[003] Omni Channel Success, with Steve Bederman from NobelBiz

[00:00:00] Jason: [00:00:00] What’s going on everybody so glad that you’re joining me for another scalable call center sales podcast. Very excited for this one. This one’s going to be fun. I know I say that every single time, but I’m always excited. I think it’s great. So I have Steve Biederman and he is. A published author, accomplished leader, highly regarded contact center, industry innovator.

[00:00:21] He is the president and CEO of noble biz, which is a contact center technology company. They do a lot of things. Focus on state of the art solutions. His background is amazing. This is more of a. Tactical educational podcasts, where I want to help everyone improve, but check out a lot of his content that he has out there with his journey.

[00:00:42] Literally, we almost didn’t hit record because we got sidetracked on lots of different things in life and lessons. So check that out. Also, noble biz has its own podcast. We’ll make sure to check that one out too. It’s called first contact stories of the call center, which I highly recommend.

[00:00:57] Steve’s been on there many times, not hosted by him, but he’s been, yeah. Steve welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:01:04] Steve: [00:01:04] Thanks for having me. I look forward to it. This happens to be a sweet spot for me in terms of how do you scale a business? Because in my own career, I’ve always been hyper aggressive.

[00:01:16] And don’t live within the world of maintenance management. It’s more, how do I keep going? And going off means bigger. So maybe I can help some contact centers.

[00:01:27] Jason: [00:01:27] What do you think is let’s just start there. One of the challenges with trying to scale, especially in the context and our in contact center being, in this realm, let’s say sales in particular, but any telephone inside sales of any size, somebody trying to scale to the next level.

[00:01:43] What have you found from your experience that gets in the way or people resist?

[00:01:48]Steve: [00:01:48] One of the things that gets in the way are, is the cost and investing ahead of time for what you make plan to do. It either gets in the way in terms of not wanting that cost until you’re sure you can. Turn an ROI on it, or being willing to invest in not knowing when to stop investing when you’ve overdone it and the ROI isn’t there.

[00:02:14] So it comes from two different areas, but I would tell you this, that. Scaling a business. It’s a plan and it’s a model, especially a context center, because there are so many relational issues and moving parents. But at the same time, there is an iterative factor to it. So my advice is always. The same, which is build the plan C project yourself as I’m this side, I’m 50 agents, I’m down 200 agents.

[00:02:45] What do I look like? What do I feel like, how do I manage that? What’s the process and infrastructure I need and what am I at 500 and a thousand agents? And what do I look like? What am I with hard sites versus virtual or a hybrid? And in other words, go through the process and build a model. Now recognize that I call that model the back pocket model.

[00:03:12] That’s like in the worst case of nobody else has any better ideas, I can pull that out and do something with that. But don’t get stuck in that because business is, we were talking earlier. About living life on life’s terms and just, keep taking steps forward. And often those steps are not what you were anticipating.

[00:03:34] You’ve done thinking that’s great. You have some structure to that thinking, you know why you want to do it and the way you want to do it, you may be a process manager or gamification. A thinker, you might prefer virtual to hard site type of thinking, but at the same time, go with it. And I know I’m I’m running on here, but I have a client today.

[00:04:01] Who was a business that takes on brands and they take short projects and they connect remote agents with the different brands. And the brands are looking for short term agents, like an Uber agent model. But during the pandemic, He was getting hurt. Everybody else was. And a new project came up from the government to do some PPE work, but it was from the, I think the state of New York.

[00:04:30] In fact, it was a huge project completely off as model. Nothing. To do with it, except he did understand how to get agents. And he did understand that his software that he used applied to it, but there was a lot of other stuff. The question he asked me was, do I go with this or do I stick with my model?

[00:04:53] And the answer was linked. Can you survive until you can get back to your model? If you just stick to your model, he said, I don’t think I can. I said, then can you thrive if you do this? He said, yeah, but I might do this and never get back to my model. I said one is living and one is dying. So I choose the one that’s living.

[00:05:15] And I know you haven’t planned for that, but maybe you want to do it.

[00:05:18] Jason: [00:05:18] And with that. So if it’s a change in the model and it works and it’s successful, then maybe that becomes the new model.

[00:05:25]Steve: [00:05:25] Yeah

[00:05:25]Jason: [00:05:25] I love your back of the pocket kind of calculation and figures, especially what you said, just in passing, which is sometimes what keeps people from wanting to scale or being effective at it is where they’re over-investing and they’re buying too many tools or spending too much money or thinking they need either the latest tech or a bigger office or this and that, and then can get them in trouble because.

[00:05:48] They, they’re slipping away from that profitability and they think scaling is the issue. And the challenge is it’s just overdeveloping right.

[00:05:55]Steve: [00:05:55] I’ve had the opportunity to build larger organizations and or from small to large and. As you start to get larger and the pressures hit everybody, not just me, but everybody in the business.

[00:06:10] So all the other managers there’s a tendency because nobody has had this experience of really crazy growth for an example. They’re the solution, most of the time comes to let’s add more people. Let’s just add more, people solve the problem. People are the solution. And the truth is that yes, people are part of a solution, but to what degree are they?

[00:06:41] Because when you bring in. People you bring in management, you bring in pressure on your processes, you bring in payroll and and all of that mitigates the margins and the ROI that, that every business requires. But it’s the easiest answer and it’s actually the fastest answer or alternatively, your, I could be the kind of business manager or owner.

[00:07:10]That essentially says, no, I don’t, I didn’t plan to add anybody in 2021, so I’m not going to and see decay. And that’s why I say you have to put your plans in the back pocket and not get so hard into them that, listening and hearing and being reasonable and pragmatic. I just see that we all get so stuck in the idea of what we think should be happening, that we fail to live with what is happening.

[00:07:43] I’ve seen businesses fail and especially context centers because. A contact center is, has to be so heavily invested in technology like mine. They have to be signed contracts for things like carrier that are ongoing. They have to have your large groups of people, and it’s not always easy to hire. So their tendency is to want to keep those people and all of those are major investments for them.

[00:08:13] And once they make that choice, They’re there. And they forgot that the main rule of being a manager is we’re paid actually for the most simple thing, which is make decisions. And that means that it allows me the privilege of making a decision today and it being wrong. And tomorrow being able to change that and make a different decision.

[00:08:39] But if I build all these hard and fast less than agile things into my business, I am stuck. And you darn better recognize after the pandemic that you better not be so stuck that you can’t be flexible.

[00:08:57] Jason: [00:08:57] And it’s interesting because stuck on both sides, right? The stuck on not hiring anybody because that’s not in the plan or, that’s not what we’re doing or stuck in the solution for this is always to hire more people or spend more on marketing, which I also see people get in trouble with, because if they don’t fix the processes, the company culture, the systems, the, have things in place that actually are getting a successful result out of it.

[00:09:23] The people or the marketing, then what happens is they’re just trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. But they’re stuck in that routine. And remember my first time I was a VP of operations. I wasn’t even a VP of sales and the VP of sales at the time the CEO, founder went to him and said we need to double our sales.

[00:09:39] And he said double the marketing and the founders, like who is bootstrapping it. No, your closing rate is terrible. We need better closing rate. And he said, no, you just need to double the marketing. And so he got fired and then I went over there and then we worked on fixing the process because that, that VP of sales was like, we’ll just spend more.

[00:10:00] That’s how you win.

[00:10:02] Steve: [00:10:02] You just keep filling up the pipeline with more. It doesn’t matter what your closing percentages, but, in a way that’s what happens in contact centers sometimes where they just, they need more revenue, they add more agents, right? An agent gives me this. They make, consider the fact that they need to improve the sales techniques of the S of the person selling.

[00:10:28] Oftentimes that’s a much harder and slower win than just add more salespeople. If I get 20 more salespeople I’ll I know my ROI is this next thing, you’re like this. And I’ll tell you though, the, as the title of this is about helping people think about how to scale. There are some basic pieces that I think are important to recognize.

[00:10:54] In the moment that we’re in because of the cloud that allows a contact center, the ability to buy technology, whether it’s the communications tools like Omni plus or other tools like CRMs or ordering systems. Whatever survey systems, whatever those are, it allows you to be able to cut less than longterm deals.

[00:11:18] So another words think about what I said earlier. You have this company, this contact center that is really an Uber agent. They’re providing Uber agents for brands. How flexible is that? To some degree, He’s able to eliminate this heavy, hard cost of agents by being able to find a legitimate way to train agents in a short term.

[00:11:49] So he has a good training approach or software and outside of certain pieces, he keeps us overhead. Darn. And he keeps himself agile because he’s in the cloud and he knows that he can come to a company like me and he doesn’t need a three-year contract. He didn’t need to buy an on premise system. He can now communicate any way he wants only when he needs to.

[00:12:15] And he spends the money. To the dollar that he’s bringing in, give or take. And in his case, agents are the same thing. He’s scaled up to over a thousand agents before I’ve seen him down to 75 agents and he’s able to do that without carrying the major overhead. There is overhead, but it’s less expensive overhead it’s training software overhead.

[00:12:41]So it’s the real key is how do I get an agent trained to begin to work this campaign as quick as I can? Come on, BPOs are doing that all the time. Anyway, right? The service centers, they’re getting tons of new campaigns and they’re doing short-term training and they’re just taking a, the same agent and flexing them into new ones.

[00:13:03] Different campaigns. That’s not what he’s doing. He’s just taking agents and trusting his training approach, testing approach. And that’s a heck of a lot less expensive, but nonetheless, a basic premises you have to. Add technology and you have to do it upfront to the degree that you know, what your technology is, how to train to it, you know how to manage from it.

[00:13:28] You need to know how to read the reporting works. And so you really need to understand the full dynamic of what are you selling. You’re selling the combination of what you do with the use of the technology that you have, and then, and then you really. Want to think about, am I a person that really feels like I should have a Howard site or not?

[00:13:52] And if I have a Hertz. Okay, but where do I have it in country? Do I have other countries? Do I have it rural? Do I have in an economic zone that allows me some, privileges that, that kind of reduce my expenses, but my strongest recommendation is whatever you do in this day and age, don’t make law be committed to what you believe in, but don’t make long-term commitments.

[00:14:20] To the technology, to the carrier to, I hate to say it to all you agents, but to the agents and be careful about what you do, but be capable of feeling confident enough that you can go from 75 to a thousand per se, or to 200 and play it out in your mind, gaming ahead of time.

[00:14:44] How do you do that?

[00:14:46] Jason: [00:14:46] As you’re talking about that, especially, the commitment, the long-term commitment, which like the cloud software, virtual agents, this virtual world, thanks to the pandemic, dispersing everybody and seeing how well that can actually work versus what’s never been.

[00:15:02]Trusted in the contact center.

[00:15:04] Steve: [00:15:04] Why we don’t cross too, because we say maybe you’ll hear the washing machine in the background. Maybe the internet connection isn’t isn’t right.

[00:15:12] Jason: [00:15:12] Or maybe be working or who knows

[00:15:14] But

[00:15:15] Steve: [00:15:15] the truth is you can manage it. Let me tell you our company at Novo builds, but we did, we have we have.

[00:15:22] At the time of the pandemic, you had 400, right? People of which 250, we had to move virtual immediately. Like in, we like from one day to the next we had to go from being in our world office to being at home. We say no, you don’t. We’re worried about them not working. No, we didn’t do that.

[00:15:45] We said, what innovatively can we do? Forwardable because our revenue could drop too. So we also had to manage costs and, we just use tools that were available. What we did is we took every team and we set up zoom rooms and we just had open. They were all on zoom. Everybody was there available talking to each other throughout the day.

[00:16:12]And it, and what we found. We didn’t expect this, but what we found is we were actually more intimate with our groups being more hands-on than we ever were when we were just in our office. And here’s the thing right now. I’m looking at you face to face highs to highs in an office. We don’t do that.

[00:16:36]We’re walking past each other. Hey, how’s it going? Whatever, We’re hiding out in a way we’ve learned how to carve people out, and we’re blinders. But when you’re video, you don’t get that privilege. And so you get closer.

[00:16:52] Jason: [00:16:52] Hey, it’s Jason here. We’ll be right back to the podcast in a moment, but first, are you ready to help your insight sales team close more deals?

[00:16:58] In my experience, there’s a certain percentage of your team that acts more like order takers than sales profession. The first step to creating a scalable sales team is to equip your reps with the right mindset and proven strategies to transform them into quota breakers, to build a team of authentic persuaders that will crush their goals.

[00:17:16] Email [email protected] or go to www.cutterconsultinggroup.com. And I think also what I saw watching it with so many clients and just companies in general, is that going virtual and the pandemic, it’s a shared experience. And when it’s a shared experience, everyone figures out a way buckles down and then, it looks out for each other and wants to make the most of it.

[00:17:40]Come from California, so I’ve been through many earthquakes there. Neighborhood comes together. Everyone is really close for a while. Any natural disaster, anything that happened like you think of nine 11, right? As a country, everyone came together. This presented an opportunity where the whole world was in a shared experience.

[00:17:56] And yeah, it’s interesting how that, bust through and as you’re talking about these things the line that I always try to remind companies, the all the employees at the company is you want to marry the vision and date the strategy. So you want to know where you’re going and you want to know what you want to create and what the impact is, but the strategy, how you do it, what the script is like, what the technology is like, where if we’re in the office or not that everyone has to understand, like you’re playing the field with that.

[00:18:24]That’s going to adjust over. Yeah, but you’re going to date the, whatever that falls underneath that,

[00:18:30]Steve: [00:18:30] What can’t change is your culture and your intention. And that’s a really important piece to understand. And so how do you hold people accountable? When I have cam employees versus.

[00:18:47] 400 employees. How do I make sure that the same intention and culture is evident when I have those 400 that we had as 10 kumbaya? Yeah. Yeah. That becomes the thing that you think about. Don’t wait till it happens to think about if you want to be a. Cedar then you need to think about it when you’re a 10 seater, because if you don’t, what will break down are your processes?

[00:19:17] My approach to how I manage a, how I implement to how I audit to how I train. It’s almost like what you have to do is take what’s more practical. You probably take a 30 seat. Situation and you, and at that point you build the same processes that you think would be agile, always agile processes, but build them the same way that you think will make sense when you’re 400 people or more.

[00:19:50] And then just begin to act as you add people. You don’t have to change your approach to how you manage them. Now from don’t build processes, though, when you’re scaling that are so hard and fast, that you can’t change them, recognize that we start with a process. And we begin to manage to it and we hold each other accountable to the reason you have a process is to have a tool to manage too.

[00:20:19] But recognize that usually when we first build a process, it’s the most cumbersome of all. You’re trying to think of every little thing that could go wrong and you’re adding it into your process. And at certain times processes don’t work and you’ll see that in your contact center, when agents begin to do.

[00:20:38] Different things from what the process is intended to do. And what that usually means with the assumption that your managers are trying to manage to. It is not that the agents are wrong, but that the process is wrong and the process is broken. So don’t just throw it out and say, agents start to do what they want.

[00:20:59] Instead. This is your opportunity for change management and have a process for how do I handle change management? With the long-term goal, that by the time you get to those 400 agents that cover some process, it’s sleek, it’s all again. And it’s simpler. So don’t keep adding as you get bigger, the process shouldn’t get bigger.

[00:21:21] It should actually get smaller.

[00:21:24] Jason: [00:21:24] Yeah. And that’s so important because. What I know that we’ve both seen is where small contact sales, telephone sales teams, five, 10 people they’re getting by on just being a family and trusting that everyone’s doing what they should be doing. And then as you scale up, what happens is you just put more people in there and then you can’t manage it.

[00:21:44] You’re, nobody’s keeping track of it. And then the scale. When things start slipping, the scale just gets even more painful and more difficult. So I love the fact that you’ve said to as you get bigger, the process should get less. Should have a lot of processes in place to keep everyone going the same direction.

[00:22:02] And then as you get bigger, this should get less because now there’s critical mass of people knowing what they should be doing.

[00:22:08] Steve: [00:22:08] Yeah. It actually, in many ways as much easier. To manage a larger organization in terms of the the fundamentals, the harder product is sometimes getting that larger organization to, or the third and fourth and fifth generation employees to, to understand the culture that requires the leadership to live that culture, to.

[00:22:31]To constantly talk it, to preach it, to explain why that’s it. Isn’t just saying, like here at our company, we’re promise keepers. That’s really our entire core value. We make a promise and we keep it, but that sounds like a, just a little tagline, right? What we do internally is we’re constantly talking to each other about what does that mean?

[00:22:56] Why is that important to us? What’s the value proposition in being a promise keeper and how do you do it? So then what we do is we build our processes and our approach and decisions. We always have one last thing we do before we take it and make it real. And then. Does that meet our core value? Will that help us be a promise keeper?

[00:23:20] And if it doesn’t, it sounded good, but no, sorry. Can’t do it. And by living in the world of your core value and bet and matching everything off it, you can go from 10 agents to 500 agents and they can buy into it too. A lot of business, people think there’s two parts. There’s two face. The two faces of that leader.

[00:23:47] And one is the leader that is out there with his people. And the one that really sits in the back room and says, this really is hard and people don’t get it out there. And I have to make these difficult decisions and little resentment comes up about those people out there. And that’s a different person.

[00:24:08] Yeah, that’s the problem you have. If you want to scale your business up, especially in context centers where it’s so people connected and customer connected you darn well better be the same person when your doors closed than when your doors open. I’ll tell you that was a hard lesson for me, for myself to learn as I was growing business younger.

[00:24:32] But yeah, over time you just get very clear that there are not the two faces of Steve. There’s just, and this is who I am all the time, always being management. No, that’s the other thing I would say about scaling any business which is your job is. My job is to be in management mode.

[00:24:51] My people need me to be in management mode and

[00:24:55] Jason: [00:24:55] versus what’s the other option.

[00:24:58] Steve: [00:24:58] What I would call Steve mode. So how do I do that? How do I become that informal guy that can play ping pong while still being in management mode? It’s because I can be the same person all the time. I don’t think that I have a split character.

[00:25:16] I am just who I am. Sometimes if it feels right to do this, and sometimes it feels right to do that, but my core values, my approach and my meaning and intention is always the same. And that’s often a conflict with managers that become leaders who all of a sudden they become leaders and they go.

[00:25:35] I feel like a frog. What am I doing? Being the leader. I was just as guy living on a park bench and now look at me, I’m a leader and they start to think that while they’re different, they have to act different in different situations, but we’re not actors making differently. We’re just the same person all the time, believing what we need to believe in and being honest with people.

[00:25:58]I think that’s how you keep agents too. You’re straightforward with them.

[00:26:03] Jason: [00:26:03] And that’s such a great lesson because I’ve seen that many times successful and not successful, but it’s that authenticity and transparency. You get what you get, what you’re going to get. And it’s the same person all the time.

[00:26:17]That’s what I’ve always aspired to be, management mode, but also just me being me in any scenario, it doesn’t matter who I’m talking to. Let’s say a CEO to a customer that’s trying to enroll. I’m just me. And it’s just who I am. And it generally works. Doesn’t always work, it’s just easier than doing that.

[00:26:36] Steve: [00:26:36] No, but we don’t as human beings always work. My operation doesn’t always work and I was on a call today with my team and we’re having a real struggle with an implementation. Doesn’t always work, but our intention is the same. So we go back and work. And one last thing I’ve learned in my life about scaling a business because I got blindsided by this.

[00:26:59] I started small with two people and became a large business and there was a point in time where I could see everything seemed to be okay. And almost that I became unnecessary and I didn’t know it, the way I knew I was unnecessary was that my managers were telling me I was unnecessary. You don’t really need to come to this thing.

[00:27:21] You don’t need to do that. It’s you’re not invited, you’re not invited, but you’re not invited. And was really faced a moment in time where I didn’t know what am I supposed to do? And I started to look up and I just started going onto my Google engine and saying, what does the CEO do for what’s my job.

[00:27:43] And And I have to then convince myself that I didn’t already do all those things. I read. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here with nothing to do, except looking on my search engine. It took me a long time to really understand what my job required. That cause my job, other than me thinking it was the most important job in the company became the least important in many ways.

[00:28:08] So how do I add value and my suggestion. So you don’t run into that at the point that you have a big operation is you begin at the beginning and just like you build your processes. To be big when you’re smaller, you build yourself. So be big when you’re not so big. And in other words, you plan it.

[00:28:33] What am I going to be like? What do I do when I have this many people, what do I do? What do I do? And model it, put it in your back pocket, full circle here back pocket will then live your life with people and go back to her when you.

[00:28:48] Jason: [00:28:48] I love it. I think that’s great. So I want to ask you something on a tactical kind of practically.

[00:28:54] Situation. So one of the big things, it’s been a trend for a few years, however, there’s still a lot of people who fight it. And it’s, I feel like it’s a hot topic depending on who you talk to and something avoided by others, which is omni-channel approach for talking about sales in particular. It’s this various ways.

[00:29:13] If people aren’t familiar that somebody can reach out or get in touch with. The call center contact center, the sales team, right? So the classic was just the phone, but now it’s maybe chat it’s SMS. Maybe an online form has all these different things. And so omni-channel is great because you’re theoretically meeting the prospective customer where they want to be met with.

[00:29:34] But then there’s the challenge, which you and I talked about before, which is how do you manage that from an agent standpoint where now they have to be like amazingly talented. Add using these duels and then converting people to move forward with these tools. What are you seeing and or what are you telling your clients to to be mindful of?

[00:29:56]Steve: [00:29:56] We get to see it every day because, we manufacture and sell Omni plus, which is our version of an Omni communications until, for context centers. So we’re seeing. We haven’t had really many clients that already are using an Omni channel that now convert to our Omni channel.

[00:30:17] That’s not what we’re seeing. We’re mainly seeing people that are doing voice. They have their voice tools, or maybe a chat with it or something. And our multichannel where they’re segregated medias. And we’re seeing them say, okay, I want to know how many channel. Here’s the key that you want to start out with that person and ask them why they need it.

[00:30:41] Why did they think they needed it? What is their business plan that suggests they need that? And have they thought through how they’re going to use their agents and some are not agents, some might be virtual agents or, using it. Yeah. So how are you going to do it? And often times they’ll say I don’t really know.

[00:31:00] I just want to say. I want to have it. So when I get a campaign, I can say, and there are many people that say I want it for my RFP checkbox so I can check that I have on the I have an Omni capabilities. I don’t really know that the campaign will come to me and then I’ll figure out how to use it.

[00:31:19] We implement those what we try to say though. When you do it that way and you don’t exactly know why or how, but you want it available. That’s great. It’s easy enough to do, but let us work with you when you get your first campaign that you think you need to use more than a narrow group of channels, let’s work with you and let us share with you.

[00:31:46] What else? What other customers have done so that you can optimize it. And so one of the things is when you have I can really speak to just mine. So when you have Omni, plus it is simple. First of all, it’s not, oh my gosh, how do I figure all that out? It’s as easy as the voice call, a voice call an agent’s got their headset, they’re looking at their screen and they get a screen problem.

[00:32:14] They start talking and then reading the script or not, or how, or looking at their CRM if they’re integrated to it or, and they’re looking at that simple screen. But think about it this way, that same screen on the side of it just has different channels. So it’s a voice channel. It’s a chat channel.

[00:32:36] It’s a WhatsApp channel. It’s a Facebook channel. You name the type of social channel. It’s a video channel, whatever it may be. And it’s just a click. So it’s as easy as when they answered the phone. I’m a force. However that comes in, whether it’s video or WhatsApp or anything, it’s the same way they answer the call.

[00:33:01] They just have that channel pop. Now, if that agent wants to accommodate the. Person they’re talking to, and that person says, I would really be more comfortable just doing voice to voice, or they might not say it that way, that’s really the outcome. Then it’s simple. Say not a problem.

[00:33:22] And you sweat, you just click that and you switch to that and you may need their phone number. You may not, depending on what it is. You just, you’re just within the contents of that conversation, continuing, you can just switch to different channels. So it allows a contact center, not just to take a new campaign that is asking for that, but it allows you the ability to say, imagine me, if I’m a contact center that can give the privilege of training.

[00:33:58] Of how. We do communication and leave it to the person I’m reaching out towards reaching out to me so that it doesn’t matter because to me, all of that information that’s gathered by the end of the conversation is all in the same place. That’s the key to it being right. Together, not just the ability to switch channels, but to report on it and to view it.

[00:34:25] So it’s that easy to do. So what you end up seeing are contact centers saying, I didn’t know, is this. My gosh it’s really no different in many ways. So in that sense, that means that I can now be creative in my business. I don’t have to just be a checkbox. I can become really good at driving this sports car.

[00:34:49] It’s not really much different than driving my all Volkswagen, and barbecues. Incredible flexibility. And the truth is this. It doesn’t cost you any more. Like for us, it’s the same price. It doesn’t matter, you’re buying from us at, or at the same price as anybody else’s multi media or voice only you’re not paying more for those different channels because you don’t need to anymore.

[00:35:17] That’s the beauty. Of where technology has gone and the band with that are available and storage that is that we have the capability to do there are a lot of strategies. I like to connect our customers with our customers so that they get to communicate amongst each other and say, what are you doing?

[00:35:39] How are you doing it? What kind of campaigns that you’re not going out? Used to be that contact center said they were up on centers or inbound centers. You don’t have to do that today or blended centers. Now you can truly be not just blended in outbound and inbound, but blended in how you choose to communicate.

[00:35:59] You want to switch right now with me to a different channel. I can switch with you right now. I’m already a different chairman. We never hung out from him. Beautiful.

[00:36:09] Jason: [00:36:09] Great. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the power of the, the cloud technology, not being married to something, the flexibility that comes with just any of these solutions, but then, being able to do it and then that balance, tying it back to what we talking about in the very beginning of the podcast, which is also being careful not to overdevelop and overspend, right? It’s I need to have these things I need to go and buy every tool I can from the hardware store and fill up my garage before I have a project so that I’m ready.

[00:36:36]Versus I have a project now, let me, start getting the right tools.

[00:36:40] Steve: [00:36:40] I think it’s really important. Today to now think it’s so complicated that you have to spend a lot of money. Those things seem to go together. It’s complicated. I must cost a lot recognize that the cost today it’s way, way different than it was 15 years ago or 20 years ago with on premise systems.

[00:36:59] It’s less today. Okay. And we Sandler and simpler and it doesn’t cost more to have more channels. It does not cost more adult than any customer teacher that you know, or company tell you that I compete in a world where there’s over 200 companies that provide dialer’s and calling technology for contact centers.

[00:37:24] Not all of them are I’m the plus like we are, but I’m different levels. Every. Choices out there and remember that if you’re buying, if you’re a contact center that don’t overpay. Okay. Yes. Pay for something that works. Know that if it seems complicated, you might be making a poor choice and then, stick with a company.

[00:37:51] Then not because they have all these channels, but because they really care about general support or the way they be promised to you.

[00:37:59] Jason: [00:37:59] I love it. That’s a perfect place to stop, Steve. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I know the best place for the company site is noble biz with a z.com. I know that you put out a lot of content.

[00:38:12] I know you’re on lots of podcasts, any thing in particular, where they can find you or the company outside the business web.

[00:38:18]Steve: [00:38:18] Knowingly LinkedIn, I’m at [email protected] or, find me I think I’m Steve, Michael, Bederman my middle name somehow got into LinkedIn years ago, they first started that many people say hi, Michael. And I’m keep wondering why they’re talking to my brother, but LinkedIn is a really good place to, so email me do that. Just for whoever cares and is interested enough. I like to leave my mobile with everybody at 720-301 5325. And listen, reach me.

[00:38:56] I’m happy to connect you with our great team of people. And we’re happy to just share what we can.

[00:39:03] Jason: [00:39:03] That’s awesome. I love it, Steve. Thanks again for coming on the podcast and sharing all this information.

[00:39:08] Steve: [00:39:08] I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everybody.