Voice Over IP for SaaS Teams | With Expert Lon Baker

So I want to talk about one point you mentioned, which is about, you know, during COVID where a lot of those, you know, specialized hardware people in at the offices had the hardware for phone services to connect their systems to, you know, public phone networks. Now, you know, maybe for SaaS companies right now who have, you know, sales teams who are working in the office and are making that shift, um, can you talk about how that can, you know, be easily replaced? And then does that also work for, you know, at any scale, you know, say enterprise, large clients who have, you know, hundreds or if not thousands of these?

Yeah, I mean, replace— replacing hardware with software, replacing, uh, on-premise with cloud, it's all relatively It really comes down to a logistical issue, as well as honestly a cultural issue. We've encountered that recently, especially with COVID where some companies embrace it, right? They really— the managers have to embrace the change. The technology is relatively simple, honestly. There are complexities in networks and security, as well as regulatory compliance in some industries, but it's really a cultural shift. We went through it ourselves internally about 5 years ago when I, as COO, made the choice to, hey, let's allow our team to work from wherever they want and let them get out of the office. We had a kind of a central office we'd had for like a decade. Everybody went to the office every day. Everybody sat in the cubicles. Everybody sat in their offices talking to each other with phones on their desk. And we said, well, let's get everybody out of there. And it actually, we learned it had to be a cultural change. The managers had to embrace it because the technology is easy. Whether I need to ship a hardware phone to an employee at their home, Or whether I have to give them a soft phone to install on their computer or their mobile phone, or whether I just have to give them a web browser-based phone to load up in their, you know, on their Chromebook, right? That technology is the easy piece, right? The hard piece is getting the cultural shift to where management as well as the team members embrace it and enjoy it.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's always the biggest challenge, right?

It is the biggest challenge.

Yeah, getting to use the technology as simple, as easy as possible without that pushback and Yeah, exactly. What about when it comes to security? Because I can imagine, you know, like there's call encryption, there's voice over IP security, uh, but now with privacy concerns growing among, you know, people all over the world, right? Facebook, you have Apple, you have people just super, you know, super concerned about this, this matter. Is this user data, you know, typically safe technology? And where do you guys stand on this matter? How have you guys handled that?

Uh, well, we do support a number of encryption technologies including SRTP, TLS for the SIP signaling and things like that. But a big cultural thing and a big policy thing we made years and years and years ago was that for one thing, we don't retain any customer data, you know, beyond the time that we're required for regulations. So we don't have a huge warehouse of customer data that we then go mine for statistics or anything like that. We do nothing with that. Our customer data is only stored for the customer. We also have compliance things in place to handle whether it's US-based or EU-based, for example. And we comply with all the GDPR and those kind of regulations, as well as California has a regulation around privacy. But our big, our big, our big privacy focus for years now has been that our customers' data is their data. We do not store it beyond what we have to store it. We only store the bare minimum amount of data we need to store. And that was a big change because if we don't have it, we don't have any privacy concerns, right? That was a big piece. We didn't want to keep any data that we didn't absolutely have to have for the customers to deliver the service they want. Or to meet any kind of regulatory things we have to meet. Beyond that, we don't want the data.

Makes sense. I like that. Um, so, you know, can you give us some examples? You know, I know people in our audience, typically SaaS founders, SaaS marketers, how could you say they can start, you know, best leveraging using this technology within their business? I mean, what would you say is the right balance, right? You mentioned, you know, voice, video, messages. How much should we be focusing on each? Where are you seeing the trends going?

You know, I'll tell you the big trends. Obviously, in the last year, you know, video has become a huge piece. You know, we rolled out video conferencing last year also as part of that because people needed it to work remotely. That said, we think that voice and texting are really the bigger players in the market because that's what both— are both more efficient. They found in studies that actually voice communications are more effective than video communication. And so that's a piece that we think is really important. But texting especially, as, as new generations enter the workforce, they are more embracing text and more asynchronous communication, right, that texting allows to occur versus having to schedule a call between 2 people. So we think texting and voice are really critical. Plus, you can deliver voice anywhere in the world really easily over almost any network. Video is a little trickier. Plus, as, as we setting up this today, right, Having the right video camera, having a good microphone, having good audio, not— that's a lot more cumbersome for most employees. Whereas, hey, having a great video call or voice call and having texting, you can give that to any employee quickly and they can use it almost anywhere all the time.

And you mentioned, so I mean, you guys do voice, you know, now you have the video conferencing and text kind of growing. So you have some of the big players, right? You know, the Slack, the Google Hangouts, the Zoom. You guys have been around for what, 21 years or so or more? now kind of a leader in the space, but how do you guys stay, you know, competitive and compete with those big players and kind of stand out?

Well, our biggest way of standing out is, well, one thing, the one philosophy I've always had is customer service beats everything, right? So giving great customer service and being honest with your customers about what you can and can't do for them, right? To make sure your product fits their needs, right? That's key up front. If you got the expectations right, you'll knock their socks off every time. But the second piece is it really comes down to we partnered both with our 20 years of experience, a lot of things we have tremendous experience in, so we can quickly see a trend coming and either build or alter a solution we currently have to meet that trend. Or we've identified the key technologies, the key open source technologies, the key partners, and we partner with companies when we need to in order to deliver all the solutions customers are expecting. And that's how we kind of stay up, up to pace being a mid-sized company with the larger companies. And we actually have some exciting things in the works this year that are going to close the gap on those larger companies. And one thing's great, open source and the internet makes it easy for you to compete with pretty much any size company if you really want to.

That's true. I think your first point is super important. I think that Jeff Bezos mentioned that years ago, right? When he was building out Amazon, he said, hey, aren't you going to become a real estate player or a warehouse and you're going to build all these things? He's like, No, I'm building a customer-based company. That's all it is. Everything is for the customer service. That's what they ask and that's what we build for them.

So that's the key. Yeah, you have to go after customers. You have to deliver what the customer wants and you have to make sure that you're in alignment with what they need because there are times when we're not in alignment. They need something different than what we can deliver, and if we just sell it to them, they're not going to be happy.

That's true. You can't force it onto them. So if I'm a SaaS company, I'm the customer, what should I be looking for if I'm exploring all these different options? There's so many unified, you know, we're messaging providers or VoIP providers, what should I be looking for?

Well, it's interesting you say that. There are 2 things that I think, I mean, obviously everybody, every, I'm a COO, so you know me. As a COO of a company, I'm always looking for the best service at the best price that meets all the needs, right? That's the business side of the world. And that's the nickels and dimes. But the real key thing is, will your choice scale with your business and will it give you flexibility in the future? Like, are you locking yourselves into something? And we recently had a customer come to us who actually had bought a proprietary system, and it did everything they wanted for their business. And then one day something happened to it, uh, and when it happened, their entire business came to a grinding halt, and they now have to go and rebuild all that. And we're helping them in the meantime while they do that, but they locked themselves into a proprietary system, and now once it broke, everything in their business stopped because everything was in that one box. And so, you know, our philosophy has always been that we put our services where customers want to work. So whether they want to work in Slack or Google or Microsoft Teams, whether they want to integrate with one of thousands of services, we decided to integrate our platform with Zapier and give a developer API so they can build into whatever they want. So that way they can use our voice services or just our text services or just our video services, integrate into whatever their business needs. So that way all their eggs aren't in one basket, right? And they have opportunity to grow. And as we grow, they get new opportunities. And that's a big piece. Make sure you don't lock yourself into some proprietary system that if something goes wrong or if that company changes directions, now you have to re-architect your entire business around it.

Yeah, I mean, that's the issue, right? A lot of people lock into things of what their reliability needs are, you know, for, for the next 6 months or 1 year. But what happens in you know, when you actually hit growth in 5 years and now you're stuck with this and you have a mess to work with, right?

Exactly.

Long-term.

Yeah. Yeah. And to that point, real quick, the interesting part about that is that like over the last 11 years or so I've been with the company, we've kind of rebuilt our entire platform. We've taken our company to a whole new phase of growth and evolution at this point. And that's the— those are the lessons that I learned coming out of that was that, you know, don't lock yourself into a proprietary system or into some long-term contract. Or into a certain technology and not be open to other things that you can do. An example being perfectly, as we're seeing coming out of the colleges now, Chromebooks are flying out of the colleges. They're faster growing than anything else when it comes to your, I think your K through 12 education, is Chromebooks is now the biggest segment of technology. Well, for me as a leader in business and technology, when you're talking about that, and SaaS in particular, which I know is your focal point, Is I'm looking, going, well, the next generation of kids are going to be looking at that, and they might come out of school and go, that was so easy to use, I want to use that. Well, I need to make sure my platform is ready to deliver services. And to that end, like a couple years ago, we built a web-based phone that works perfectly well on a Chromebook. So if a company wants to deploy something inexpensive to, to employees, we're there. And that's kind of my philosophy of we put our services where people want to work so they can be flexible in their choices, not locked into a choice that we force on them.