Gavin Macomber on Meeting Customers Where They Are, Not Where You Are

Gavin Macomber on Meeting Customers Where They Are, Not Where You Are

[00:00:00] Gavin Macomber: Welcome to be customer lad, where we’ll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the accidents and behaviors of lawyers and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host of Bill’s staikos.

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of be customer led. I’m your host bill staikos. I have a dear friend for our guests today. Gavin Macomber is the CEO of a company called cleverly communications. Now gladly is a leading. Of next gen voice messaging and data communication solutions for businesses and consumers.

[00:00:51] They’ve got about 7,000 customers. I’m really excited to talk to Gavin today because a topic that is near and dear to his heart, given the business that they’re in, as well as mine. Space that I’m in, in customer experience is meeting customers where they are not where you are as a company. So Gavin, welcome to the show.

[00:01:10] I’m so excited to have you here. Thanks so much for your time today, bill. It’s great

[00:01:13] Gavin Macomber: to be here. Thank you so much for having the on, be customer led. And I just, I want to give you a shout out. remember a couple of years ago you told me you were starting this podcast and you’ve really taken it to, amazing Heights.

[00:01:25] So congratulations. And I’m honored to be. Oh, man.

[00:01:29] Bill Staikos: I’m so honored to have you here. and you’re probably thinking then, like, this guy’s nuts. Like what are we doing? So, and for our listeners, our, our, our kids played hockey together, up in New Jersey when, my family and I were living in New Jersey.

[00:01:39] So very excited to have you going. So Gavin, we ask every guest the same question to kick off, right? So, and you’ve got a really interesting background marketing strategy ventures. You’ve been a founder. Tell our listeners a little bit about your journey. Let the rabbit out of the hat a little bit, I guess, but tell us, tell our listeners about your journey and some, what are the differentiating factors that you think.

[00:02:00] have helped you along your

[00:02:01] Gavin Macomber: career. Great question. And, yeah, let me, I’ll give you a little, a little bit of background and then maybe try to inject some, some life learnings that not to get preachy at all. Just, cause I, I know when I, when you’re not probably talked about this too, like when you start your career, you don’t, you’re not always confident in terms of.

[00:02:19] What am I going to do? And how, how does the world turn? And I went to school in the Northeast. I went to Babson for business school in the early two thousands. Did I, sometimes people ask me how how’d you get into telecom by the way. Right. And, and, I did it. Traditional summer MBA internship at a company called Genuity at the time generic.

[00:02:40] It was the old GT internetworking. It was, it was like a spinoff from Verizon. when Verizon was formed back in the day, I’m dating myself a little bit here, but. So

[00:02:50] Bill Staikos: you’re dating to me doing that, by the way, don’t, don’t upset the host, Gavin, you know what I mean?

[00:02:55] Gavin Macomber: They were doing, do you know what he was doing?

[00:02:57] Some really cool stuff. So they, they were actually, one of, they were the original internet backbone, the states back to like, you can look this stuff up, like. BBN and Boston Al gore was involved in that company way back when founder the internet. Right. they, they were doing some really cool stuff in the early two thousands.

[00:03:14] And I went to work for them. They had, when I left business school, I thought about going, should I go big corporate or should I do something else? And I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bent to me. And one of their customers was a startup that was doing international calling from cell phone. At the time, for consumers and, over voice over IP.

[00:03:35] And I was like, wow, these guys are really doing some cool stuff. And there’s, this seems like a lot more fun. Right. But obviously risky at the time. And, and back then, it was not popular to be an entrepreneur, or do a lot of startups. So I went there and, spent, spent a year or two trying to crack the consumer market and the consumer market.

[00:03:54] As we know, it was like B2C versus B2B. It’s always challenging. So fast forward to, we had, we had some success, enough success where we basically pivoted the company to become more of a B2B player, changed the name. From a consumer name, like cellular LD to, mobile sphere. and we, we had some, we had some, some luck.

[00:04:13] we had some good timing. We picked up some marquee customers like the Boston consulting group, Harvard university, consumer cellular. You still see their ads on TV today. That was pretty cool. So that I spent seven years there and, grew, we grew the company. Yeah, it wasn’t always easy, but, but I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.

[00:04:34] Gavin Macomber: And, while you, you, you learned from your, there’s the, the challenging years. and, and, and everything, everything leads you somewhere in your life. So, for younger listeners that are, that are like, trying to figure out like what to do next, or, what if I don’t.

[00:04:48] No, where I’m going, like trust your instincts. so I went from mobile sphere. We started talking to Vonage in, in like 2010 and we almost long story short Melville, sold the company to them. Wow. And no, but it, but they didn’t buy it. And that was like a big disappointment there. They, technology wasn’t congruent, whatever.

[00:05:08] Right. or those stories, but I, but I got to know the management team and they said, Hey, we’re, we’re launching a new product bondage mobile. Come help us. And it was like started time for change. And my wife was from New Jersey. That’s how I ended up in New Jersey though. So like, so I came down and started working for Vontage.

[00:05:24] we, we came down and, and, and Vonage was a, was a great experience too. but it was big corporate. Like I went from a startup to a thousand people at the Vonage headquarters in New Jersey. So definitely a, a, a transition.

[00:05:39] Bill Staikos: And that was the Vonage app on your mobile phone. Right. I remember using that.

[00:05:42] We’re still customer, we’re still Vaughn as customers. Are

[00:05:45] Gavin Macomber: you that’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So at the time it monitors very consumer focused, but that was, that was it. It was like, the Vonage, you had Vonage at home and then you had Vonage on your phone and that’s, that’s what we did. And, and it was, it was neat.

[00:05:57] So I was there for. product marketing ended up in, in strategy, the last, that last sort of stint advantage and worked with some external consultants and got the strategy bug, in the consulting bug. And so I left when I left Vontage in 2013 or so, I opened up my own management consulting shop, one man management consulting shop.

[00:06:20] Now, and, consulting is, you always hear this. It’s like feast or famine. Right. But, and, and I did that for about five years, and, and it was, and I also did a couple of little startups in there. I was involved with a couple of startups, which was Nate ended up, with a company consulting for a company called first.

[00:06:37] First Orion and we’ll, we’ll pull this back into the, into the CX arena for you. First, Ryan was, was, had this really cool product that they were launching called, engage. And it’s, it’s a branded calling solution on a mobile phone. So when your phone rings and you see that unknown number right, or random number, and you’re thinking, should I take this call or.

[00:06:59] This was, they, they had this solution where they could literally brand and they have it today and they’re doing well with it brand the entire screen, what they like Amex logo. So, it was American express calling and trying to reach you. Right. And not only would they tell you, not only did you know it was American express color, but they would purse.

[00:07:16] We could personalize it with. Bill. This is Amex calling, about some charge that was on the car, right? So that was a, a really cool technology and is today, and, and that’s where the world’s headings are. What we, if you, if you haven’t received a branded phone call, you, you probably will. One of these

[00:07:32] Bill Staikos: days.

[00:07:32] I’ve never, I never gotten one. I we’ve talked about this. I remember, when you were doing the work, I think that especially given. The proliferation of mobile. Like, I mean, obviously it’s been around for a long time, but even the last couple of years, the technology and the importance of even texts as part of that, right?

[00:07:49] Like even branded texts could be a thing where I’m getting random numbers. I’m like, who is this? Right? Yeah. Sometimes I’ll say T and T or whoever it is there. But, I love that and absolutely would increase my propensity to pick up the phone. If I knew that. A brand versus someone own number.

[00:08:07] Gavin Macomber: Yeah. And, and, it’s, it’s coming.

[00:08:09] I think, it’s a technology that’s going to get rolled out by the carriers Verizon T-Mobile at and T it’s it’s common. And there are a couple of players in the space first, Ryan certainly wasn’t the only one, but, but that was, I did that for a couple of years. It was a fun. Stan ended up running marketing for them left in 2020 and got started looking at the unified communications market.

[00:08:29] So sort of back to Vonage, back to voice messaging. It’s sorta sorta my core. I was talking to some PE firms about doing a roll up strategy. Could we go out and buy a couple platforms in the U S and this is where, like, everything happens for a reason. And, and, somehow I got connected with this PE firm up in Canada and Toronto, CPS capital, and they were in the process of acquiring.

[00:08:55] unified communications and IP facts company in Canada. And they said, Hey, we’re looking for somebody to come in and do some due diligence and help us think about strategy. And should we go into the U S and all this? I said, no, I’ll put my hand up. And, so, so I did, I consulted for them and then, W we, and we came up with a strategy and everything, and we got along pretty well.

[00:09:17] Gavin Macomber: And, and, that it was the next question was, Hey, we’re looking for a CEO, in Montreal, do you know anybody? And I’m not in Montreal, but this is what was crazy. Right? It’s it was COVID right. So everybody was starting everybody’s perceptions are starting to change now. And I said to down, I’m like, guys, I think this guy.

[00:09:36] Could be, could work really well in a distributed manner, distributed fashion, et cetera. So, and we’re going to go in and we’re going to expand in the us so fast forward, I, I, for the first year I ran the company like on zoom like this, right. And you’ve probably heard those

[00:09:50] Bill Staikos: stories. Oh man. Oh my gosh.

[00:09:52] That’s tough. As a new CEO as well, like that had to be a challenge in the house. It

[00:09:55] Gavin Macomber: was, it was, I finally got up to Canada and met everybody in person. Oh, it was like 10 months later, but it was, but, I, I’m a big proponent, I think,of remote work, I think in, in a lot of cases it can work. You and I have talked about this, and, and of course we’re in the unified communications business.

[00:10:12] And so we’re, we’re providing companies and people with mobile communications technology that allows them to work from anywhere. So, you, you have to, you have to sort of foster that, right? absolutely.

[00:10:25] Bill Staikos: You got to live that every day. Tell us a little bit about, tell us a little bit about cloud lay for, for our customers, for our listeners in the U S or even Canada.

[00:10:33] I mean, we’ve got listeners gratefully around the globe, like tell us a little bit about cloud layer and some of the products that some of the things that you guys have even, somewhat recently have come out with a pretty cool, I mean, just really interesting, awesome technology that you guys are putting out there.

[00:10:47] Gavin Macomber: Thanks. Yes, sir. are our core product is a unified communications platform, which is basically voice messaging, soft phone mobile apps also also can grow with the sort of old school desk phone. the industry calls it like. PBX. So it’s basically a cloud based business phone communication system. So we have, we have a few thousand customers up in, in Canada, mostly SMBs.

[00:11:13] We also have, the company, also has, a, IP facts business. And that’s a whole, whole nother story because people hear the word facts and they’re like, the people are still faxing

[00:11:24] Bill Staikos: over IP. Right?

[00:11:26] Gavin Macomber: IP faxes is actually huge. It’s I mean, the entire, like the, just a quick example of the entire medical community, hospitals, insurance companies.

[00:11:34] So I think there’s a stat out there. 75% of, of patient records. That flow around the country every day are set over IP facts, mind boggling. Right? So we’ve been in that business for a long time and that’s still a high growth area of the company. But back to back to unified communications, that’s really where we see the growth opportunity.

[00:11:54] And particularly in north America, the, during COVID unified EUCAST as they call it, Became rapidly adopted. Right. As you can imagine, I mean, March, 2000, March 20, 20, everybody went home. Right. All at once. And that’s why Microsoft teams took off. Right. Because everybody companies figured out they had teams on there, office 365 package.

[00:12:19] Right. But also for all the other, for all the. EUCAST companies out there, including Vonage and RingCentral and, and, Dialpad and many of the others, if it really became like a, just a hyper-growth opportunity, right. Because, because everybody needed to work remotely. And that’s what unified communications does.

[00:12:38] What we realized though at cloudy was when we started thinking about our north American strategy, we realized that. SMB market, particularly the, the micro SMB market. And when I say micro SMBs, I’m talking about businesses with like two to 10 employees. Right. And there, there are, there, there are 10 million of those in the U S just to give you perspective.

[00:12:58] And we’re talking about everybody from personal services, professional services, mom and pop retailers, real estate, property management. I mean, you just go. Go through the west

[00:13:08] Bill Staikos: financial services, even that right. You’ve got a small RIA team that’s managing money somewhere and

[00:13:13] Gavin Macomber: it, consultants, freelancers, I mean the freelancing freelancing industry is just blowing up.

[00:13:19] Right. Which so that’s, which is exciting to see. I love, love to see that. So we, so we came up with a product called talking taxed and, we launched it just a couple months ago. it’s really targeted for micro SMBs it. And what it does is, as you might imagine, based on the name it’s it’s it’s we basically took texting.

[00:13:37] And when I, and I, and when I say texting business, I’m referring to business, texting, not personal SMS, personalized semesters, like when I’m texting you or you’re texting your colleagues, business texting is customer to company or company to customer. trying to bring this back into your wheelhouse too.

[00:13:53] So it’s, so it’s it. And there are companies who’ve been doing this for a long time, right? This is not new. Look at, I know you had,the CMO from live person on last month. Great, great, great podcast. By the way, hit a live person. Been doing this for big companies for a long, long time, big brands like airlines and being able to text a big business like an airline.

[00:14:16] It’s hugely convenient. I got stuck in Florida, last week. my family and I went down for president’s day, weekend and flight got canceled and I’m on. I’m talking to three airlines and think about it. If you had to call three airlines and like, wait on hold, never get a gun. I was texting with three different airlines and yeah.

[00:14:35] And I got a flight. Like it was wild. this is a great example of like big brands and large enterprise have access to that kind of technology from companies like live person, mom and pop retailers, not so much. Right.

[00:14:48] Bill Staikos: And especially now, right? I mean, I feel like we still get everything delivered even.

[00:14:53] I mean, we’ve just because we’ve been able to support a lot of different small businesses in our area because of it. And they’ve taken advantage of yeah, they’ve got stuff, certainly on the web and you can do your ordering, but I have texted a couple of. That’s more personal though, but like, think about sort of like being able to text my order or saying, Hey, could you add this to this order?

[00:15:12] coming in Wednesday and the convenience of that is off the charts. I mean, completely changes the experience that you’ve got in the interaction you have with that company. Yeah,

[00:15:21] Gavin Macomber: absolutely. And we, as consumers of have lived through this, like, think about your kids are hungry for dinner, you didn’t make it to the grocery store.

[00:15:30] Let’s order pizza. Right. So I soaked, so I can either go on, Uber eats or one of, grub hub, whatever. Right. That’s pretty easy. But what about the local pizza place that everybody likes, who doesn’t have that technology? They’re not on Uber eats, right? They’re not on grub hub. We’ve got one in our neighborhood.

[00:15:46] Gavin Macomber: You’ve probably been there that, that we, like, my kids always ask for it, but they, the only way to order a pizza from them is on the phone. Right. So you gotta like, and you know how it is, everybody’s busy, like, how am I going to call them? And I, and I got to, do I want. Cheese and half pepperoni.

[00:15:59] I like, so just think of, if you could fire off a text and just say, Hey Dominic, can you, cook me up, cheese and pepperoni special that, we like, right. And then, and then you have a personal relationship with these guys too, and they remember you, and this is what’s cool.

[00:16:12] So we’re talking to X does for these types of businesses, we have an app that’s that you can put on your smartphone. Right. So, obviously like, your iPhone you’re in. Yep. But even cooler, we have an iPad app and a lot of businesses use iPads now. And then of course we have a, like a Mac Mac app on Mac iOS and we have a, a PC app if I’m in the pizza shop and I’ve got an iPad there, I can see those.

[00:16:37] I can, I can receive a message from a customer and I can get an, literally get an order. But not only that. They know it’s me, right? Because they’ve saved me and in their address book in context, and it’s look, it’s like a lot of small businesses today run their businesses off their personal mobile devices for that reason.

[00:16:57] But it gets super challenging when you have. Multiple employees. Right? Think about, I’ll give you an example, like a real estate firm who has a team, and that’s pretty popular today. Like, you got a team of real estate agents, two, three people and comp customer texts, realtor, a right, and says, Hey, I’m interested in this.

[00:17:17] Can you take me to see this house? And real literary now has to call realtor B and say, Hey, so-and-so wants to see this house. And then. And they just, they just get crazy. Right? So now what you can, what we have is we have a shared phone number capability. So there’s one number. We give you a number when the text comes up.

[00:17:36] Anybody on the team receives it and can respond to it. And w if I respond to it, and we all time, you can actually see me typing, right. So you’re not going to respond to the customer while I’m responding. Right. And then we have all kinds of cool things. Like, we can add auto replies, right.

[00:17:52] So if it’s after hours or whatever, or, on the weekend and. It’s. So this is where there’s tech. This technology that’s been available for big brands and large enterprise. We like to say we’re democratizing that for small business.

[00:18:09] Bill Staikos: I love that. And you you’ve actually done some re your company’s done some research on this, which I thought was fascinating.

[00:18:15] And because it’s not a small number of people that you guys have uncovered, that actually would actually want, I mean, I think like I use texts all the time. Like, it’s my preferred method of communication, frankly, even with my own team, I’m texting, I don’t love slack. I mean, it’s, it’s convenient, but like, I’m typically texting too, or maybe even using both and folks are jumping in and out of different channels.

[00:18:36] Tell us a little bit about that research, because I think like some of those results were really interesting to me, like, those numbers or like some of the numbers in terms of people are interested in texting their small business or mom and pop down the road or a really fascinating, totally.

[00:18:48] Gavin Macomber: So we, we, we did a consumer survey.

[00:18:51] But last year sometime, and it was, a couple thousand us mobile users and the results were really that they are really interesting. We, first of all, the big stat that jumps out of it is, 93% of consumers want to talk and text with a small business. So this is like the pizza shop, right. I want to call them to order the pizza, but I also, I would love to text them if was, and, and then the other one that we did, we asked consumers about.

[00:19:20] They’re experienced with small businesses and this goes back to, it’s so easy to order stuff on Amazon. You just, we all did that during COVID. Right. Except when my recycling gets so big, with all the boxes,

[00:19:31] Bill Staikos: if there’s not a sign of privilege, it’s Amazon showing up at your house every single day with like multiple boxes.

[00:19:37] Right?

[00:19:38] Gavin Macomber: So the, but the, but the child, like a lot of, we all want. Local business, small business. And like, so, in a lot of these small businesses, they they’ve, they they’ve got the stuff. And so it’s really about just making that purchase experience for small businesses. Convenient for consumers.

[00:19:57] And I’ll give you another example, right? So if, if you, if you use a, like a, a wine app, right, let’s say you want to get a, you’ve found your new favorite wine, and you’re going to order it from wine.com or somebody. Right. You can do that on the internet. I mean, Amazon has been in and out of the wine business, by the way, like three times, you can order that stuff and it’ll ship.

[00:20:15] You can order a case of wine. It’ll show up at your doorstep. But what about the local, your local wine shop downtown, who you want to support their independent? maybe they’ve got one or two locations. And so again, if I can text them and say, Hey, did that, one that, that, Italian Chianti that I like come in, right.

[00:20:34] And a lot of times you want to call them, but you don’t have the time. Right. everybody’s busy and forget about it, but if I could fire off. Like while I’m in a meeting or whatever, and just say, Hey, can you guys put that aside for me this weekend, I’ll be there Saturday. Right.

[00:20:50] Bill Staikos: And I think that’s what the important thing around text is.

[00:20:52] Right? I mean, text fits into your schedule as a consumer, right? It doesn’t like, oh, now I’ve got to go to the, now I’m going to take five minutes or 10 minutes out. I’ve got to go to the website. I’ve got to order the wine, then it’ll be delivered fine. But if you’re. At a stoplight or a stop sign, or you’ve got 30 seconds in between a phone call and, you’re trying to have some lunch or whatever that is.

[00:21:15] You can just fire off that text and say, Hey, I’d like a case of this wine as an example that is meeting your customer where they are, right. And th and it fits, and now you fit into their. Which is so meaningful in not only today. I think that the pandemic has certainly accelerated that, but, I mean, that was a trend that’s been building, but absolutely critical for any business and love that.

[00:21:39] You’re bringing that now. And I love the concept of democracy. We talked about, where I work, the concept of democratizing insights, you’re democratizing technology to. The masses by helping them be more competitive with larger companies. When you talk to your customers, like, I can’t imagine like a small, like a, like a three person, four or five person organization has like a communication strategy.

[00:21:59] Right. But when they’re like looking at your product, how do you think that makes them change their view or their perception of this is really important? Like we’ve got to really think about. How this fits into how we’re engaging our customers. Like, is it like a light bulb moment or is it like a problem they thought they’d never had?

[00:22:15] Or how does that kind of manifest?

[00:22:17] Gavin Macomber: Yeah, that’s a, that’s, that’s a great question, bill. And, I love to ask you the same question cause you probably, you could probably help us there. It’s, it’s the, the, the challenge with micro SMBs and like, we all know, we’ve either been small business owners and we know small business owners and people, especially during COVID.

[00:22:34] These people like were, were, are just working around the clock, trying to keep their business afloat if they were a brick and mortar shop. And like they were dealing with, restrictions back in the day where, or a restaurant, right. That was at 50% capacity. Think about. And so these, these are it, people are busy, so it’s, it’s really about how do you get them to understand that we can help them, right.

[00:22:57] So how can I help you help grow your business and make it easier for your team and make it more convenient for you? Less of a stressor. It’s like, we, we, we, we wrote this blog post about. Couple,maybe maybe six months ago, vacation proofing your SMB, right? Like small business. People want to go on vacation, but what if the phone keeps ringing.

[00:23:24] So when you have a landline, And I’ve talked to some people and they’re like, well, what do I, they have a landline old school landline that comes into their business and they literally like have to fast forward or they forward it to their cell phone. Right. but then their cell phone rings off the hook, like 24 7.

[00:23:38] Right. And that doesn’t really sound like a vacation to me, not at all. So what we, what we with our service. So we do texting and voice it’s all together. And so what you can do is you could have, you can really control, not only like you can control the customer experience and you can provide a really, I think even, even better customer experience, because think about when you, as a customer, when you call in and you don’t get the business or they don’t answer the phone, We have we have, if you text in, we can send an auto reply.

[00:24:06] It’s like after hours or we’ll come back to you, we’ll be back to you on Monday so we can do, and we can automate all that stuff for businesses and we can do it from, between nine and five, they’re going to get this message and then you can do cool stuff. Like if they call in you give them an IVR and you can say, press one, to like leave a message or press two.

[00:24:27] And we’ll, we’ll, we’ll text you. And then you send it up and then they press two and our platform will send an automatic text to them saying, and then we now we’ve converted the conversation into a texting thread. And w and somebody on the team can jump in and say, oh, Hey bill,

[00:24:44] Bill Staikos: what do you need?

[00:24:44] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin’s on vacation. I’m going to take this one.

[00:24:48] Gavin Macomber: Yeah, exactly. And that also with the whole shared the, the personal mobile, a lot of SMBs try to run their businesses on personal mobile devices. That is, is super challenging because they got one mobile number. Think about the realtor that posts their mobile number, right on every house they’re trying to sell.

[00:25:08] And, that’s, again, if you can have that, that number comes into a shared app and three or four people can respond to it makes it easier.

[00:25:15] Bill Staikos: Very cool. I, for me, I’m a little bit unorthodox and in my view around customer experience, from the perspective of, you’ve got to use the toolkit to actually drive business stress.

[00:25:26] Increased revenue, reduce your costs, improve the culture at your company. Right? So for me, when I think about meeting your customers where they are, you’ve got to do it in a customer friendly way, of course deliver the types of, or, or open up sort of a way to engage your business that your customers are looking for.

[00:25:42] So when you got to understand that, but at the end of the day, it’s about increasing sort of the, sort of the opening of the door, right. For them to come into that. At the end of the day. And if you don’t have texting, I mean, obviously we’re gonna have, nearly every business has voice, right? But like, if you’re not offering things like texts cause your and your, and your customers want to do that, you’re missing opportunities to grow your business.

[00:26:03] So for me, it is, it is very much about increase, opening the door to the front or the top of the funnel, and then being able to keep them in, because now you’re keeping them engaged in a very personalized way.

[00:26:12] Gavin Macomber: Oh, that’s, that’s, that’s a really good point. And you asked me a question a few minutes ago.

[00:26:17] Circle back to it. When you talk to small businesses, right? What do they, how does the light bulb go off? So one of the things that we can do, is we can text enable your existing landline phone number, right? So this is your, your voice number. Pretty cool. It’s cool. And, and look, we’re not the first to do it.

[00:26:36] Others have, but what it allows you to do is now you’ve got this published landline number of. It’s everywhere. It’s in, it’s on the internet, it’s on your website. It’s now you can say, call me or text on that number. And that text comes in and it goes on, on the app, on the existing landline number.

[00:26:53] So that’s super powerful stuff. And when you tell a business that the business owner that usually they’re like, you kind of, they’re like, you can do that.

[00:27:00] Bill Staikos: Yeah.

[00:27:03] Gavin Macomber: This is another crazy statistic. And we tell them, your customer, you’ve got customers out there that are probably trying to text that night.

[00:27:10] And they’re just disappearing in the space.

[00:27:13] Bill Staikos: That’s pretty cool. That is really cool stuff. Yeah. Let me ask you a question. What do you, when you think about business texting, I mean, you guys are probably measuring this, but like, what are you hearing in terms of the impact of that on the SMB space? You guys considering

[00:27:28] Gavin Macomber: that in any way we launched the product a couple months ago, so we’re pretty early, but we’ve had a lot of conversations with.

[00:27:35] Small business owners who, have, have, we’ve got a free trial, so you can sign up and you can use the service for a month on us. which is pretty cool. So we get a lot of feedback, which is great. Cause you, you want customer feedback and that’s how you improve. But, it’s, it’s great to hear, stories from business owners who.

[00:27:53] we’ve made their life more convenient, right? The business, the business owner themselves, the realtor, a real estate group with shared texting the well we’ve got the property management companies. We’ve got mall, like, one, two person law firms. Right. And believe it or not like they have clients that actually want to touch them and don’t want to yet we’ve.

[00:28:13] Gavin Macomber: I think we we’ve made their lives easier. We made their lives more efficient. It’s go back to the vacation proofing business. and then from the, from a consumer standpoint, I think we’re, we’re giving consumers that option to text a local business. Right. And, and so that’s for them, it’s, pulling it back to like ordering pizza for your kids.

[00:28:33] That’s something that, I think is, is super valuable, right. For, for all of us out there as consumers.

[00:28:39] Bill Staikos: I just went through the order pizza for your kids last night. I would’ve loved to be able to text cause I wa we were running around the house trying to take care of three and get, get them.

[00:28:47] Like, post-school like just kind of calmed down and not run around and just like, what do we do for dinner? And kind of looked at each other and said, okay, let’s order some pizza. I’d love to just be able to fire off a text version, having a call here’s my address, blah, blah, blah. And kind of going through all that stuff.

[00:29:00] This is really cool tech. I’ve got two more questions for you, Gavin. and I’ve recently started asking, the first one, but I really do love the response to that again. And I’ve actually gotten feedback that, that folks love this question because it’s opening people’s perspective into different, leaders out there.

[00:29:16] Bill Staikos: So like who do you look up to from a business perspective?

[00:29:20] Gavin Macomber: That’s a great question, bill. And you, you said you sent that to me a couple of weeks ago and I’m still thinking about it. And, I respect people that, are visionaries. people who can see markets. Shaping three, five years in the future.

[00:29:35] I think that’s a, that’s, that’s a, incredible asset for, for, for a lot of people that probably many of us could probably do it if we tried, if we’ve just thought about it. But I look at people, obviously like classic example areas like Elon Musk with know electric vehicles, right? I’m an Evie guy now I’m not a Tesla driver.

[00:29:54] but even a year ago, like the market was. And it’s very immature. Right? Very, still very emerging on, on trial and it, and another year goes by another two years, everybody’s going to be driving you bitch. So yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:08] Bill Staikos: Pickups. I mean, pickups, Daz, EVs is just mind boggling to me, right?

[00:30:12] Gavin Macomber: Yeah. Yeah. The F-150 is going electric, right?

[00:30:16] Bill Staikos: Yeah. Like you can’t even get one. It’s just like everyone wants

[00:30:19] Gavin Macomber: one of those things. Totally. in our industry, there, there are a couple people. So one Rob LoCascio, he’s the founder of, of LivePerson. I don’t know Rob, but, I’ve watched him over the last 10 years. I’ve watched that company grow, again, classic example of like knowing that this was the world we were going to live in, was going to be messaging and texting.

[00:30:42] And again, they, they empower, big brands to communicate with their customers via text or vice versa, right. Customers to come to. So having that insight, and now they’re doing really cool stuff with like conversational AI.

[00:30:57] This is in your, in your sweet spot and, and love to hear more about where you think that the whole conversational AI space is going because of. That’s for people who haven’t heard that term. So I think it’s still sort of a niche term. w what are your thoughts on that?

[00:31:10] Bill Staikos: Is that I actually see that I see that creeping down more into the commercial or mid-market space, right.

[00:31:17] It’s certainly in the higher end for sure. But what I see more and more, and we, we talked a little bit about this when we have the COO on is, and they’re doing some really cool stuff, and there are other platforms out there that are doing this, but it’s much more interactive and more engaging, video.

[00:31:33] Right, right onto your phone as an example, like being able to draw that up. And I think it’s going to like the next, let’s say three in about three years, it’s going to completely change the way that we even like, like use this thing. I mean, it’s, it’s really going to be much different. I don’t, I don’t know if, how different people realize that.

[00:31:52] And in live live persons have massive organization, right? Like they’re sort of at the forefront, a lot of the stuff, but the, the interactiveness is going to get much more sophisticated and the personalization as well. And company’s ability to deliver personalized messages at the right moment in context is really going to start to get much, much bigger, which so I’m really excited for that.

[00:32:15] Gavin Macomber: Yeah. And by the way, In a almost fully automated fashion fully. That’s right. That’s what’s I think, pretty well about it. the, the other one I’ll give you one other, the, if we have time, there’s a guy named Chris heard. he, I don’t know if you’ve come across him on, on LinkedIn or anywhere, but he’s, he’s the founder and CEO of first base first base is this company that’s providing, they provide a platform for remote.

[00:32:42] So when you, you hire somebody in the onboard them, what do they need at their home, in their home office? Right. How do these guys have figured out how to make this experience? Incredible right. Beyond more experience. So when you, when you started a new company and you’re working remote, and this, this platform allows that company to basically make sure you have everything you need, right.

[00:33:03] And then all get shipped and it’s all personalized. And so the reason, and again, I’ll tie it back to like people who can see market shaping Chris figured out before COVID. Somehow that this whole world was going to go remote right overnight. Yeah. I have a lot of respect for people and people like that.

[00:33:22] he’s, also look working remote is not easy. I think he’s also doing a lot of good injecting, a lot of good for people out there that are especially like, if you’re younger and your career, I mean, imagine your first job out of college and you’ve got to work remote, right. That’s gotta be super challenging.

[00:33:38] Bill Staikos: It is. I mean, I remember when I was at Freddie Mac, we were doing like, serving younger employees and they were like, I’ve got a remote cohort. I actually, they were connecting outside of the office. Like no one was going in the office at the time. And they were forming groups and coming together, like at parks, socially distant just to meet.

[00:33:56] Other younger employees. Right. And, old guys like me, I’m like, I’m never going to the office. Like, I don’t want to do that. Right. So, but like, but it was really fascinating in the importance of creating that human connection early on. Not just getting it right from like an onboarding perspective, but even, being able to think about.

[00:34:14] not just remote work, but also making those, those human to human connections in, in, in a way is super important. I’m with you in terms of the, the misfits and the, and the folks that are able to kind of like see, peak around the corner and when others are just still kind of toiling at their desk, like doing the, doing the work that everybody else is doing.

[00:34:29] when you, when you think about where you go for inspiration, where do you go to fill your tires?

[00:34:34] Gavin Macomber: Great question. I, I, I definitely spend time on LinkedIn. Like we all do. I mean, I, I like to follow what’s going on in the industry and see what my old colleagues from various places are doing.

[00:34:45] And that’s all well, and, and, obviously like just, being aware of like trends and what’s happening around the other one, but I’ll give you another one that I’m a huge fan of morning brew. Not, not to plug them too much, but I love what those guys have done. Alex Lieberman. Brilliant guy.

[00:35:01] Obviously I started listening to their business, casual, podcasts like two or three years ago, like on the treadmill. Right. I’m like, and how good were those right? Early on.

[00:35:11] Bill Staikos: Yeah. Super engaging podcasts. I mean, and what they’re doing, I mean, what they’ve accomplished and what they continue to do is just, it’s awesome.

[00:35:19] It’s an inspiration. It’s great

[00:35:20] Gavin Macomber: to see. They’ve got a new podcast called imposters. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I just. I just

[00:35:27] Bill Staikos: saw it as well, a couple of weeks ago. It

[00:35:30] Gavin Macomber: sounds pretty cool. It’s like, how do people, how do people get to where they are in their careers? It’s like what we’re talking about right now, it’s going to be fascinating.

[00:35:39] So I’m looking forward to listening to some of those. But I can find the time.

[00:35:45] Bill Staikos: Well, you’ve got to run a business. I know that’s not easy. That takes up a lot, plus a plus a family and everything else. Gavin, it’s so good to see you, man. So happy to have you on the show. I really appreciate you coming on and talking to, talking to listeners about a little bit, what you’re doing, what you’re hearing out there in the market.

[00:35:58] And I think you guys are doing some really cool stuff, and I think it’s so important to be able to bring this kind of technology to so many other organizations who really need to open up that door and let customers in, in different and new ways. Yeah. You’re changing the game man every day. That’s awesome.

[00:36:14] Gavin Macomber: Thanks bill. Well, a pleasure. A pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me having us and, really enjoyed the conversation. So let’s, let’s do it again soon, in, in

[00:36:24] Bill Staikos: person to, right. Yeah, absolutely. next time I’m up in, in your neck of the woods. I’ll definitely give you a shout or vice versa.

[00:36:30] Thanks. Absolutely. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening

[00:36:35] Gavin Macomber: to be customer led with bill oath. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we’re doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time we’re out.