The Intersection of Business Communication and Technology with Talkdesk’s Bill Welch

Scott Kinka

Hi, and welcome to the Bridge. My guest on this episode is Bill Welch. He’s the president and COO of Talkdesk, the freshly minted president, and COO, from my understanding. Is that right, Bill?

Bill Welch

That’s right. 45 days in.

Scott Kinka

45 days in. That’s gonna be some interesting perspective. We’ll hear a little bit more about that, but before we get started, and we’ll talk about Talk Desk and sort of follow the normal format that we do, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you arrived here 45 days ago, a little bit about your background, maybe where you got started. Apparently, we have some shared history we just found out about, but tell us a little bit more about Bill.

Bill Welch

We did, and it was encouraging to see that, we both went to a non-accredited school called LaSalle University. But no, I’m proud of those days up in Philly and grew up in New Jersey and now reside in North Carolina. The proud father of two young men and my wife. And we just have a great time there and, really, enjoying this journey so far, with Talkdesk and really spending a lot of time with prospects, customers, partners and the employees. And, just a great company. I’m sure we’ll talk a lot more about it.

Scott Kinka

We certainly will. Tell us, I mean, you’ve got an interesting resume with some pretty big companies in it. Give us a little bit more on your background there. I have a few of those sort of listed after my LinkedIn research, but I’ll let you tell the story.

Bill Welch

Yeah, so I had the pleasure of really being a part of some great companies. Started most of my career at the Oracles, the Symantec, the HPS, but most recently I was the COO of a company called Zscaler. I helped them go from really just a little known company to the IPO of 2018. So they were one of the top IPOs that year. Just a great company really changing the way we thought about cloud security, then went over to Duo as their president and COO and helped them navigate whether they were gonna go public. And at the time they decided that Cisco’s offer for almost two and a half billion dollars would be better for the outcome for the company. So we sold it to Cisco. And, most recently now joining the journey with all the talk dealers and, very, very encouraged by it.

Scott Kinka

Fantastic. Last couple opportunities that you had worked on were insecurity and you’ve moved into the CX space. Was it just about the opportunity with Talkdesk or was it something about the industry itself that kind of got you really interested in moving in?

Bill Welch

Yeah, I think I’ve really enjoyed my time in cybersecurity, and I still think it’s really critical to what’s going on in the industry. And every time you look at the headlines you see every single day, you see something about cyber. But I will tell you what really encouraged me, and it got me excited about Talkdesk was one really, really large addressable market. I mean, this market for customer experience, contact call center just the ability to bring customers closer to companies was really a great opportunity. And I think that the caliber of the investors in this company had a great board, a really great executive team, and then, just a really amazing, innovative platform for contact and call center technology.

Scott Kinka

Interesting. Yeah, and I saw recently the Gartner 2023 Peer Insights, ‘Voice of the Customer’ award for 2023, which is great news on that. And we also have a relationship outside of, I mean, folks know that Bridgepoint is an advisory firm, and most of the folks that we have on the podcast are companies whom we represent out there in the marketplace. But there’s also another unique part to our relationship in terms of interacting in the field in implementing customers. Can you talk about that maybe just a little bit in terms of what you’re aware that we’re doing together in that part of the market?

Bill Welch

Yeah, Scott, I’ll tell you one thing I’m really encouraged by is Bridgepoint and what they’re doing as a channel partner of ours. And now that recently I know that there was an acquisition of a company called PPT, which now has been rebranded, as you know, Bridgepoint CX, really the power of your company and the power of what you guys deliver has really been shown through with the customer interactions that I’ve had recently. You know, they’re very proud of our two companies coming together and really delivering a transformational, innovative solution to their problems.

Scott Kinka

I appreciate that. Thank you. And we may explore that a little bit more as we go forward, but I’m gonna put you on the spot. Here we are, Talkdesk, 45 days. Your people are all watching this. When we get to this point of the podcast, I usually say, gimme the elevator pitch on the company here. So here’s the true test. Maybe by the time we get this aired, it’ll be 65 days or something along those lines. But tell us what Talkdesk does.

Bill Welch

Well, let’s hope that the team has trained me well. What I will tell you is that we are a transformational and innovative company when it comes to customer experience. And we started with a new architecture. We started from the ground up saying we’re gonna deliver a technology that solves really big problems for our customers. And it starts with our architecture. It starts with having a cloud first microservices. We took advantage of that so that we could have flexibility in how we deliver. This flexibility also gives us the ability to have a multi-tenant platform so all customers can run the same version of our software. We’re accelerating our speed of innovation. We’ve had over 70 products in the last seven years, and we built it all in one environment, so that they can access all of our products. We’re not a conglomeration of multi companies that came together. We’re also not a company that is trying to bridge between an on-prem and a cloud solution, all of it delivered by a single user interface. And, we’re also delivering industry specific products for healthcare, financial, and retail. So overall, we’re just changing and transforming the customer experience.

Scott Kinka

That was pretty good. I mean, I just got that from your team over dinner, this past week in Las Vegas. So, it was pretty similar. So, I gotta give you kudos on that. I mean, I always ask Bill, when we talk to our supplier partners, we talk to our technology partners. I always say gimme your superpower, right? Because customers have a lot to remember, and there’s a lot of companies that do a lot of things. And sometimes the more you do, the harder it is for the pundits to categorize you. It’s sort of the best and worst thing about our industry, right? Everybody needs to get put in a box, and your team did a really good job of it, calling out specifically two of the things that Jim mentioned there, which was kind of that ease of deployment, sort of smaller footprint than the competitors, but it was really the industry specific applications that they really said is unique about what it is that you do. So I mean, I find that to be really interesting, given the industries that you just mentioned. I mean, you come from a cybersecurity background, and the ones that you mentioned having very specific applications for are those that have the most stringent security requirements, frankly, like you mentioned healthcare, you mentioned finance. It feels to me that there’s no secret that that’s why that was where you focused, not just on the CX experience, but also because those were highly regulated industries. Am I reading that right? 

Bill Welch

I think that’s a good read. I mean, I will tell you that those industries do have very high standards. The bar is very high for us to compete in those areas. And one of the things we’re proud of is that we are delivering technology that’s on an AI platform industry specific. We’ve been able to drive innovation, put a lot of money into our research and development, and over the last couple months, we’ve already delivered three new products already this year, so that it is generally available, and of course we’re gonna see a lot more innovation. So, really proud of the fact that the company is focusing on innovation mapping to business outcomes for customers, focusing on industry specific verticals where we can solve their specific problems in healthcare or retail or financial, and then in turn, continuing to invest in our channel and investing in our partners. Because having a volunteer sales force, like Bridgepoint and others, was very helpful to us. That’s how we’re gonna scale this. That’s how we’re gonna make sure that we can deliver these solutions to customers, by using our really robust channel.

A Robust Roadmap to Streamline Customer Experience

Scott Kinka

You’ve mentioned the investment a couple of times, and obviously we’ve been through, speaking of transformative, I mean, I appreciate that you used that word to describe the product, the era we’re in has been transformative in terms of the way we work and the way we invest in our businesses. Has that been a change for you, as an organization kind of post pandemic doubling down on sort of feature development and or an investment? Or is this sort of the continuation of a process where you’ve always been sort of a feature first investment, first technology, first organization?

Bill Welch

Yeah, absolutely. We have been a feature first customer, focus first company. It’s a company that prides itself on its innovation. It’s a company that was doing AI before. It’s now become the name of the week.  I will tell you that that’s something that is most encouraging from what I’ve observed with the team and the time I’ve been here, is how we listen. We listen to our customers to see where they’re going, and then we’re trying to map that to what we’re doing with the innovation in our technology. So we’re hiring people that are doing the right things. We’re trying to drive the contact and call center from being a cost center to a profit center and really have this strategic consumption of technology coming off of some of the challenges we did see in the pandemic and now this work from home.And do we work from home? Do we go into the office? You know, these are all the things that we are embracing as a company, and I think it’s really showing the results in what we’re delivering.

Scott Kinka

You’re one of the few platforms, from my understanding, that has sort of natively built workforce management embedded with the CA platform itself. Was that a product line that was sort of a pre-pandemic product line, or did you know,  I always feel like the work from home thing exacerbates our ability to tell if somebody’s productive or not. So is that something that is a newer component to the offering work from your workforce management tool set and tuck that into work from home and your thoughts around?

Bill Welch

Yeah, well when I had said it, we had developed over the last seven years, 70 different products. We have a very robust roadmap, our present roadmap and our future roadmap, to always be thinking about what’s coming next. Because what’s important is that our customers have someone to go to where they collaborate with a partner like Bridgepoint, and then with us to say, okay, I need workforce management, I need case management, I need connectors to Salesforce, I need connectors to my UCAS solution. And one of the things that Talkdesk has done is try to anticipate what is next, what is coming, and you know, this solution in that single platform to where now we can expand into a customer and solve their problems, versus having 10, 20, 30 different vendors to where now they can have that single pane of glass, that single experience, that they can manage.

Scott Kinka

You know, you mentioned, Salesforce, which is interesting. I mean, in talking to your team that was sort of a big bucket, right? It’s funny, we get asked all the time in our CX business about our CRM and contact center platforms, concentric circles that kind of cross each other a little bit in the middle, generally around omnichannel and the contact. You mentioned case management as an example, which is one of those areas that sort of, where does that live?  I asked that question of your team when we were together, and the Salesforce conversation came up. Specifically not just connectors, but also hey, if you’re somebody that’s leaning more towards the CRM side of the circles that are attached to each other, that’s okay too. Can you speak a little bit more about sort of delivering the functionality, but doing it sort of where the agents are living today, your flexibility around that, and specifically as it relates to Salesforce and some of the other CRMs?

Bill Welch

Yeah, I think that when I see this space, and again, I’m still in my infancy of understanding the complete market itself, but as I look at that continuum of having UCaaS down on the left, and you see Microsoft Teams and Zoom playing a role down there, and how they’re gonna interact with those customers, and then you’re going up to the right side with the customer experience, and that customer experience side is Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics or even ServiceNow. And then sitting right there in the middle is CA. And I think that when you look at those three elements of the market, the really tough part is that middle layer. And that’s where we have solved, and we’ve done very, very well there. Our opportunity now is to partner strategically with the ones on the left and the ones on the right, and make sure that we’re coming alongside them, to help them deliver their solutions. I mean, as a matter of fact, in healthcare one of the things that we’re very proud of is that we have bidirectional integration with Epic. We realize that in healthcare they are a strong leader, and we’re not just jumping off on a middleware solution and doing it. We’re actually working closely with them side by side, just like with Salesforce and others who absolutely have great customer experience software that is delivering for their customers.

Leveraging Technology for Predictive, Digital-First Solutions

Scott Kinka

Yeah, I mean I find that super interesting about your model Epic. I mean across my technology career, I’ve touched Epic six or eight times and it’s not always friendly, right? It’s sometimes and not their fault. Just like, you gotta make it work in desktop as a service, and you’ve gotta tie it to this UCaaS platform, and its purpose built to do a thing, not necessarily the other things that you want to do with it. It was always if you did the work, it was the reason why you got the deal, because you could play nice with it, if you get where I’m going with that. But it wasn’t necessarily easy to do. I think your commitment to operating inside those verticals to be super interesting, particularly around Epic. So less a question and just really more commentary, but I think it speaks to your market approach, kind of vertical. Let’s explore the verticals for a minute. I mean, we’ve picked on healthcare a little bit, but where else do you have industry specific application integration that our listeners should understand?

Bill Welch

Yeah, I think the other two areas that we really have been investing in, are in our financial vertical and in our retail. I’ll specifically comment on whether it’s with integrations with Jack Henry, integrations with Fiserv, these are leaders in the financial services market. And I will tell you that, we’ve seen great success in being able to deliver these powerful integrations, to where customers say, Hey, I don’t have to go and be that general contractor. You’ve brought a solution that is specific and applicable to my market, where you understand my business. You understand how a bank works, or you understand how a credit union works, or in healthcare, whether you’re a payer or a provider. And then in retail some of the largest retail customers that we’ve interacted with have very specific custom homegrown applications. So one of the things that really has benefited Talkdesk is our ability to have that open architecture, that ability to integrate with systems, in some cases that were written 30 years ago. We have a very, very large retailer, for example, that uses us and they have a reservation system that they built themselves, and as a result of our relationship they have that integration between our open architecture and our AAPI. And that’s something that we’re really proud of. We’re trying to think about how to make it easy as an outcome for our customers. One other thing you asked about, superpower, I want to go back to the other thing that’s superpower with Talkdesk is the way we deliver value. We already talked about our industry focus, we talked about our innovation platform, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the value that our customers are seeing. And what I mean by the value is, one of the questions I ask executives all the time is, how do you articulate value to your board? It’s a question everybody’s asking you right now in the times that we live in, and one of the things that we do is we have a value management office, and this value management office actually takes all these metrics. As you know, the contact center, call center is the most metric organization in a company for maybe the CFO’s office. So what we do is we take all that data, we take the business drivers, we take the outcomes they’re trying to drive, we put that into a platform and an ability for them to actually present that information to their executives. And I’ll just give you two examples. One of our largest, North America moving companies, they actually were able to harvest almost 3 million in new sales as a result of leveraging the Talkdesk technology. And another one of very large credit unions in the United States, they recently shared with us that as a result of implementing our chat feature alone, they were saving $130,000 a month. So not only are we helping create them to capture revenue, but also saving dollars in their contact center.

Scott Kinka

Yeah. And, can we kind of hone in on that chat discussion a little bit? That 130, whatever, how much did you say?

Bill Welch

Thousand a month.

Scott Kinka

Perfect. Was it largely staffing that they didn’t put on the phone kind of scenario? Or was that in, like, how do you justify that?

Bill Welch

Well, how they justified it was that what was happening was that when they look at their agents, the live agents we hear a lot about AI and the virtual agent and ChatGPT, but you know, there’s always gonna be a need for a human element. We’re never going to be replaced by robots, completely. Don’t get me wrong, I know that there will be opportunities for advancement and technology, but the reality is, they wanted to take the mundane tasks, the ones that you know, Hey, when’s the credit union open? Or what’s my balance? Or in the case of the moving company, where’s my truck? And if I can take those tasks and get them handled by a different channel, a digital channel rather than a live person, the savings are incredible.

Scott Kinka

Sure. Well, I think that fits with the way the customer expectation is too, right? It used to be that in a contact center you would, you’d press the button 80 times to get through it to get to the agent. You’re like, I’m not dealing with all this nonsense to get there. Now we’re like, we’re gonna do everything that we can to not have to talk to a human, right? Wherever that is. And if you can support that with the technology obviously all the best.

Bill Welch

Well, the last thing you know you wanna do is hit that button 80 times, right? So if you can get your question answered, and, you can have it to where it’s digital first and mobile first, and what a great opportunity now to where it’s almost predictive. I mean, how nice it is when I’ve seen this firsthand when they already know what I’m thinking. You know, I’ve landed late on my plane, I didn’t make my connection and boom, it’s already done for me. I don’t have to talk to an agent. So I think that the more and more we can see the leverage of technology to make the customer experience better, that’s where Talkdesk is best suited.

Embracing Trust and Transparency

Scott Kinka

Earlier we talked a little bit about work from home and to sort of stay in the theme of the pod, I wanted to just hone in on that for a little bit. You guys are a technology company, but you’re also a company, right? And I recognize that you’ve been there for 45 days, so if you feel like you want to answer this based on previous experience, that’s okay too, but I’m curious, I always like to ask this question of tech companies: have you figured out work from home? Do you guys think you have that ring fence yet inside your business?

Bill Welch

God, I actually do, and I’ll tell you why. We’re a completely remote workforce, so we actually embrace this and it’s working really, really well. The workforce is thriving, the employees are engaged, we’re still enjoying our travels. I mean, that’s what I’ve been doing since I joined. And, face-to-face meetings are coming back, but we hire people that we trust to do the right thing. You know, trust and transparency is one of our values as a company, and we believe that we’re getting the best out of people because they’re able to manage the balance of their life. And it’s working very, very well for us. Now, having said that, it’s interesting because we’ve actually had some employees who said, Hey, can we go and put a center of excellence somewhere so that we can start to put more collaboration, in person. So we have some very large sites where we have over a couple hundred employees that we’re thinking about going and say, okay, maybe we’ll put up a site for everybody to come and collaborate. But, we will give the platform as needed for our work at home.

Scott Kinka

Got it. So let me flip the question the other way, because you guys talk to customers all day, all the time, I should say. Do our customers have it figured out yet? Or are those still the problems that you’re contending with when you meet with them in the future?

Bill Welch

I think a lot of customers are still trying to navigate this space and navigate this challenge. I know for example, even my own son who works at a pretty large security company, and he’s working two or three days a week in the office and the rest at home. And it’s kind of mandated. So there’s a lot of conversation around this. I think the best thing we can do as you know, employers and employees, is let’s focus on the outcomes. The outcomes are what matters. And the amount of time you put in is important, but what’s more important is what are the outcomes that we’re delivering for our customers and for our employees.

Scott Kinka

Do you find that when you bring in managers from outside the organization, it’s sort of hard to get them into the mode of measuring productivity? You know, we hear that a lot as we’re meeting with customers. You’re like, we have this great culture, but then we brought somebody in and they’re used to first person and last person out. It’s the person that has the most value, right? Because there’s not really a KPI associated with success otherwise in that group. You contend that as you bring people in.

Bill Welch

I think you always contend with that. I think that what’s important though is that our leaders actually understand that they work for them, they work for the employees that are part of their team. They’ve gotta go out and come alongside them and spend time with them to help them and achieve their personal and professional goals. I mean if we’re not coming alongside our employees and understanding our personal and professional goals and then helping them they have options. Just like in a SaaS business we have to earn our business every day like a subscription. Well, in this new modern day of the workforce, we have to earn the subscription of them staying with us.

Scott Kinka

Yeah, that’s a really great way of looking at it. It’s funny as  I’ve been 25 years in the service provider side,  and people have said, how do I know you’re gonna stick with me? And I’m like, look, we gotta earn this every month, right? At the end of the day, I mean, it’s not like you’re buying a piece of equipment off the shelf and you’re gonna love it or hate it for five years, right? It’s a completely different model. Interesting to think about our associates that way.

Bill Welch

Yeah. And I love the subscription model because like you said, you have to earn it every day as opposed to the old style of it, which was like you said, a box or a perpetual license and a mano, this is, and then the ability to change, the ability to go somewhere else.  So that is why I think Talkdesk is uniquely positioned because of the innovation because every single day these customers are asking for what’s next, what’s next, what’s next? and that’s something that the company has invested in.

Hiring and Shifting Talent Dynamics in a Post-Pandemic World

Scott Kinka

Fantastic. Well, this has been a great talk. I appreciate it. We’re gonna end with some fun, if you’re okay with that.  Couple fun questions gonna challenge you a little bit. The first one, borders between business and fun, and that really depends on how you answer it. I’m gonna ask you for a shameless prediction. 18 to 24 months could be about talk desk, could be about who wins the World series up to you, but throw it out there. Be Nostradamus for me.

Bill Welch

Yeah, it’s really tough for me to predict because we’re living in such an interesting time. I mean, there’s a lot of challenges in front of us. I think right now I don’t necessarily want to go out on our prediction. What I would probably say is let’s all focus on what we can control. There’s a lot of things going on in the world and in our communities. You know, the best thing I think we need to do is focus on our families, focus on our community, and help each other focus on making sure that we are taking care of our own backyard. Because everything else, it’s gonna fall in place the way it should, but I think my prediction is let’s focus on our bone backyards.

Scott Kinka

I like that. I get it. All right. Now for the real fun, here’s something you can focus on. You can’t focus on when the next world changing event is. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that it happened, right? And there’s only one application that’s still functioning on your phone. Call it the zombie apocalypse, whatever you wanna call it. What is your absolute need to have an application on a go forward basis?

Bill Welch

It’s kind of boring. And I’ll tell you why it’s boring. It’s my calendar. And I’ll tell you why, if you go look at somebody’s calendar, it’ll tell you everything you need to know about that person, because that’ll tell you where their time is spent. And whether they’re locking out time for working out, whether they’re locking out time for spending time with the family on the weekend. But if it wasn’t for my calendar, I wouldn’t know how to function, because I wanna make sure that I know what I’m using, because the one thing you and I have in common is time. You have the same amount of time that I have, it’s only 24 hours in the day, and how are we leveraging it?

Scott Kinka

Yep, that makes perfect sense. All right, last one. Here we go. What’s on your end table right now? And it’s not a funny joke. What are you reading right now?

Bill Welch

Yeah, so I’m rereading, and the reason I’m rereading this is because of the journey I just started at Talkdesk. I’m rereading a book called Who, and it’s really about the most important thing you do at a company, which is hiring. And you know, that’s really where we need to be spending all of our time, is how do we hire the best people, retain the best people, and inspire the best people. So, a great book, highly recommend it to any leader, in any capacity because the most important asset you have at your company is your people.

Scott Kinka

This wasn’t planned, but I’m gonna ask you a follow-up because I love that and I agree. Has hiring changed since the pandemic in your mind? Do you look for different things today than you did before?

Bill Welch

I think it has. I think what has happened now is that traditionally companies were hiring in their epicenters of excellence, whether it was their headquarters or whether it was in their regional offices. And now what happens is you can get talent anywhere. And if anything at all, what also has changed is now the talent is gonna go where they want to be. And now they will say, okay, I wanna work from South Carolina, or in my case, North Carolina. And I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve worked for all Silicon Valley companies, either outta Washington, DC or Raleigh, North Carolina. Because what I kept on explaining to all of them is, don’t judge me by the amount of time I come in the office, judge me by the outcomes that I deliver.

Scott Kinka

Yeah. And I appreciate that. Sometimes the outcome’s hard to come by. I think that’s the cultural thing that when we meet with customers, particularly on the CX side that’s another one, is understanding outcomes. It’s easier with an agent, right? How many calls, what’s your average handle time, customer satisfaction rating on the backend, but you start filtering around the people and leadership, what’s happening in sales harder and harder to come by. You get into information work even more difficult to come by measuring business outcomes. And we talk to customers all the time who are struggling with finding them, and I certainly agree with you, that that’s how business has changed, certainly in hiring has changed over that timeframe. And, you know, you’re in it, man, 45 days in, God bless you, seems like a lot of fun. I’m allowed to say that, by the way, because we went to the same school and it was a Christian school. I appreciate that. This has been a great conversation, Bill. I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. And we’re looking forward to continuing this conversation again in the future.

Bill Welch

Scott, I can’t thank you enough for this and for anybody that wants to hear any more about Talkdesk obviously go to our website. But I will also tell you that if you wanna interact with Bridgepoint, which I would highly recommend, great partner Ronnie Maje runs it for our Talkdesk team. Anything having to do at Bridgepoint, he is the person to, to contact. But great show, Scott, thank you for having me today.

Scott Kinka

I really appreciate it. Thanks, Bill. Good luck going forward. You’re with a great company, and we’re looking forward to some success together. I appreciate it. Thanks very much and thank all of you.  As Bill just said, the one thing we share in common is the amount of time we have in a day. We certainly don’t take lightly that you’ve chosen to spend yours with us. So thanks for listening.