This week, cloud communications provider, Dialpad, announced it is acquiring Koopid. This is the third contact center as a service (CCaaS) move Dialpad has made in the last two months.
About one month ago, Dialpad announced it was buying Kare Knowledgeware for its virtual customer care capabilities. A few weeks before that, it announced a partnership with workforce engagement management (WEM) provider, Playvox.
This purchase of Koopid brings an omni-channel customer experience (CX) product, powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Koopid provides omni-channel management for modernizing contact centers
At a high level, Koopid provides a number of digital channels as mobile, web, social channels as well as the platform to manage how customer interactions flow through them.
If a customer starts an interaction with the business, regardless of channel, Koopid can route the session to the right method of conversation, such as digital self-serve via a bot, call or other method. What’s very powerful the combination of other Dialpad tools as it creates a 1+1 = 3 scenario as it makes Koopid smarter.
For example, when a customer reaches out to a company, Kare can determined the intent using AI and based on that, it can take different actions. Kare essentially scores the interaction for level of difficulty and if the score is too high, the session can be deflected to a live person to solve as virtual agents and bots do not complicated well. If the score is low, then it’s fine to move to self-serve. Without Kare, Koopid workflows can be created and executed on – but the combination of the two raises the intelligence bar.
Kare + Koopid adds exponential value
One of the benefits of Koopid is the workflows can be set up through an easy to use, full drag and drop, low code / no code interface. This enables contact centers set up task flows quickly, without requiring the assistance of a developer.
Businesses that tap into Koopid can react to new use cases or market changes very quickly as opposed to going down the path of developer lead changes. Over time, the combination or Kare and Koopid should lead to greater levels of business agility.
Koopid’s current management interface contains a workflow methodology that states, if you get these questions, do this, which covers about 90% of use cases from a pre-trained library with the rest being unique. Kare has the ability to use various sources of data to create a broader base of knowledge that further improve customer interactions. Kare can actually optimize the training and retraining of Koopid workflows taking that 90% closer to 100% as it has a much broader set of data to work with.
The team that Dialpad is inheriting is well seasoned in communications. While there is a plethora of AI-powered CX companies, many are founded and run by recent grades from Ivy League schools. While some of these companies may be interesting, many are building technology for technology’s sake.
Koopid has a deep bench of talent from some of the best contact center vendors in the world, such as Avaya and Genesys, so Dialpad is getting a great team to go with the great technology.
Dialpad will keep Koopid open
An interesting aspect of the acquisition is that Koopid’s two biggest partners are Dialpad competitors Vonage and Avaya.
One would expect Dialpad to terminate the relationships to hurt the competition, but Dialpad is taking a different approach. On a pre-briefing, Joe Manuele, SVP of Corporate and Business Development told me they are inclined to keeping Koopid an open platform that other vendors, including their competitors can use to add digital channels.
For example, a business with an Avaya call center could keep it in place for the voice components and then modernize other channels using Koopid. I think this is the right approach, as it’s the least disruptive for customers and when vendors do things in the best interest of the customer, they are normally rewarded with more business.
While much of the combined value does require platform integration, and that can sometimes take a long time, I don’t expect that to be the case with Dialpad – Koopid as they are both cloud native companies. Vendors that follow modern cloud design run on containers and use microservices, which are easy to integrate in another platform. On the call with ZK Research, Manuele summed it up best when he said, “When you’re cloud native and you’re buying another cloud native company, it’s really easy to integrate an acquisition.”
Dialpad was certainly a late entrant to the world of cloud contact center but its cloud native design and smart acquisitions has let it catch up quickly. Now it has a complete CCaaS solution and can go toe to toe with all the incumbents.
Add in its cloud native UCaaS capabilities – the combination is what Dialpad calls TruCaaS – and Dialpad is now set to unseat many of its bigger competitors that have not yet migrated to a cloud native back end.