. But with that being said, folks, uh, relatively concise episode of CX without the BS today. No monologue, uh, talking head today.

Uh, no interviews or guests, but we've had some. Phenomenal conversations the past few weeks with some awesome guests. Justin's, uh, Justin Jones from Sonic cx. What a great chat that was around KPIs. I, I really enjoyed that. We had Fred Stacy recently on over from Cloud Tech gurus talking about AI and, and the [00:22:00] actual use case app, uh, implementations of it in the world of CX versus the, the buzzword and the hype.

So, uh, go ahead, check some of those conversations out. Um, otherwise, if you really enjoy. The types of conversations we have here at CX without the BS or what we're doing here.

Head over to LinkedIn and give me a, uh, follow or connect with me on LinkedIn. Like one of our recent listeners, Clancy did. And by the way, I'm just gonna go ahead and give Clancy a shout out because Clancy shot me a message over on LinkedIn and I do just wanna go ahead and quickly read it off because I love when I get messages from, um, from, from listeners because it does kinda show like how.

Much of an impact these types of conversations have, especially on folks who are out there selling this stuff every single day. Right. So Clancy reached out and he said, Hey, Brian just had to pop on and say how your podcast is the best podcast on CX and contact centers. I found I'm new to the CX C Cs space and starting a job at.

Name company here on their commercial sales team in December. So really trying to learn as much as I can. I've been rolling through your episodes. [00:23:00] If you have any advice for someone selling c has or learning the contact center or CX space in general, would love to hear it. Thanks again for the pod and keep up the great work Clancy.

Um, now I responded to Clancy by the way, which I will a hundred percent respond to any messages I get from you over on LinkedIn. Uh, so go ahead again, connect with me on LinkedIn and just let me know. Hey, I heard you on. DX without the Bs, and I wanted to go ahead and connect with you, uh, and say hello. Uh, I, I respond.

Hey, Clancy can't tell you how much messages like this mean to me. Um, love it. Glad you get value from the show. Truly, I'm a sales coach at heart, so I love to hear when my content is adding value in helping, um, the number one piece of advice to answer his question specifically. I would say is to shadow as many of the top performers you can.

In general, you'll be able to uncover what specific value adds you are able to bring to the customer. In terms of both positive ROI as well as solving tangible problems, the more of the meetings you are able to shadow, the more you are able to hear where you differentiate and where you shine. Another thing I would say is that activity breeds results, which by the way, [00:24:00] that's the mentality of one of my sales mentors, Mike de Lu out.

At Stratus, IEP over in the New Jersey, Philadelphia market. Their team is phenomenal in the technology advising space. They have built up a sales machine, sales support machine, and they have a cybersecurity product called Cirrus. This is an unpaid, uh, unpaid promotion, by the way. I just love them. I worked for their team.

I did their go to market and outbound sales dev, uh, leadership for about six years, and the, the team that we built up over there now is, is like, I think seven x the team I had built in terms of. Of personnel. They are crushing it now. Um, so this is a, a mentality Mike brought to the organization is Activity breeds results.

Cold calling, uh, back to my response to Clancy. Cold calling on the actual phone is a differentiator in 2025. And we talked about this, um, back, uh, a few episodes ago, um, , with past guests, John Croissant from Level Up leads, where we discussed how this is literally a differentiator, uh, when it comes to like actually going out and doing dials in 2025. 'cause the [00:25:00] reality is, that most folks are uncomfortable doing the dials. And this goes back into my response to Clancy, but the ROI on doing phone calls over emails is insane, especially when you factor into consideration the use of AI in generating sales copy. These prospects get hammered day in and day out.

With AI slop. So when they get a real phone call from a real human being, it's honestly refreshing. And then in terms of someone selling CA and cx, I think it's. Most important to always remember that we are selling outcomes, not whatever shiny object of the day is like, don't get me wrong, AI is phenomenal and lot has lots and lots of value, but that doesn't mean it's going to magically replace all humans tomorrow.

Yet there are organizations who are promoting AI as just that there is always a shiny object each decade or so.

I think at the end of the day, the main focus is always about what outcomes you derive, both for the agents, the organizations, and the customers. [00:26:00] Outcomes, outcomes. Outcomes. Uh, so Clancy, thank you for listening to the show and thank you for subscribing. And by the way, folks, if you are curious, how do you subscribe to CX without the bs?

Well, whatever podcast you are listening to us on, uh, podcasting app, that is, whether that's. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube music podcast Attic where, wherever. I like Podcast Attic personally. Um, just make sure you hit that subscribe button and we have oodles of past episodes, so, um, head back into the archives, I think what, probably around 60 or so episodes at this point.

So if. Check some of those out or go over to YouTube, hit subscribe to CX without the BS over on YouTube. And of course, hit that little notification bell. 'cause we do have some new episodes. Uh, hopefully drop at least once every week or so. Uh, unless I'm traveling and on the road like I was over the past, uh, month.

So going back into the, the swing of things here as we approach the holiday season. If you have any questions by the way, or you want to hear certain topics around cx, customer experience, unified communications, contact [00:27:00] center, um, all that kind of fun stuff and more head down below into the comments. Let me know what your question is or again, you can go ahead and shoot me your questions over on LinkedIn if you shoot me a connect.

Um, just let me know. You, you, uh, found me over at cx, uh, without the BS and let me know your question

or again, one more time, you can head down below to the comments here on YouTube and, uh, let me know your questions. But with that being said, I think we're gonna go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation. So with that being said, Brian, to go signing off. You're on CX without the bs. We'll see you next time.