SalesTechStar Interview with Fabrice Della Mea, Vice President of Product Management at Dialpad

Fabrice Della Mea, Vice President of Product Management at Dialpad chats about some of Dialpad’s latest enhancements while sharing her thoughts on the future of AI and SalesTech:

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Hi Fabrice, take us through your SaaS product dev journey and more about your role at Dialpad.

I’ve worked in enterprise communications for over 20 years, driving product innovation in the space with roles at Genesys, Cisco, LiveVox, and RingCentral. Today, I lead the contact center product management team at Dialpad, working to develop product strategies that enable businesses to deliver superior customer experiences. Having spent the last two decades launching contact center, unified communications, and collaboration solutions, it’s been incredibly exciting to establish new practical AI-enhanced solutions that empower and augment business leaders, managers, and customer support agents. My role today focuses on developing next-generation product offerings for contact centers that benefit both the customer and employee experience.

How are Dialpad’s latest AI enhancements enabling contact center workflows and performance?

Contact centers are routinely facing significant challenges like long call handle times, understaffed teams, and overworked agents still today due to costly, disparate, and sometimes still legacy environments. This has led to poor customer and employee experiences, ultimately impacting businesses’ bottom lines.

On the other hand, Dialpad’s AI enhancements are revolutionizing contact center operations by acting as a force multiplier for human capabilities. At the core is our proprietary Ai and DialpadGPT. Dialpad Ai has been optimized over the years and has transcribed over 7 Billions of business conversations. This has led to a very high accuracy in transcribing business conversations, the highest in the industry, based on our own comparison testing. This ends up transforming agent experiences and customer interactions in two key areas: enhancing contact center operations to improve customer experiences and directly addressing agent burnout to reduce turnover.

Dialpad Support’s AI-powered tools tackle the most pressing challenges facing contact centers by providing both agents and their managers the tools they need for success and bringing all customer interactions into one unified platform. For managers, our Launchpad dashboard delivers real-time performance visibility and actionable insights, which is key to help managers decide quickly which call to jump on or which agents to assist in real time. Ai Scorecards offer automatic agent interaction scoring on 100% of the calls, which is also transformational, when you know that managers used to be able to only score sub 5% of the calls on average in this industry. Now every agent has a chance to get some feedback and improve from it. And our newly integrated workforce management capabilities which came from the Surfboard acquisition,  streamline scheduling, forecasting, and performance tracking. This is also key to have an optimized staffing, avoiding over staffing which leads to unnecessary costs, and avoiding under staffing, which leads to longer wait time and poor customer satisfaction.

For agents, our Ai Agent can deflect over 50% of routine questions, helping agents to focus on more meaningful questions. And when a harder question comes in, then our Ai Assistant tool empowers agents with comprehensive knowledge access across repositories for real-time insights. We leverage generative AI, so that agents have small bite-size summaries of complex questions that they can easily absorb while being on a call with the customer at the same time, as opposed to some other tools in the market that would surface entire articles that would be too long to read. By automating mundane tasks and providing easy to consume real-time guidance during calls, agents can focus on more complex tasks, fulfilling customer interactions. This comprehensive approach creates a virtuous cycle where empowered agents and informed managers can deliver better customer experiences.

The impact has been significant – our early Dialpad Support customers report 20% faster handle times, 50% less post-call work, 75% reduction in manual management tasks, and 10% lower agent turnover. As agents become more capable and managers more effective, businesses can deliver a level of service that not only meets, but exceeds customer expectations.

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What about today’s state of contact centers needs a tech push and tech overhaul?

According to industry research, 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad support experiences. The challenges facing contact centers require more than just incremental improvements to efficiency; the industry needs a complete transformation of the support ecosystem that elevates the experience for everyone involved: agents, managers, and customers alike. The evolution of our Dialpad Support platform reflects the market need for AI-powered solutions that can address challenges while maintaining a human-first approach to customer service.

How can contact centers improve their overall end to end cycles and performance with better tech integrations so as to serve end users faster / better?

With the challenges facing today’s contact centers, we need to address every level of the ecosystem. Agents need coaching and support to encourage growth within their roles, while also eliminating mundane tasks to reduce levels of burnout and turnover. Managers need better oversight to build and sustain high-performing teams. Investment in the experiences of contact center agents and managers is key to delivering a positive customer experience. When agents thrive, happy customers follow. The key to improving contact center performance is having AI that’s truly integrated into a core platform and optimized for actual workflows, not just bolted on as an additive function. When AI is native to the system, it can assist across the entire customer journey – from automated query deflection to real-time agent coaching.

A few thoughts on the future impact of AI and contact center upkeep? How will it impact the way teams are hired, trained and managed?

The future of AI and contact center operations is complex; however, customer service roles will evolve to focus on more detailed problem-solving and genuine relationship-building opportunities as AI handles more routine contact center inquiries and administrative tasks. Ai will also help personalizing the relationships with customers, keeping contextual information from past interactions, and offering a true continuity during the entire customer journey. This shift will attract and retain more skilled professionals who can dedicate their time to these customer needs – that is if AI is properly adopted and enhances human interactions rather than replacing it.

Insights into what users can expect from the Dialpad platform down the line as we head into 2025?

2025 is shaping up to be a very exciting year for Dialpad, especially on the heels of some monumental achievements in 2024 having recently surpassed $300M in ARR and our acquisition of cloud-native WFM platform, Surfboard. We’re excited to continue developing innovative AI-powered technologies that drive a new era of productivity, insight, and interaction in CCaaS and beyond.

Read More: Auditing your SalesTech Stack: Why it’s Essential in Today’s Consolidated Market?

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Dialpad is a business communications platform that unifies calling, messaging, and meeting into one app.

Fabrice Della Mea, is Vice President of Product Management at Dialpad

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