It Just Takes Some Time featuring Raymond Stover

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:24.206)
Hey Raymond, you're next in queue. How are you?

Raymond (00:25.523)
Hey, how you doing, Rob? Why, thank you. It's good to be here.

Rob Dwyer (00:32.782)
So Raymond Stover, you are the VP of Sales and Marketing at MyCallCloud.

You and I have known each other for a little bit, gotten to be friendly. And you said something to me recently that led to this episode that I wanted to talk a lot more about it. But before we dive into that, tell us a little bit about you and MyCallCloud and how we ended up here.

Raymond (01:07.295)
OK, well thank you so much for asking. Been in the call center industry since 2003. I laughed at the CEO of Touchstar Software. And he said, what do you think could go wrong with an install on a dialer? And I just thought of everything I could think of. I just started, you know, and I was greened. I had never been in a dialer facility. I had been in some IT work.

I have a philosophy degree and a master's in adult education. And here I was interviewing for a dialer implementation specialist. And I won that position. I got that position because I laughed at him. I had the right attitude. I had some ideas. Because you don't grow dialer installation technicians on trees. You have to build them up. And so and.

TouchStar software was, if you look back in history, that was what Matt Florell and his team, they were looking at when they were building VICIDial. That was sort of the base system. They were looking at their asterisk servers and looking at TouchStar and they built this beautiful open source dialer platform that now...

You know, it's funny. Years fast forward, Touchstar has been absorbed by another company, and VICIDial has grown. And now VICIDial is supporting. We don't even know, being it's open source. Hundreds of thousands of agents are using it worldwide. And here we are with some of my mates from the Touchstar days, and we're running our own call center solution service. We are CCaaS providers providing

web-based dialers. so I think that pretty much brings us up to speed, right? You and your team have the call analytics. And we like to plug in providers that make sense, that have good values and good products. And then we can let our clients pick and choose what solutions they want. Sort of a

Raymond (03:15.015)
a bit of an a la carte environment for us, know, depending on what the client wants. We like to deliver. They get what they want. So all that being said, what's your next question, Rob?

Rob Dwyer (03:27.918)
It's been, I don't want to make you feel old, we're post 20 years you've been doing this. What has kept you in the business that long?

Raymond (03:41.728)
Interesting. You know, for me, it's funny. I look at other opportunities, and then the dialer world sucks me back in. And it happened several times. I was looking to migrate out and away. And then somebody picks up the phone and says, hey, Raymond, we need you over here. Can you help us? And so I've gone where the need has been.

Rob Dwyer (03:53.038)
You

Raymond (04:07.313)
My wife is in real estate here in Colorado and I was going to go jump in with her and this opportunity with MyCallCloud was too good to pass up. So I got sucked back into the dial the world and you know, I'm happy to be here and on the weekends, you know, there's my compromise. I helped my wife with real estate on the weekends.

Rob Dwyer (04:27.928)
Well, that seems like a pretty good gig. When you and I last chatted, right before we decided to do this episode, you mentioned that you had also gone where the need was and helped start a BPO. And there was something unique about that. before we get to the unique part, tell me about this BPO that

Raymond (04:56.287)
OK. So being in the dialer world, I've seen many opportunities come and go, right? And I've had people say, hey, Raymond, do you want to start up a call center? And time and time again, I passed up the opportunity a good half dozen times. Maybe I could be a millionaire by now. But the flip side was I didn't want to manage a call center. didn't really. I'm here at MyCallCloud. I want to stay focused there. And managing a call center means a whole

There's another minimum 40 hours a week, and you have to deal with HR, and you have to deal with personalities, and with agents in a call center. It can be a tough gig. I would much rather be really focused on that, or in this case, I'm going to stay with my call club. And so a friend of ours said, Raymond, what am I going to do? I need a call center I can depend on. And I made introductions, and we tried to help find a place for him.

But his product and the service that he needed was very specific. And also, was specific for North America banking institutions. So there were some regulations and some hoops that he had to jump through. And time and time again, these BPO agencies that promised him the world.

They came up short. They did not deliver what he needed to run his business. He's conducting post-transaction surveys for banking industry. And so when he was talking with me, he's like, Raymond, what am I going to do? I might have to close down this business. I can't find a good call center.

And reluctantly to some degree, said, well, you know, was more out of concern for him. I want to solve a problem. I like to solve problems and help make the world a better place. And so I said, you know what, Steve, we have the technology. We have the skills. We have the development resources. And we could go get some agents for you. You the agents is actually the small part of it. What he needed more was programmatic.

Raymond (07:06.591)
solutions that would keep each of those banking institutions separate, give them separate, unique, specific surveys for whether it's a loan or a teller visit or whatever the transaction was at the bank. And then from there...

he has to report on them. you know, the financial industry, they live and breathe reports. And so he needed a good solid reporting system. with the survey and with the isolated business units in there, we also included reports that are cumulative for the year and for the quarter. And also we do important things such as

Rob Dwyer (07:34.83)
You

Raymond (07:53.918)
you know, Bob Smith said on the phone today that he's thinking about leaving the bank. And so there's also a daily component for the reporting that informs these institutions that they have somebody that's very happy or somebody that's very upset. And then they can they can have they can assign someone to go give Bob Smith a call and find out and try and resolve what those issues are. So it's a very cool product that we built for him, but it's very specific. And that BPO

BPO Edge is very small. has one client, and we're just serving our buddy Steve. so that's pretty much how that BPO came into service. to this day, all it's doing is it's just maintaining and helping our buddy Steve run these post-transaction surveys.

Rob Dwyer (08:46.552)
So the part that intrigued me about all of that, because I feel like the technology people, the BPO people, they hear what you said, and all of that resonates. BPO's are great at coming up with custom solutions, and technology plays a huge part of that. And all of that sounded very familiar to me. And I was like, yeah, I understand that.

Then you mentioned something else that caught me a little bit off guard about the agents. And after thinking about it, I was like, wow, this is just really cool, and I want to talk about it. So let's go ahead and remove the shroud. What is it that you talked about that made me go,

Raymond (09:41.65)
Right, yeah, what's the, well, you know, all of our clients in MyCallCloud, you know, everyone's got a little bit of secret sauce. You know, what is it that makes my call center work? How do I make my money? How do I make that solution happen? And one of the solutions that I needed was good, reliable, dependable agents to run those phone calls. And you know, that's a bit of a grind. It's not always a...

an easy thing to find quality agents who are well-educated, that understand basics of financial institutions, and that want to work, and that were reliable, and that listen, et cetera. So for me and my team, we have worked in prior dialer organizations that we've worked with. We've seen some interaction with blind agents. And for me, I'm sort of in the back of my mind.

agents and so we went down that path and we have locally I'm in the Denver metro area there's a fabulous organization called the blind Institute of Technology Mike Hess and his team Mike Hess was a fortune 500 maybe even a fortune 100 he was the network administrator and he is fully blind hundred percent you know

So that means he's holding all the network information in his head. And I'm thinking, boy, how do you hold those subnets and those IP addresses? And how do you navigate? And I'm just such a visual learner. It just sort of blew me away. But Mike Hess and his team, they're on a mission to hire and employ, get 10,000 blind and visually impaired individuals.

employed in technical roles, in professional roles. The blind community is terribly, terribly underemployed. So many people in that community have college degrees. And I've met some of these people that we've hired on that have more than one degree. There's a lot of talent there, and they are told no so often.

Raymond (12:00.229)
And for me and my team, we knew that being able to enable our software to allow blind agents to use a dialer system, we knew it was possible. So we didn't really worry about the Fs and the, we just plowed ahead and we worked out a solution.

And so now our instances of VichyDial can interact with JAWS and Nvidia. there's only really a couple. Apple also has some accessibility solutions. But the big players in the field are.

Really, it's JAWS, American Scientific, and it's a screen reader. And these blind agents, they navigate using the tab key. They're using the keyboard, right? They can't pick up a mouse and drive the mouse. They don't have that visual feedback that we do. And so they listen to the screen reader, and they interact with the client on the call.

I could go on and on, but this is your podcast and you open it up with a question. let me just, I'm going to throw it back to you. What questions do you have about my experience or our experience with blind agents and what thoughts do you have and what should we talk about next ?

Rob Dwyer (13:18.35)
I would love to understand what impact you've seen on performance with blind agents interacting with customers versus non-blind agents, because it strikes me. I was actually thinking about this this morning. I was reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's book,

David and Goliath. And there's a story in there about a prominent American attorney, his last name is Boice. And he was dyslexic as a kid. But he actually kind of turned that into his superpower in becoming what he ended up becoming. And I'm wondering.

Do you see these agents being significantly better at hearing and listening to customers in a way that the non-visually impaired maybe don't?

Raymond (14:35.049)
Great question.

The blind agents do a very good job. If I look at quantifiable and qualifiable.

You know, a lot of times I go with my gut instinct, right? And a lot of times the data itself doesn't really tell a big story because the blind agents complete the surveys. The sighted agents complete the surveys. They all answer all the questions. They all ask those open-ended questions. They all type in responses. And so it's sort of hard for me to compare it like on the apples to apples piece.

From the qualitative side, I can tell you they listen. They don't tend to interrupt as much, because I have to do call recording reviews and quality assurance. And the visually impaired agents, they're not interrupting the consumer so much. They're listening, and then they ask an intelligent question to help draw it out, as do the sighted agents. I think that.

The BVI community, blind, visually impaired community, they enjoy their job. They're happy to have good, stable employment. They're not job hoppers. And so it's sort of hard for me to quantify it with numbers. But when it comes to, you know,

Raymond (16:11.791)
at the end of the day, who's happy, who's working, who's dependable, who's always there and on time and answering those calls and making those calls. I don't know, there's just something a little bit more. think part of it is because we have a little bit of, we have a little extra interactions because they have technical issues from time to time where they have a little bit more questions. So I end up talking with them more.

And I just see a lot of care and concern. In this day and age, people want to be heard. They want to be cared for. And if you can provide quality versus quantity, me, personally, I like the quality. I want to do high quality surveys. And I can trust them. It's funny. I tell them, we are all adults here. And I trust you to do this job. I'm going to let you run.

You know, we will audit your calls and all that, but you know, it's a huge breath of fresh air, you know, being told that you're going to be treated as an adult in a work environment, you get to call the shots when you're on the phone. You know, I just have some fun, happy reactions and interactions with the blind folks. And I think that...

the ability for them to take on a job such as this. And it's interesting. I'm sorry, I'm going to take a little bit of a sidetrack. There's these little bits of technology that the blind agents are like, well, we should.

bifurcate the audio so that the left side of my headset is my JAWS screen reader, and on the right side is the consumer. And for months, we had been running this system with the audio on both sides. But if I was a blind, visually impaired individual, if I could separate that audio, and then I can somehow, in my mind,

Raymond (18:14.407)
or certainly in theirs. I've heard them say it many times before. If I can separate the audio left and right, then I can really do a better job on these phone calls, because I know what's the screen reader. And they can suppress the screen reader, right? If it's telling them something that they already know, they can suppress the screen reader. They don't have to try and untangle what the consumer is saying in their right ear and on the left, right? Because if it's all in one,

Well, the screen reader and the human, the consumer at the far end, they're both talking at the same time. But if they, you know, and so it's like, you know, this little bit of technology, not only did we enable our software, but then they took it another level and say, hey, Raymond, let's go and, you know, do this. Like, okay. And I didn't have to do any of that work. That happens at the local level on the workstation. And so when they weren't able to figure it out, we involved the Blind Institute of Technology, because they have a...

wealth of resources. so they were able to, you that's one of the reasons for me, it's pretty easy, right? I can onboard blind agents because they've already been pre-trained by the Blind Institute of Technology. And they've sort of helped us with some of these configuration items that might stymie people down the road. And, you know, it's almost like I get to hit the ground running. Here you go. Here's your login. Here's some test calls. Okay. Off you go to the races.

So it's a pretty cool environment and I really appreciate that relationship with the Blind Institute of Technology because like I say, they pre-screen. And so here we are helping the community with employment and sort of that first job. How do you, it's a classic thing, right? How do you get that first job with no experience? How do you get that next job without good experience? And so.

Admittedly, the call center environment may not be that glamorous or exciting, but it absolutely provides a vehicle of experience and hands-on, well, really, it's just experience. And it is truly invaluable, and it proves that they can work in this sighted world that we have with the dialer. Everyone thinks, it's a dialer. It's on the screen. It has to be.

Rob Dwyer (21:08.974)
Thank

Raymond (21:34.207)
It has to be all visually managed, but that's not really the case.

Rob Dwyer (21:39.222)
Yeah, sounds like you've got a visitor. Go ahead.

Raymond (21:41.055)
Pardon me one second. got a

Rob Dwyer (22:00.718)
So as you were talking about this, full disclosure, right, I am not familiar with any members of that community. But one thing I do know about contact centers.

Contact centers employ all kinds of people and a lot of the people who I've seen be really successful and really love the job aren't terribly comfortable in a customer facing, and I mean actual face-to-face with a customer type of position for a variety of reasons. But when they are able to interact with customers with just their voice.

They have a certain level of freedom that comes with that, where they can just be only judged by their voice, not by their appearance. And unfortunately, we live in a world where appearances mean a lot, but it seems to me that contact centers are a place where I I can fit in. I think a lot of us, if we go back,

when we were kids, right? We just wanted to fit in. You want to be recognized for being maybe extraordinary in a positive sense, but it really can feel kind of gross if you're being recognized for being extraordinary in a sense that feels negative, whether or not it is negative. And it strikes me that for...

The BVI community, this is an opportunity to like just fit in. They can do a job and from a customer or consumer point of view, they don't know and they don't treat them any differently than they would treat any other agent they were talking to on the phone. I'm wondering if you've ever heard any feedback from those agents along those lines or, or if I'm completely wrong, which is also possible.

Raymond (24:11.487)
I think that it goes, it's more along the unstated lines. I've not had a whole lot of those type of conversations, but certainly it is in many ways a great equalizer. If the technology is enabled, you know, it levels the playing field and you're absolutely right because the consumer at the far end of the phone.

They see no visible handicap. It's a classic thing. You see somebody getting out of the handicapped spot in their car, like, oh, they're handicapped. Or there's that questioning sometimes. But in the call center environment, as long as the BVI agents are competent and well-trained and they know how to navigate, yeah, there's heroes. I've had multiple.

Actually, it's a sort of tangential. I'd probably have to go look at the stats. But I've had a couple of them just recently where the consumer at the far end is complimenting those blind agents. And they're saying, you did an excellent job. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for helping. Thank you for letting me get my word out. And I'm hearing that, I don't know, it just seems like I hear that more for the blind and visually impaired agents.

You know, my visual agents on the system, it feels like they go through and they run through the, you know, they're going through the rigmarole and they say, thank you very much. And that's the end of the call and off they go. It's a bit of a production. And I don't know, I think that the blind and visually impaired agents that I work with, they take it to heart that they can make a difference, that they...

they're being treated like adults. think part of it is the work environment too. It's not always cut and dry, black and white. think that as you know, there's some call centers that have positive encouraging environments. And then there's other call centers where it's a negative, driven by fear type environment.

Raymond (26:20.207)
Obviously, my bias is that those positive environments is where I would want to work. I want my nephew or niece to work in that sort of environment. And if it's a sweatshop with hardcore sales or collections and you're just always rough and distrusting of the client.

You know, it's a negative environment. wants to, you know, the churn and those type of call centers has got to be much higher. And so I think it's a combination of things. You make the technology accessible. And that's a big hurdle for folks. And to have a positive environment and to have a supportive environment and to have the feedback mechanism to let them know if they're doing a good job or not because

so much of the BPO experience with agents here in North America these days is they are working from home. So they're working on an island. They don't always get that feedback mechanism that I think is pretty important.

Rob Dwyer (27:24.364)
You mentioned the technology piece a couple of times and just now that being a big hurdle to overcome, but I'm wondering once you've as an organization kind of gotten over that hurdle where you've established, okay, we've integrated the things that we need to integrate to make this work. that point, is it pretty plug and play from, getting someone started new?

Raymond (27:50.54)
Absolutely. Once those hurdles have been overcome, then you get one blind agent, two blind agents, they run through successful battery of calls. That's it. You're done. Then it's it's wash, rinse, and repeat. It's just, you have to make a little bit of concession for training. Right? You know, I train the blind agents separate from the sighted agents. It's a better use of my time, better use of everyone's time.

Rob Dwyer (28:09.612)
Yeah.

Raymond (28:17.947)
So it doesn't make sense when you're talking to sighted agents, to the blind agents about their screen reader and navigating. So all I do is just, you know, there's, and that's what sort of boils down to with the technology and with the work environment.

Rob Dwyer (28:24.514)
Yeah.

Raymond (28:34.653)
you have to make some adjustments. Because typically, the blind, visually impaired community can't just jump into any job and start working. They have to have that screen reader. They need to know how to navigate. And part of it is it's plug and play for us, because we've established the foundation. What's the training model? How do they log in? And then that's why it's wash, rinse, and repeat, because we've established that.

But when you're breaking into new territory, our software as a dialer company is accessible for a blind agent. if, and I've seen them, like one of the gentlemen that worked for us had worked for United Airlines and they were a reservations agent. And you think about that, you know, that's pretty high level. You have to find the right flight, you have to find the...

right person, you have to navigate through, there's probably lots of fields that they would have to navigate through. And that gets a little complicated, but it can be done. I think that certain projects, certain call center environments are more or better suited to adapt to a call center, to a blind agent. know, something like the surveys is a perfect example because it's a walkthrough, right? You ask the question.

Rob Dwyer (29:53.1)
Mm-hmm.

Raymond (30:02.503)
And then based on the response, then I present the next question. And then based on that response, I present the next question. So I'm walking them down the garden path, just as I would a sighted agent. The sighted agents and the blind, they are using the same script, but they're staying within the lane. There's not a whole lot of, as opposed to, one gentleman, he wanted to hire the blind agents, but he couldn't figure out, and we couldn't either, there was no.

Rob Dwyer (30:15.224)
Yeah.

Raymond (30:32.143)
easy button for this is about seven, eight years ago. Maybe somebody out there knows a better solution to this, but what he was doing was ticket sales. And so when somebody said, hey, I want to go see Bruce Springsteen in Cincinnati on April the 28th, well, his sighted agents, they quickly go to these sites and they scan and they scan and they scan. And then they say, OK, I have two options for you. And for a blind, visually impaired individual to use a screen reader,

to jump through multiple websites and to scan for and to find availability, et cetera, et cetera, it's not conducive to that environment. So I think that part of it really involves some consultation as if anybody wants to involve blind agents and bring them into their call center, well, the benefits are many, but you have to cross that technology hurdle. And you have to say,

Is it worth traversing that hurdle? Is this something that somebody using a screen reader would be successful at being able to manage these calls? And so part of it is just, is it a good environment? And then what are the hurdles to overcome? And for some companies, I've heard that it's very difficult. For us, it wasn't all that difficult. We made changes. We did testing.

and we got it into production within the same week. But then when customers come to us, they want to use our platform, they like that idea with the blind agents, then we have to go look at what is it the agents are looking at on their side. Are they navigating on Salesforce? Well, well, yes. Salesforce has a big commitment to being user friendly. there's actually...

administrators. Salesforce is so friendly to that community that there are blind administrators. know, because everyone, know, how many people need a Salesforce administrator? They're expensive. They're difficult to come by. You know, well, there's blind agents that are being trained up and getting certified in Salesforce. And, you know, boy, you know, I want that. What a great resource that could be for for an organization.

Rob Dwyer (32:36.238)
Hmm.

Raymond (32:58.163)
You know, they care, they pay attention, they double check their work a lot. And in that environment, because Salesforce on top of MyCallCloud, you know, they're both integrated. And so it becomes a more of a seamless environment that screen reader can be navigated through and then therefore the agents can be successful.

Rob Dwyer (33:19.02)
Yeah, it strikes me that in, you know, we are seeing more and more uptake of AI in customer facing roles, be that chat bots, be that virtual agents where I'm actually talking to a voice that is powered by AI. But I do believe while I think customers are

coming around to accepting this, I think there are some specific industries where the uptake is going to be slower. And when I think of the financial services industry, the medical industry, where you're dealing with very personal situations that impact people's lives in a very visceral and dramatic way, I think most people prefer talking to people and

It strikes me that someone who is a better listener can deliver potentially a better experience than, you know, an agent who maybe could quite honestly get easily distracted by things in their environment, whether that's a work at home environment or a call center environment. doesn't matter. Like visually you can be easily distracted and

I don't think that most contact centers are thinking of that as a strategic advantage within those sectors that they could potentially leverage. Forget about all the other fringe benefits that come with it. Just having someone who really does a great job listening as you're talking, not interrupting and letting

customers, consumers really talk out what they need to talk out. There's a benefit there that may be, as you mentioned, difficult to quantify, but I think those industries are the types of industries.

Rob Dwyer (35:33.186)
can make a big, big difference. Before we wrap up, I got to ask you, I see for those that are just listening to this episode and not watching, behind you I see these amazing vistas of mountains. You're in Golden, Colorado. Was it the mountains that drew you in? Number one. That's question number one.

Raymond (35:36.371)
Absolutely.

Raymond (36:06.855)
So I grew up in Colorado and my parents put me on skis when I was seven years old. They were leather boots and wooden skis and cable bindings. They flopped around a lot. But somehow I liked it. And I was, despite all the cold and the hardships and the long lines, I liked it. it's sort of, know, so many people that we encounter in life, right? Everyone has sort of their...

Rob Dwyer (36:22.88)
Okay.

Raymond (36:35.583)
You know, what makes them tick? You know, I got some friends, especially as I'm getting older, right? They love golf. You know, they're golf heads. And then I got fish heads. You people that just, they would rather go fishing than anything else. And for me, I, in part, I live for the winter time, so I can go skiing in the mountains. And just the images, what you're seeing here are posters from my COVID office. And they're

They're images of Colorado. if one of them is with flowers and mountains, the others with ski areas and beautiful lakes and et cetera. So just for those who might be listening, go ahead. What's your next?

Rob Dwyer (37:16.406)
Okay, so how did this Colorado boy end up in College Station, Texas? what was going on there?

Raymond (37:22.281)
Hahaha

Raymond (37:26.239)
Well, I was living the life of a ski bum in Colorado. I was helping out on ambulances for the ski areas to help with the transport, but I wasn't making a whole lot of money. And in my family, the call went up. Hey, who is free to go help take care of grandma? And when I was a kid, grandma helped take care of me. And I look around myself and like, you know.

I'm just being a ski bum. It's time to move, time to do something new. So I put my hand up. I said, okay, family, I'll go down. I'll go help take care of grandma. So stayed with her and you know, that small little town of Bryan College Station and got a couple of degrees and met up with my childhood sweetheart and married her. And it's a happy ending. I get to come back to Colorado and go skiing in the wintertime.

Rob Dwyer (38:19.232)
I love that and that makes a lot of sense and I'm glad that I asked about it. It's a great story. I gotta thank you Raymond for joining Next In Queue. It's been a great conversation today.

Raymond (38:32.681)
Well, thank you. I appreciate you letting me talk. I didn't get to ask you any questions. We didn't really talk much about you and what you're doing and what makes you tick. So thank you for giving me this opportunity.

Rob Dwyer (38:41.154)
That's the way it's supposed to go. That's the way it's supposed to go. You're the guest, I'm the host. I ask the questions around.

Raymond (38:49.683)
Hopefully people already know you and what makes you tick.

Rob Dwyer (38:51.694)
Thanks, Raymond.

Raymond (38:55.216)
Absolutely. Thank you, too. Appreciate your time. Good questions.