Angry customers will share a negative experience with approximately 15 other people, according to a study by American Express. Negative interactions do more than spoil someone’s day; they can also impact a company’s bottom line.
For companies operating contact centers, the technology choices are slim and outdated, Cameron Weeks, CEO of Edify, said.
Research from analyst firm Forrester shows that 73 percent of customers use call centers to address their concerns. However, many call centers don’t have digital care coordination or technology support, which results in agents having to navigate analog systems and repeatedly put customers on hold.
Weeks and his co-founder Bracken Fields thought they could build a better customer service platform that would make it easier for customers and support teams to connect. So, in 2007, they started their first Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) company. Eleven years of customer support technology later, they founded their latest venture: Edify.
It’s important for brands to mimic human behaviors, Weeks said. Social conversations between friends can easily jump from social media to texting to live video. Why can’t customers interact with brands the same way?
“We like to say that we started Edify because we’re customers, too,” Weeks said.
Edify’s unified omnichannel software allows companies to move users seamlessly among channels within one conversation. Call agents can see a customer’s entire journey on one screen: from their calls and emails to SMS conversations with customer service agents. No more call waiting or transfers. No more disconnecting.
Last year, the duo launched Edify Huddle, which uses AI technology like natural language processing to help route queries. The AI also collects feedback and provides coaching and training recommendations to contact center agents, helping them stay informed and encouraging them to provide a better service to customers.
Weeks describes himself as a product-driven CEO. He spends time with customers and prospects to discuss their experience with the Edify software and see what features need upgrades and improvements.
For Weeks, the customer is always right, which means there’s always more work to do.
Cameron, you and co-founder Bracken Fields have known each other since you were kids. When did you start working together and what inspired you to start Edify?
Our first project together was actually managing the Wi-Fi for a hotel chain in Indianapolis. I had already started my former company Sharpen and one afternoon, Fields broke my Nikon SLR Camera at a basketball game. As an apology, he offered to come help me fix a hardware problem at one of the hotels. We quickly realized that we worked really well together, and honestly, that project led us all the way to Edify today.
In the early 2000s, the same guy who owned the hotels asked if we would help him purchase a new phone system for his company. At that point, we knew very little about phone systems, but everything we found was overwhelming and expensive for no clear reason. Rather than buying one of the giant complex and expensive phone systems in the market, we thought, “How hard can building a phone system be?” Now, 15 years later, I can say building a telecommunication platform is wildly harder than we ever imagined it would be, but we also wouldn’t change a thing.
As CEO, describe the focus of your role at Edify. What do you love about working on the product side?
I am very much a product-driven CEO. My favorite thing to do is spend time with both customers and prospects to learn about how their companies operate as well as their feelings toward Edify’s solution. Having a super close connection to each customer allows us to build products that get everyone’s attention from established industry analysts, Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike.
You mentioned that most of your competitors have a finance background. Coming from a product background, how does that shape Edify?
In technology, every company starts as an innovation hub. However, as companies grow, some of them lose focus on the innovation and fall victim to the desires of private equity , which unlike venture capital, moves the focus away from innovation and toward cost management. This is very much the position of the customer service and business communication landscape today.
What customer service problems are you trying to solve with Edify?
We like to say that we started Edify because “we’re customers too,” and we finally reached the breaking point of not being able to tolerate bad customer service. We had the benefit of having a deep understanding of the industry, which allowed us to fully understand that the issue was not with companies not caring about customer service experiences, but instead that every enterprise company in the world was forced to buy from a small number of PE-backed vendors, all of which were 20, 30 or 40-plus years old. Basically, they are still trying to use technology that was developed before the widespread availability of the internet and are attempting to morph that into today’s internet-embedded world. It’s not working.
Edify’s leadership team comes with a deep industry background because the lessons of the past are important. This allowed us to create a platform that meets the needs of even the most demanding multinational companies, with uptime guarantees they can count on while leveraging the newest technologies and development philosophies in practice.
Simply put, we build the best technology for our industry, which solves a very human problem of bad customer service.
Where does the future of customer service look like in the next few years?
Companies are very aware of the impact their customer service department has on their overall business. They are actively looking at how they can create unique and even perfect customer experiences at scale. With Edify, we are providing the market with tools that actually let them deliver on those goals.
So, personally, I think the future is about to get much better for everyone, companies and consumers alike.
People think that millennials don’t like talking to people. In my opinion, that’s not actually the case.”
How are you using machine learning to enhance human engagement and customer experience?
People think that millennials don’t like talking to people. In my opinion, that’s not actually the case. Instead, millennials typically agree that talking to someone is just too inefficient of a thing to do. This really translates to just wanting the right answer as quickly as possible regardless of how they have to get it.
What is a major project you are working on this year? How will it impact the business?
Last year, we launched our one-of-a-kind Business Communications as a Service (BCaaS) platform, Edify Huddle. It is a cloud-native, omnichannel solution uniting unified communications (UC), contact center (CC) and communication platform (API) functionality in a single software solution that lets users move seamlessly among channels within one conversation.
We created Huddle to change the customer experience industry. Contact centers have been limited to using outdated legacy technology and we believe customers deserve a modern, intuitive and efficient way to interact with brands. Nothing existed, so we created a solution. After all, we’re customers too, and we want better experiences.
Huddle is our biggest ongoing project, as we’re always adding new features and perfecting the solution we imagined and then built from the ground up. Currently, we’re building out our client portfolio and partner channel program and look forward to growing these so that more businesses and customers can benefit from Huddle.
We created Huddle to change the customer experience industry.”
How will Edify grow in 2020?
Edify is growing rapidly, which creates an exciting environment. Expansion of our team is ongoing and we have plans to hire upwards of 50 additional employees at both our Fishers, Indiana and Santa Monica, California office locations within the next 12 months. We are always looking for talented individuals who aren’t afraid to push the boundaries and take risks.
Our current team is composed of like-minded individuals who work really hard, collaborate, have fun and challenge each other every day. We seek out individuals with similar traits when growing our team; we’re proud to say the current team at Edify is composed of some of the brightest minds in cloud computing and customer experience. We look forward to bringing on more talented people who can help grow our business and add to the fantastic culture we have built.
