Empowering SMB Communications: FluentStream’s UCaaS Solutions, Regulatory Compliance, and Healthcare Innovations

Unlock the secrets of efficient business communications in our latest episode with the Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Success at FluentStream. Marissa sheds light on how FluentStream is empowering small to mid-sized businesses with enterprise-grade communication tools. Learn how this UCaaS company tackles the unique challenges SMBs face, such as the lack of internal tech teams, by offering user-friendly, reliable, and secure solutions. Marissa shares insights on the crucial role of tailored support and regulatory compliance, especially for sectors like education, healthcare, and local governments, reinforcing FluentStream’s dedication to exceptional customer service and operational efficiency.

In the second half of our conversation, we spotlight how FluentStream is transforming customer experiences in the healthcare sector. Using Oakview Dermatology as a case study, Marissa illustrates how SMBs can leverage FluentStream's cloud-based call center functionality to enhance their operations across multiple locations. Discover how comprehensive reporting, offsite call center capabilities, and post-call surveys are driving patient satisfaction and operational success. We also delve into FluentStream’s journey from a local Denver company to a formidable presence in the cloud communications market, showcasing their continuous innovation and unwavering support that help SMBs maximize their investments. Tune in for an episode filled with actionable insights and inspiring success stories.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey everyone, exciting topic today, as always around business communications, a topic that's seen a lot of change, disruption and opportunity today with FluentStream Marissa. How are you?

Speaker 2: 0:15

I'm doing well. How are you doing, Evan?

Speaker 1: 0:17

I'm great, I'm super hot. Here in Boston we're suffering under a heat wave, but you folks from Austin know all about that. Maybe introduce yourself. And for those who aren't familiar, who is FluentStream?

Speaker 2: 0:31

Yeah, I would love to Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Marissa Bartza. I am the Vice President of Sales, marketing and Success here at FluentStream. I oversee kind of the full life cycle from prospect to sales to customer, as well as supporting our partner community. By doing that we're able to really better target FluentStream's ideal customer at the top of the funnel with our marketing and then set really solid expectations about our experience for customers and then deliver on that. So it's been a really exciting time here.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Fluent Stream is a UCAS company. A lot of people often think of it as like the new and improved version of telecom. We focus on serving small to mid-sized businesses, organizations, education facilities, townships, things like that. As you mentioned, telecom is a really exciting space right now. That, as you mentioned, telecom is a really exciting space right now. We are really in it day in and day out too. That's all we do is phones and phone service, and we understand how we can best deliver that communication ease for our customers. Our goal is always to help our SMB customers really focus on how they can get that enterprise level feature set with over 100 features we offer, all by still focusing on their specific needs in that industry.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Well, it's a really great mission and the SMB world is so underserved in enterprise communications cloud communications, rather. So what are you seeing the main challenges being today for small businesses out there that obviously don't have CIOs and internal IT and tech teams? But beyond that, what are the problems that you're solving for today in the SMB world?

Speaker 2: 2:16

Yeah, like you said, smb is really underserved here, and part of that is because a lot of the features available aren't always targeted to their market because they don't have a CIO or CTO necessarily. We really focus on ease of use and so, while we offer these enterprise features and functionality, our main goal is always that it can be easily used by our customer and be able to log in, adjust. A good example is out of office, right? We just have the 4th of July coming quickly here in the United States. We want to make sure all of our customers how to update their voicemails, auto attendance, et cetera. So if their customers call them, they're setting good expectations now and then are able to celebrate the holiday with their friends and family.

Speaker 2: 2:59

We also really want to focus on the fact that with SMB, if they don't have that in-house tech team and they don't maybe have the time or knowledge of how to adjust some of these things, that they have a person on the other end from FluentStream who's an expert that can help them. We have really unparalleled customer service. We recently won two more awards that we're very proud of for our customer service that we provide, because it's all us-based 24 7 365 you can get a hold of us by phone, online chat, email or through a form. We assure you that your ticket will not languish and it will not be handed off from person to person to person. We're really proud of the fact that all of our agents are trained to be tier two agents, which means they can handle almost all of the requests that come in. So we have really great first ticket resolution and that gives our owner operators an opportunity to quickly get what they need done and move on to getting back to their business and their day job.

Speaker 1: 4:01

Fantastic. Where do I sign up? No, just kidding. I'm stuck with a terrible communication service. I won't go into that, but it sounds like a fantastic value proposition at the local customer level. What are you seeing big picture-wise in business communications? I'm used to talking enterprise. We're talking about real businesses, not these tech giants businesses. Right, you know what kind of customers are you serving and what are they you know seeing and asking for out there.

Speaker 2: 4:31

Yeah. So you know we serve a lot of different customers and because of that we do our best to be really flexible and nimble and get to the basics. We know what our customers need First and foremost is reliability. We know our customers when they sign up with Fluent Stream on their phones to ring right. At the end of the day, ucas can have all the bells and whistles, but reliability is so key and so we really focus on our reliability and our security of our system first and foremost, because that's the critical need for most of our customers.

Speaker 2: 5:03

From there, what we really look at is what our kind of major industries are that we're serving and some of the rules and regulations around those that are going to help them be most successful.

Speaker 2: 5:13

So a few examples is school districts and townships. Like I mentioned, we serve a lot of small to mid-sized towns and cities as well as their school districts, and we know the importance of having E911 set up correctly, for example, a lot of laws and rules, like Carrie's law, making sure that we are fully compliant with those types of requirements so that those industries again can focus on what they deliver education to our children, the infrastructure that keeps our lives running in our towns. I'd also say a couple other highlights is healthcare. We have a lot of doctor's offices, dentist's offices, things like that, but also a lot of assisted living facilities that use Fluent Stream for their services, and once again, it's critical that we can service not only their needs from a phone system perspective, but also the rules and regulations around that, such as HIPAA compliance, loan system perspective but, also the rules and regulations around that, such as HIPAA compliance.

Speaker 2: 6:11

And then, lastly, is just making sure that we can grow with our customers. The small to medium-sized businesses of America are growing rapidly. They are the kind of lifeblood of our country and we want to make sure that, as they grow and evolve, that we're there with them and with the UCAS system, it seems for some of us in the industry that it's basics, but to grow with us it's very simple. You just need an internet connection and if you want phones, we'll ship them to you. Gone are the days of lockers full of infrastructure and having install fees and IT people that have to load everything in and get it all set up. You just have to plug in your computer and your computer or your cell phone can be your phone, which is great.

Speaker 1: 6:52

Yeah, I think when people small business owners see technology like yours for the first time, it's when they were stuck in something they bought maybe 10 years ago. It's always eye-opening to see the results and shout out to Mark Fletcher on Carrie's Law. That was something he helped spearhead on the 911 space and hospitality for years. I won't get off track here, but really important work there.

Speaker 2: 7:18

Your interview with him was fantastic.

Speaker 1: 7:21

Oh, you saw that Great. Yeah, he's a great guy. Yeah. So speaking of which features you mentioned, I think 100-plus features. Traditionally, you know your little key system or PBX would have hundreds of features, but you couldn't ever figure out how to use them. You know transfer and be pound four, six, eight or something, and no one ever did anything with them. So what features are people actually using, using, you know, with Fluent Stream, and how do they access them?

Speaker 2: 7:51

Yeah, great question. So again, I think, first and foremost is our world has evolved and how we do business now has changed significantly, especially in the last four years. We are working from anywhere, we're working from the office, we're on the road, we're at home, etc. And so a big feature that's been a huge draw for our customers is our mobile application. So, like I mentioned, your computer can be a soft phone with Fluent Stream. But what's also fantastic is we offer an application so that your business phone can come with you in your pocket anywhere you are with your smartphone, and it keeps your business and your personal separate. I think a lot of us, as we are evolving to working from home, fluent Stream is a fully remote team and so we've really leaned into how do we best support our team and our businesses, who are our customers, as they move in that direction. So not only do we offer a mobile app for our users. So if you're, for instance, I use my mobile app only for my Fluent Stream phone number. When my cell phone rings, it shows if it's coming from Fluent Streamumer, my personal phone number, which is great. But again, as you mentioned, smb owners are often owner operators and don't have that IT staff, and so we also offer an admin app, and so if the owner operator is, let's say, already left for the day for that 4th of July holiday, they can set up that auto attendant or changes to their phone system on the fly, from their couch as they're prepping for that barbecue. They don't have to go back to the office or get back on a computer, they can do it from their phone, which is very exciting for them.

Speaker 2: 9:25

Another big draw we're seeing for our slightly larger customers often, but just in general, is integrations. Users have higher demands than ever. Our user experience on our smartphones and on the internet etc. Is higher and higher, and so one of the things that we've been really emphasizing is we just launched Microsoft Teams integration with Fluent Stream. So for our customers who use Microsoft Teams, that Teams interface can now be their soft phone as well. They can make and receive calls, they can adjust their settings, et cetera. Plus, the admins can use Teams to do all of that administration work right from that one instance. Teams to do all of that administration work right from that one instance. What's fantastic for them in that regard is they have confidence that their users are adopting the product. They don't have to log in somewhere else. For example, if they have SSO through Okta or one of the other offerings, they're already logged in. It's not another login, it's not another concern. They're in, they're receiving phone calls and they have confidence in that.

Speaker 2: 10:39

A second integration that we offer that's been very popular with our customers is our Salesforce integration. We often know when a sales call comes in. You have to pick it up, of course, and you want to engage and listen to that customer, but you also want to see if they've called before. Maybe they already have an account with you and they're opening a new location versus a new customer. With our Salesforce integration, all of that information pops up just by knowing what phone number is calling in and then you can save the call recording with your notes in Salesforce easily and automated, rather than having to again swivel chair, pull a recording, listen to it back, take the notes, etc. So it's been really great to see these integrations kind of playing through for our customers so that they can reduce work for their teams and drive that efficiency.

Speaker 1: 11:29

Fantastic. I mean, these are traditionally enterprise class features that took a long time to interconnect and figure out. Now it sounds like those are in the hands of SMB users as well. That's fantastic. You talked a little bit about typical customers and your businesses that use FluentStream. You mentioned healthcare. I'm intrigued by that, and it seems like every time I call or text my dentist or my doctor or any sort of health care provider it's pretty awkward I end up in voicemail jail or some bad IVR tree. So what kind of companies in that space are you working with? I don't know if you can pull out a favorite example or favorite child and talk about them.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Yeah well, we have no favorites, but we do have some that have been happily raised their hands to let us be able to share their success story. So a recent example is Oakview Dermatology. They're a great doctor's practice located across nine locations in Ohio and South Carolina. They have over 120 staff members and 100,000 plus patients. Their focus is all about customer experience and, like you mentioned, it can be difficult for doctor's offices to manage all of the needs and demands of their patients and do it in a seamless and effective way, and so one of the things that Oakview Dermatology decided to do was to remove some of that overhead from their team, was to outsource their call center, but they quickly saw how difficult it was to understand the customer experience as they made that move. So they didn't want to sacrifice experience and satisfaction, but they did need to make a change to their operations. Change to their operations, and so they were able to use Fluent Stream and deploy our again enterprise-grade call center functionality for their small doctor's practice in a way that allowed them to have the visibility at a leadership level from a reporting perspective, so they could see the activity of their call center and really understand some of those key features of call center expertise being delivered to their patients, such as abandon rates, time to answer first, call resolution, things like that. Additionally, because of the way that our system is set up in a fully distributed UCAS perspective, it's all over the cloud. It allows their call center to be offsite and quickly be able to utilize all of the features regardless of where they are, which is fantastic.

Speaker 2: 14:00

And then, lastly, we were able to work with them because, even if they had all that great reporting from FluentStream, they were still not confident in the experience for their customers.

Speaker 2: 14:09

They were concerned and wanted to get that feedback directly, and so we were able to set up for them a post-call survey right within the phone system so that at the end of a call to Oakview Dermatology you're asked please rate on a scale of one to five how your experience was.

Speaker 2: 14:24

You just hit a button and you hang up and that really gives them that last mile kind of confidence that their customer experience is outstanding, and all from one place where they're also looking at all of the stats of their call center being successful with their other statistics. So you know, oakview Derm's been a fantastic customer of ours. They've also grown over time, so I mentioned they have nine locations with us now. It didn't start that way, but as they keep opening new locations, we're able to quickly spin it up so that it can fit into their exact model that they've defined, without them having to go back and redefine exactly what buttons and what auto attendance they want to be set up. So it's been a great story for us, and they continue to open locations and we're cheering them on.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Oh, it's fantastic and it's intriguing that customer experience is now something even SMBs talk about. Your background is looking here, with companies like Adobe and Deloitte Consulting and Shortel, and those have been topics for the blue chip S&P 500 companies, but it looks like it's trickling down as an important area to focus on for SMBs.

Speaker 2: 15:41

Exactly, it truly is.

Speaker 2: 15:43

And what's been fantastic to see is how eager the SMB market is to lean into this innovation.

Speaker 2: 15:50

They're so open to having conversations with my team, even after they've been with us for five, 10 years, to say what's new, what's coming out, how can I adopt it.

Speaker 2: 15:59

And my team is really emphasizing how they can maximize their investment, because even an SMB customer is making a huge investment in their phone system. For, you know, compared to an Adobe contract, for example, it might seem small but based on their you know, p and L, it's a very big investment and we want to make sure that they're maximizing all of the features that are included in their set. Again, we want to make sure their phone rings. That's first and foremost our priority, but all of these other bells and whistles are available to them and they are always able to either call our support team and get those set up, or call, you know, some of the other teams that we have to make sure that they have that available, and we offer training so we can always set up custom training for our customers, or they can reference our knowledge base with resources if they want to. You know, check it out on their own time and try and learn on their own.

Speaker 1: 16:55

Fantastic. So I must admit this is the first time I've heard of FluentStream and I know the market pretty well. When I think about how diverse and how many competitors you have, it's a little overwhelming. There are so many choices customers have in communications, from the legacy big telco giants to companies like yourself in cloud communications. How do you think about setting yourself apart from all these competitors in business communications? And you've done that successfully. What's been the secret there?

Speaker 2: 17:31

Yeah, what's been wonderful in the evolution of FluentStream is how we started to how we've evolved to today. So FluentStream started in Denver, Colorado, and it was a very consistent kind of setup for a UCAS company. As we see in the market, like you said, it's quite saturated and there's a lot of local providers and they go out there and they do the hands-on install and they do all of those things and they can provide what those small to medium-sized businesses need on the ground kind of boots on the ground. And that is how Fluent Stream started. And then about six years ago they felt like the company really felt like we had learned what we could from that experience and that's when we started to grow.

Speaker 2: 18:14

But our roots are always back where we started, which is a local provider that really understands the businesses we serve, and I think that's what really sets us apart. So now we provide service nationwide. We have customers all over the country, but we always come back to that core value of customers being kind of the center of our universe and understanding what those local needs are for those owner operators or for those teams that are servicing a handful of locations and need a little extra assistance with their telecom setup, because maybe they don't have five telco engineers on the team to help manage that system. And so we are really we're growing fast. We're very excited about that and we are really happy to continue to get our name out there, because we really believe that we do provide that bespoke experience for the customers in the way that a local provider would, but at better prices, better rates and with really high-end features that they might not be able to get from some of those local providers.

Speaker 1: 19:21

Fantastic. And speaking of high-end features and integrations and workflows, what's next? Can you give us a peek into the future and what you're thinking about and how it will impact your customers or the industry?

Speaker 2: 19:35

Yeah, absolutely Probably no surprise, but AI is top of mind and we're working really hard on some solutions so that we can utilize AI to better understand our customers and deliver what they need in a more proactive way.

Speaker 2: 19:52

My belief, kind of hot take, is that I believe a lot of our customers are still not maybe maximizing the feature sets that we provide, and so utilizing AI internally to best understand how our customers can get even more out of their Fluent Stream investment is really key.

Speaker 2: 20:11

Additionally, like I mentioned, with our integrations, we're really focused on how do we utilize some of the AI available from the ecosystem that our customers are living in so that they can best take what they have from their phone system and use it with AI. So a great example is, like I mentioned, we offer cloud recording with our seat types like no problem, and that's a really great feature for our customers, because a cloud recording provides transcription as well. And that's a really great feature for our customers because a cloud recording provides transcription as well, and with the transcription, you can upload all those recordings into an AI tool of your choosing and be able to really best understand what your customers are asking for as they're calling you. So we're developing AI on our side, but we're also trying to help our customers see what integrations are available so that they can utilize the AI there. For example, salesforce Einstein. It's a very, very powerful tool. How can we best utilize that with the cloud recordings that are going into Salesforce?

Speaker 1: 21:11

through our integration.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Wow, that's fantastic. What a great use case, and I saw Apple will be supporting recording and transcription on your iPhone and iOS 18 sometime, maybe next year, early next year. But to have that capability for a small business on their phone system is going to be a game changer, like an easy button almost on all the kind of services they might use. Well, thanks so much for sharing just a little peek at what you're up to and what's next the next few weeks or months of just trying to stay cool down in Austin in the 100-plus degree weather. What's on your radar?

Speaker 2: 21:52

Yeah, yeah, honestly, a big priority for us right now is really helping make sure our customers are ready for the 4th of July holiday, making sure that their businesses are set up so that their customers know where they are and how to reach them if needed, but also so that they can take that much needed break. So that's going to be the top focus for the next couple of weeks, and then again just identifying how we can best deliver these new exciting integrations, as well as some of our tried and true features that are available.

Speaker 1: 22:22

Fantastic. Well, have a great Fourth. Thanks so much for the insight and the info. Really intriguing what you guys are doing, and thanks everyone for watching.

Speaker 2: 22:33

Thank you.