[00:00:27] Jay: Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name's Jay Aigner today. I am lucky enough to be joined by someone in the land down under, Mike Powrie, founder and CEO of CloudWave very early in the morning for you, Mike. I appreciate you being on. How are you, buddy?
[00:00:42] Mike: Very well. Thanks, Jay. Good to go. How are you? Yes.
[00:00:47] Jay: saying for the show, it's six, seven, six 21 there now, you were lively. so that's a good start. You used to work in these sort of hours to kind of hit the American zone or what?
[00:00:59] Mike: Yes. We've got a lot of new American brothers and sisters that, that need some love. So we're up early. but you know, I've always been a bit early riser and I think, you know, it's a The cliche is correct. The early bird gets the worm, Jay.
[00:01:13] Jay: Yes, it does. it does. so tell me, where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life? Silence.
[00:01:43] Mike: really nice bite sized chunks and help people learn.
and I sometimes think maybe that.I've been around quite a while, Jay, for my 20, 50 year in IT and I started off, it's really, you know, explaining, some of these complex information technology terms and services across networking software. You know, my first job was in a distributor, in a contact center, actually.
answering a ton of questions, and, I sometimes think maybe that the folks, sometimes helped, with that teaching, aspiration. But yeah, no, this is off my own bat and really sort of more of a, something I had to do. I felt a burning desire, when after sort of 10, 15 years in corporate, sort of thought, what else is there?
You know, this was a disruption play within a really old antiquated industry in contact center town with some, you know, rigid tools and expensive stuff that doesn't integrate and, you know, the penny dropped around 2013 that there was a better way to do this and. this build versus buy concept, these Lego blocks that from AWS from Google, from Twilio, you could finally wrap technology around a business and, you know, CloudWave was born, and we haven't looked back
[00:02:58] Jay: Beautiful. it's very interesting. You say that about teachers. I, as you were saying that it made me realize I have had a lot of entrepreneurs on whose parents were teachers
and those little, the fact that you pulled out maybe why that is, as far as like being able to explain things and like, kind of, that's a very interesting,
take on that.
So I, I never really connected those dots before.
so how did cloud wave start? I mean, you kind of hinted at it a little bit there, but like, what was the actual Kind of genesis of, you said, okay, here's a problem, let's go solve it.
[00:03:31] Mike: Jay, my background's all in, was unified communication. So I did 10 years at Cisco systems. fantastic organization, you know, on the forefront of internet adoption and really cool level of training. I worked, I was the youngest managing director for a Danish firm called Jabra for a couple of years.
worked for a German company called Siemens with their unified comms practice in Australia. I headed up that and then I was at British telecom for four years. Doing really big hairy managed services. So, I got to sort of understand that the unified comm side and then the dark arts of managed services and telco and how that all works.
and like I said, I just, I had some really, horrific. A couple of experiences trying to deliver contact centers, utilizing old world technology. So some of this, some of the traditional players with expensive license models. as I said, they were trying to stuff kind of this on premise equipment into the cloud and, you know, it wasn't multi tenant.
It wasn't designed for it. And we just had massive issues and we had agents who were left, you know, with tools that they couldn't use. As I said, we spent years trying to integrate things and it just would not work. technology was clunky, super expensive CFO white in the face. and it really struck a chord with me and cut me pretty deeply, around there must be a better way to deliver.
A contact center of the future that gives the agent the tools and the information they need at the time they need it, and it and really helps customer the customer journey coming through. And the other thing, Jay, is everyone has a horror story about dealing with a contact center. everyone I speak to.
You know, you're trying to shut off your cable service and it's 90 minutes. You know, you get bounced around trying to set up a new mobile phone and the previous guy doesn't know your details. you know, there's no authentication. yourself five times. So look, it was an industry that just needed help, and we saw a huge problem, and that was the CloudWave being born.
[00:05:31] Jay: Beautiful. And who was your first customer after you guys built whatever version of the platform you ended up selling?
[00:05:38] Mike: yeah, look, so, so at first we were, you know, who the hell is cloud wave? and we coupled with some really other big, global content, global managed services company. So tech Mahindra, I had some friends of British telecom, Telstra, you know, a toss, there was some large. Global, managed service providers.
And so we lent on their credibility with customers and their big contracts, and we folded in underneath and just did some cool, shiny, innovation elements. And that's how we really got started. So we leverage their credibility. but we brought to the party some really cool innovation that,that they didn't have and, you know, a lot of these large organizations have to stick to a core few pillars of tech, and it slows them down in their competitive nature ability to meet customer demand.
And we brought that so it was a nice, powerful combo.the story behind it is I'm at New Year's Eve and, responding to a tender, there's fireworks going on outside. I'm like eyeballs falling out of my head, answering a tender in India and, people telling me I'm crazy and what are you wasting your time for?
And, we won that tender and the customer paid us up front for five years. So that was the other big moment. And it was very cool. It was a nice lucky break. But if it hadn't been that, it would have been another one because, you know, you just, the burning desire has to, in some ways, sometimes override common sense to get you off the ground.
You know, it's, It's, it's just, it must be done and you must get through it no matter what. And, you will succeed. So that's the upside. I'm too
[00:07:16] Jay: At first, I thought you said you were on Tinder, on New Year's Eve, which I thought was a. Different story, I think,than the one you just told.what do you, so what does cloud wave provide today? In a nutshell, like what is it a platform? Is it a services company? Like, what is it today?
[00:07:34] Mike: Really quick. So we're primarily engineers. Every single person in the 30 odd strong company is a contact center expert. Hugely important because it's a niche that needs a subject matter expert. So KPIs and reporting and how AI can be folded and you need to know contact centers. So that was part A. What we do is we take some really cool new age technology from the likes of primarily Amazon.
So Amazon Connect is their latest contact center product. Again, in this Lego block framework with 300 odd different services that you can knit together around, you know, speech and, you know, text to speech, AI modules, incredible amounts of, you know, you can change, language. you know, even the voice for two different, intonations for different,comfort countries around the world.
and really shaped that customer journey, you know, play music on whole that suits that person's era. There's some insane tailoring that can be done. And finally, you can create a customer journey that. is unique to your business. Now, the other side is also the agent. So, if anyone's been into outside of contact center, this is some, it's a relatively thankless task.
It's eight hours a day of really dealing with problems. So we've made it our mission. to improve the lives of these agents because a happy agent will give a better experience. And that then creates longer lifetime value for the business, top line revenue, less churn. There's all sorts of really great ramifications and ripple effects of creating a good customer experience.
Our software sits on top of all of this, the Amazon connect world, other plugins, you know, CRMs, workforce management tools. As I said, you know, AI customer journey analytics across all channels, breaking, bringing WhatsApp and also it's really anything that your imagination can come up with.
We can bring into our single pane of glass called neon now. Which is on the Amazon Marketplace.
[00:09:39] Jay: Wow.yeah, as I was, you know, we talked a little bit before the show. I worked at a call center platform company before. what is, what would you got any stories from any of the call centers you've had to visit while you're building this platform? Is there, you know,
have you seen the beaten down and the downtrodden,
agents, you know, what's your, what's it
[00:09:58] Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have.
[00:10:01] Jay: start
[00:10:02] Mike: time you go, I mean, first thing is you walk in and the guys have their favourite you know, football team jersey hanging up. They've got pictures of their kids, their cat. You know, some tickets to an Adele concert they went to. So they're tailoring their They're cubicle.
So we took that logic and allowed them to tailor their own desktop. So the colors, where the information is on the screen, the time it pops up, suggestions for how to answer questions. We've also taken logic around this internal customer journey and down to the level of, we can tell by the intent of the call before it hits the agent.
Is this a complaint? Is this something that they're wanting to, Buy something. Is it a changing an appointment, you know, for an engineer or whatever it might be a new vacuum cleaner part, depending on the company. And then if the agent has had a couple of stressful calls in a row, we can divert that to a different agent, or we can deflect it to an automation queue or chat channel, or we can send it to somebody who's really highly skilled in a certain topic.
So straight away, we've got this symphony of. the intent capture and then pushing to the right person or right task that really, again, improves, the agent's life as well as gets the customer to the right space at the right time. First time.
[00:11:28] Jay: How do you sell software with new technology into such an antiquated industry?
[00:11:35] Mike: Yeah, look again, maybe the teaching comment comes back. it's just education. it's day after day of educating folks. and this stuff is not easy. You know, even for seasoned it. Veterans who understand networking and tech and hardware. this is, there is an ocean of possibility in this new world.
As I mentioned, 300 services from Amazon, that's just AWS. You know, there's all sorts of other plugins and, you know, data sources that people have. So what we really try to do is it's a hand holding through a digital transformation. It's people don't know what they don't know. So we might start with what's a really quick win a problem and let's focus on that build to that deliver and then let's move on to the next and improve, get collect some data.
understand, you know, where the business insights are and feed that back to the guys that actually know the business better than anyone. And then they can, sort of instruct and decide where to utilize this technology, to improve their business. So it's really a, it's a handholding. Yeah. an education exercise.
[00:12:45] Jay: Is it custom, you know, I mean, it's, it doesn't, maybe it's just. Yeah. You know, the semantics of it, but is it a custom, implementation for each client or is there some sort of central, like, this is our platform and this is what we do.
[00:13:02] Mike: Yeah. So it's a very good point. It can be either. So in the old world, you go buy a product off the shelf, you've got 20 features and that's it. You're away. This, the other side of the coin is you have 300, 500 features and you kind of bamboozled by where do I start? So we're somewhere in the middle. So we provide This overlay, which will day one, set up your data, like give you access to all this 300 allow you to drag and drop and take the elements that you want and then allow you to manage them.
So you've got the levers in your hands or the business people do. You don't need to call it pay thousands of millions of dollars to another company to come and change things. You, the business owner can do that on the fly. So it's all about empowering the agent, the context and a manager. You know, things like reporting, right?
this is another massive rabbit hole. You know, there's literally hundreds of stats that you might want to pull out, but each company is different. They goal their staff on different things. So we've, with our interface, you drag and drop what stats you need. You set parameters, you set warning lights, et cetera, et cetera.
And this can be then changed tomorrow, the day after, you know, we look after, you know, Sydney Opera House is a big iconic customer of ours. They had a really, you know, unique issue where they would, you know, have hundreds of people on hold waiting to buy tickets to a concert. You know, let's say, you know, Adele, let's say.
And, I love Adele for some reason this morning. Let's say, You know, and those concerts, those tickets would sell out straight away, right? But then they got 97 people on hold churning through, Hello, sorry, no, it's sold out, sorry. So we can inject a message into that hold music on the fly or they can do it.
Sorry guys, Adele is sold out if that's what you're calling about. Thank you. You know, good luck next time. 88 people drop off that queue, right? And it's just a much nicer experience and nicer service from a company and the technology is there. So why not take advantage of it through a platform such as ours?
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:13] Jay: how do you guys. Prevent yourself from just being accustomed software development shop. Right? Like, you know, all your customers want different things. They want, you know, these. Good. different, even if it's just layout stuff or if it's features or it's whatever, I think a lot of those SaaS companies can fall into the trap and I've worked at them where they really have to fight against how much customization, how much time they spend in each account.
Because there is a limit where like their ROI just isn't worth fielding every single little request, as I'm sure you know.
[00:15:47] Mike: So again, so this Jeff Bezos concept is what we kind of mirror us. This is open API. So this is probably the genius master stroke of AWS is they've made everything open API. So that means that anyone can go and knit together these services that they see fit. And we have big enterprises will go and do it themselves if they have You know, 100 different developers and, you know, 6, 12 months and a few million dollars, which some big banks and these guys do, they will go and create their own and manage it themselves.
Now, most companies in mid market, et cetera, do not have those skills, but they still want to have this enterprise really cool, tailored contact center. So that's where they will come in and use our framework and our overlay, which is again, not hard and fast. You know, we're not shoving them into that 20 features and that's it.
You have the ability to pull in what you want as a business and then use that as a launching pad into differentiating yourself against your competitors. so we're giving them the levers. We're not forcing them into a product. if that makes sense. But it's a, it's an interface. It looks like a cool product.
You've got reports and flashing colors and all sorts of cool stuff, but you're in charge of all those flashing colors and where they sit and what time, et cetera. So we're in that middle hybrid ground. And it's a, I think it's a great place to be. It solves the problem on both sides.
[00:17:14] Jay: Well, considering I've worked at a call center software platform and you own one and I do QA and I have done QA at those places. I have to ask you a question. I've never asked anybody before, which is
how do you handle QA on your platform? How do you test that? You know, all these disparate integration pieces.
Now you can't obviously test. The components of Amazon and that sort of thing, which is kind of a basic testing understanding. But how do you make sure it all comes together correctly? So that the client is getting the best experience possible. Okay.
[00:17:45] Mike: it's a rigorous process. It's a meticulous process. So,our core values in the business is to see raw, you know, collaboration, respect, ownership. Accuracy and reference ability. And so this is what we live by. And this is what carries through all of our customer engagements, our internal meetings.
How do we hire people? You know, these are things we fall back on. So you'll notice that accuracy there is in our values because it is essential and, you know, everyone knows from the coding world, You miss a semi colon somewhere and things break and we can't afford to have a contact center down for any amount of time.
So, you know, this is the front door to most organizations. So, obviously the cloud takes away all of that resilience and security and plumbing side. And then our software is absolutely rigorously tested. we have multiple staff who manage that. We do,stage rollouts. and internal, sanity testing.
And there's seven or eight different layers of this, before the product goes out. and look, TouchWood, we've had smooth deployments, you know, the majority of the time. If there's, something that, that on the rare occasion slides through, then it's a bug fix and that gets, treated immediately. so there's a really rigorous process.
That's how you solve, for that QA. Yeah.
[00:19:07] Jay: Hold on. Yeah, I mean, we used to sit on calls and. When a big ad was about to run,
I mean, at, you know, 10 o'clock at night, we would be there with the, all the, you know, the server information up making, you know, you see the spikes and it's like, I'm holding my breath to make sure everything goes through. So I've been through some of those hairy, you know, quality,
I guess you'd call it issues, with
those platforms. So what are you guys doing for marketing today? What are you doing for sales? Is that your main job as the CEO? Like, what are you out there doing? And is that part of it?
[00:19:38] Mike: it is. And look, business development is really, you know, my, my only value add these days. I've got so many smart guys and ladies who manage the machine of cloud wave. and so I focus on alliances. You know, we've got a whole lot of new partners joining who. may want to, resell, Amazon connected.
Don't understand how, so that's globally, again, we have a lot of global system integrators who want to use us as their, CX division. and then we deal directly with, end users and our sweet spot is around that, you know, 20 to 500 agents, depending on the region. So, yeah, look, we do a ton of digital stuff.
we, I used to shell out, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for, various shows and I just don't know if there's a much payback there for me personally, for us, a lot of tire kicking and, you know, more vendors at the show than actual customers. So, and that's just being general. So there are some good ones still out there.
but, you know, you have a ton of digital stuff. we try to do thought leadership pieces. We do blogs, things that aren't. Just kind of poking people and trying to sell more about guys. Have you thought about, you know, generative AI, reporting is so critical. This is how we do it. this is how we just built a chat bot to solve for healthcare industry.
we do some really cool stuff in vertical. So two tier banking is probably our, one of our strongest suits. There's a whole lot of integration into custom, credit union databases and warehouses. And, we've had a lot of success and testimonials that have come from that. And that's probably the biggest and the best way is have the customer talking to other customers about you.
That's really the only true way because anyone can spout hot air, all day, but it's getting your customers saying nice things is the absolute, you know, nirvana. And that's where every single customer reference ability is our last. So that's about making sure every single engagement, the customer comes away saying nice things and we're highly referenceable.
[00:21:42] Jay: Yeah, I always like to say my clients literally are my salespeople. I don't have a sales
[00:21:48] Mike: but they are,
If they were, they would be, you know, my, highest paid commission people because they just, you know, when you get a referral from somebody, that's like, they did this for us.
[00:21:59] Jay: You need that. You should work with them. It's almost, I don't think there's a better. Set up now, referrals aren't necessarily scalable, but to your point, you can get testimonials and use case studies and all those sort of things that are kind of the next best thing to a director for, I think, where at least they know that, you know, somebody else had a lot of success with you.
Um,final question, I'm going to keep this non business related, just, Mike, you know,
outside of the business world, if you could do anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be? Okay,
[00:22:34] Mike: man, that's a really cool question. look, I've got a bit of a passion for, health. you know, I'm, I, for a number of reasons, you know, we've, it's always been instilled early. you know, to sort of, you know, keep healthy. And I think that's a huge part of, well, what drives me and what sort of keeps the blood pumping literally is a focus on health.
So, something in the health field, around, you know, longevity, you know, dieting and I'm right into, you know, a lot of, you know, Huberman and, and a whole lot of, really good, doctors out there focused on this stuff, it's just a really Cool. Interesting thought. And I think it's not just about living for a long time, but living well.
So, and, and for me, it really, as I said, it helps a lot during those stressful times. If you've, got a bit of a baseline of, you know, the gym and you're, you're,you're decent diet. And, and by the way, you don't, I'm far from perfect, but,there's still a lot of chocolate cake and, you know, the glass of wine.
But, Yeah, that's probably the where I would go, mate, is somewhere in health, a doctor or something like that. That I always loved that idea.
[00:23:41] Jay: I like that. I, yeah, I mean, I try to eat as healthy as possible. I actually, I'm very proud of myself. I set a goal yesterday morning, Halloween morning.
I said, I'm not going to eat any of the kids Halloween candy tonight. Cause if I get into a piece of it, it's over, you know,
It's just like a cascade of like gummy bears and everything else, so I'm very proud to say that I did not. Have any candy last night.
it was a gold of mine and I crushed it. So,
[00:24:06] Mike: Well done,
[00:24:07] Jay: there's little wins, you know what I mean? It's the little wins, Mike, you were fantastic, man. If you want to find more about you or cloud wave, what's the best way to do that?
[00:24:14] Mike: Matt, I'd head to our international landing zone, which is, www. neonnow. io. So N E O N O W, neonnow. io. It's got a whole heap of stuff about us and testimonials and some cool videos. I'm on LinkedIn at Michael Powrie, under CloudWave. if anyone wants to hit me up, that would be very cool.
Always happy to chat. yeah, mate. And thank you so much. What a great podcast and, really nice to talk.
[00:24:42] Jay: Yeah, it was great to meet you, man. And, enjoy the rest of your week. Enjoy the upcoming summer down there and I'll talk to
[00:24:47] Mike: Thank you, sir.
[00:24:47] Jay: All right.
[00:24:48] Mike: Good on you. Thanks Jay. You too.