SalesTechStar Interview with Adrian Di Pietrantonio, Co-Founder & EVP, Global Platforms & Partnerships at Dubber

Call recording technology is turning out to be more critical to B2B sales and customer facing teams, Adrian Di Pietrantonio, Co-Founder & EVP, Global Platforms & Partnerships at Dubber shares his observations in this chat:

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Hi Adrian, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about your role at Dubber and Dubber’s story so far?

Hi – thanks for having me! My background is largely in the telecommunication industry and in 2011, James Slaney, Steve McGovern and I joined forces to launch Dubber. Over the past decade we’ve grown the company into the world’s leading provider of cloud-based call recording and voice AI services.

Dubber is a publicly traded company based out of Melbourne, Australia, but in 2018 I moved from Australia to the U.S. to open Dubber’s North American headquarters in Dallas, TX. I currently lead the company’s partner relations and have helped secure partnerships with world’s largest telecommunication service providers and technology companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce and Zoom.

Read More: Making Sales Intelligence Work For Your Business

How are you seeing call recording technology becoming more sophisticated in today’s times and how do you feel innovations in this space are set to change how sales teams and businesses perform their customer facing work?

Traditional call recording technology is expensive and requires on-premises hardware. Historically that has meant that only large enterprises or call centers where employees are located in a single location have been able to reap the benefits of call recording. However, with the emergence of cloud-based technology, it’s now possible for companies of all sizes to unlock the value within voice data.

Where others focused on call recording tied to their application or service, Dubber focused on making call recording available on any service, application or endpoint. What this means is that it’s not only affordable, but available everywhere. Now every conversation can be captured, transformed into data and put to work.

It’s also important to note that the events over the last year and a half have really sped up the adoption of cloud-based call recording technology. Companies (even those in regulated industries) were forced to quickly adapt to employees working remotely – and in many cases, these flexible workplace policies are expected to stay in place long after the pandemic. As a result, the pandemic has shined a light on the need for modern, cloud-based call recording technology. Companies of all sizes have access – and should use – technology that can compliantly capture every conversation, no matter where, on what platform or on what device they take place on.

Now remember that voice data has a bigger story to tell with the help of voice AI. Not only should calls be recorded, it should also be easy to obtain insights that live within these calls. Sales and customer service teams need to have access to sentiment ratings and search capabilities to retain and improve customer relationships, and subsequently capture additional market share.

What are some of the challenges you see businesses face when trying to create better customer facing processes?

Without the right technology, businesses are missing out on the value that lives within customer calls. And if this information disappears at the end of the conversation, companies are not able to identify areas to address or improve – whether that is how sales or customer teams interact with customers, or in the actual product or service the company is delivering.  We believe that companies that begin to harness the power of data within their voice calls will begin to really listen and hear what customers say and think about their business – and find whole new ways to improve their products and services.

Can you share 5 top of mind highlights of call recording technology that you feel every marketing and sales leader should know about?

After selecting a partner for call recording capabilities, it is important for marketing and sales leaders to think about how they can best use the information. Here are 5 top ways:

1. Improve sales and customer service performance by tracking sentiment ratings and identify opportunities to improve processes and productivity. Critically, business and government can eliminate manual data capture – note-taking – and create a truthful system of record.
2. Solve customer disputes by going back and confirming what was discussed. This can range from anything about questions around an order that was made, or an accusation that financial and investment advice was misleading or negligent.
3. Meet compliance regulations by being able to easily locate a conversation in case of an audit.
4. Reduce fraud both internally and externally.
5. Improve overall data quality – now every conversation is captured across voice, video, and chat. And can be automagically used to enrich CRM systems, training, and compliance.

What are some core sales technologies and customer experience technologies that you feel should form the crux of a tech stack for a customer facing team?

There are some key technologies/capabilities that a call recording solution should have. This includes:

• Cloud-based technology. Gone are the days of on-premise call recording technology. Cloud technology improves security by making it easy to implement the access controls discussed above, as well as make the rollout of services virtually instantaneous. Plus, all recordings can be held in one place, making it easier to search and uncover insights across ALL calls with limitless storage constraints.
• Artificial intelligence. Having access to the recording of a call is vital, but it is impossible to gain value from it if you can’t uncover what was said quickly. A comprehensive solution is able to convert a call to text, archive it and make it searchable. It should be as easy as searching for a keyword in your email inbox. Plus, with the addition of AI, companies can automatically get access to deeper insight such as sentiment down to an individual level, and their specific calls.
• Privacy and security concerns should be a top priority when it comes to storing any kind of data, especially customer data. Being able to easily manage who can record, what can be recorded and who can access these recordings is a necessity. Plus, data should always be encrypted in transit and at rest.
• APIs and integrations. Call recording should make your life easier, not harder. You should be able to integrate call data into existing business tools and CRM systems.

Read More: How to Manage Remote SDRs

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s sales and marketing leaders need to do differently today?   

The new battleground is customer experience. Knowing what is being said and what was said is a critical starting point. We talk about listening to the customer but the question to answer is if you don’t know what is being said – both by your employees and the customer, how can you listen?

Once you are listening correctly the resulting data becomes the means to see trends in real-time. Too many businesses measure trends and customer satisfaction months after a conversation. With Dubber you know customer sentiment in real-time. You see phrases and words that signal trends and intent in real-time. You know where employees need training and help.

Knowing equals happier customers and happier customers and employees leads to more revenue!