Can small companies outpace tech giants in innovation? Join us as we sit down with telecom entrepreneur Ray Pasquale from Unified Office, who takes us through the fascinating journey of VoIP technology's evolution. Ray shares his mission to enhance VoIP's quality and reliability without incurring hefty infrastructure costs. Discover how Unified Office seamlessly integrates VoIP with business systems like point-of-sale and practice management software, making these tools more efficient and user-friendly. Ray also delves into their pioneering use of machine learning for sentiment analysis, and how advancements in language models have enabled them to tailor AI solutions for various industries.
Imagine a world where AI-driven whisper coaching revolutionizes sales and customer service. We explore this ground-breaking application within the auto dealership industry, where advanced AI provides real-time, personalized guidance for salespeople, ensuring they hit the right notes on every call. We also discuss how small to medium-sized businesses, including hotels and pizza parlors, can modernize operations and enhance guest experiences through smart devices. From boosting efficiency to generating passive revenue, explore how these technologies are transforming the business landscape, including the potential role of robots in hospitality.
Ray and I reflect on the unique advantages smaller companies hold over larger corporations in spurring innovation, unencumbered by the constraints of size and bureaucracy. Using tech giants like Apple and Microsoft as examples, we discuss the rapid market changes made possible by modern technology and virtualization. The episode wraps up on a personal note, as I share my journey of recovering from a knee injury and the unexpected switch from hiking to swimming. Ray extends an invitation to listeners to discover opportunities at Unified Office, encouraging engagement from partners, customers, and analysts. Don't miss this insightful conversation that blends tech evolution, personal resilience, and forward-looking business solutions.
Can small companies outpace tech giants in innovation? Join us as we sit down with telecom entrepreneur Ray Pasquale from Unified Office, who takes us through the fascinating journey of VoIP technology's evolution. Ray shares his mission to enhance VoIP's quality and reliability without incurring hefty infrastructure costs. Discover how Unified Office seamlessly integrates VoIP with business systems like point-of-sale and practice management software, making these tools more efficient and user-friendly. Ray also delves into their pioneering use of machine learning for sentiment analysis, and how advancements in language models have enabled them to tailor AI solutions for various industries.
Imagine a world where AI-driven whisper coaching revolutionizes sales and customer service. We explore this ground-breaking application within the auto dealership industry, where advanced AI provides real-time, personalized guidance for salespeople, ensuring they hit the right notes on every call. We also discuss how small to medium-sized businesses, including hotels and pizza parlors, can modernize operations and enhance guest experiences through smart devices. From boosting efficiency to generating passive revenue, explore how these technologies are transforming the business landscape, including the potential role of robots in hospitality.
Ray and I reflect on the unique advantages smaller companies hold over larger corporations in spurring innovation, unencumbered by the constraints of size and bureaucracy. Using tech giants like Apple and Microsoft as examples, we discuss the rapid market changes made possible by modern technology and virtualization. The episode wraps up on a personal note, as I share my journey of recovering from a knee injury and the unexpected switch from hiking to swimming. Ray extends an invitation to listeners to discover opportunities at Unified Office, encouraging engagement from partners, customers, and analysts. Don't miss this insightful conversation that blends tech evolution, personal resilience, and forward-looking business solutions.
Hey everybody, we have the one and only telecom entrepreneur, Ray Pasquale of Unified Office today. Ray, how are you?
Speaker 2:
Doing pretty well, all things considered.
Speaker 1:
All things considered, that's good enough. So thanks for joining. It's been a minute since we've connected and for those who aren't familiar with Unified Office and the amazing work you and the team are doing, take us a stroll down memory lane. I'm not sure how many decades we need to go back, maybe the first phone call that. Alexander Graham Bell made to you from Boston all those years ago. Where do we start?
Speaker 2:
It actually hasn't been that long, evan, I would say well, yeah, my history is with Sonus Networks and those kinds of companies that built the big iron back in the day, right to route and transcode telephony telephone phone calls into IP enabled versions of said phone call ie VoIP About 2011,. I decided to try to fix VoIP. I took a page out of Steve Jobs' book saying if he was still alive, what legacy market would he reinvent? He probably would go in and fix VoIP. What I mean by that is when I was at Sonos, for example, vonage and all these companies came into being, none of them sought out to build a lousy company. It was all about price disruption in those days, right against the pbx from the big guys, uh, and you know, there was a little bit of innovation. You got a little bit of visual voicemail going on there and some call forwarding and things like that, but largely it was all about price disruption and I said I said to myself you know, if I can fix the quality and reliability of void such that it really runs over common, ordinary internet circuits without having you have to resort to, like renting T1s from phone companies and using MPLS and all this other stuff, I think that's a big deal. But then I said, well, wait a minute. That said, all I've done is restored VoIP to a real production-level platform with all the attendant features of the old PSTN. Now how do I make it more valuable? And I wasn't quite sure how to do that in 2012, 2013.
Speaker 2:
It took a couple of years, by the way, for us to patent this transmission protocol that runs over the top of Internet circuits, right transmission protocol that runs over the top of internet circuits, right. And I mean, during that, we had a couple of handful of beta customers in philadelphia and locally here in the amsher. That kind of helped us see some of the the level of frustration that they had with common ordinary phone systems. Why can't it do this, boy, if it could only do this? And so my brain got working on. You know, if I could make it go to work for them by doing certain things, like maybe integrating into their point of sale systems a lot better, integrating into their practice management systems if you're a dentist and then going into that database and pulling out the pertinent stuff that you care about and just making it big on your screen so you can see it. If you've ever looked at these CRMs. It's unbelievable the amount of information, the squinting you have to do so simple things like that by creating these pop-ups to expose valuable information that helps them learn. Look, they are talking to Evan Christel and that Evan's a really important customer and, by the way, he owes us $49 and he canceled his last appointment. These are big deals, automobile dealerships, they all like that stuff. So those were simple things that we started to do, and then we integrated with real-time analytics that we built, rather, that had basically the sort of feature sets that allowed you to become much more productive, especially with a shrinking workforce. We started to integrate with robotics. As you know you've been up here once or twice, you've seen the robot in our lobby, for example, and then you know along, about six years ago five years ago, I think you can Google it we started to play very early on with machine learning and trying to create an even more value of the underlying voice platform, and that being something we called sentiment analysis back then.
Speaker 2:
Back then, nobody was saying these words. I was like a lone wolf. I remember at IT Expo talking about this and I was getting all these cross-eyed. I mean, how are you able to do this. In those days.
Speaker 2:
The machine learning and the databases are really immature. We were using stuff out of Carnegie Mellon. It just wasn't ready, unfortunately, and so we had to withdraw that product from the market for a while, waiting for the market to catch up, especially the language models. So fast forward to today. It's a much more mature industry. The OnChat, gbt, whisperio is a really cool platform.
Speaker 2:
The large language models now are things that didn't exist back then. If they did, they weren't productized, let's put it that way. So our challenge is, as we serve various verticals, we're not horizontal as a company. We focus on five or six verticals in the market hotels, auto dealerships, dental, et cetera. Qsrs is a big one. It was how to take that large language model and squeeze it down to something a bit smaller, that's more germane to that particular vertical, which is a lot of work and the prompt engineering that goes into this.
Speaker 2:
And if you don't know what any of this stuff is, you can google it and teach yourself. It's really complex stuff, but it's stuff that you gotta know how to do right in order to create those kinds of ai-based products that make a real difference in your customer. And so, uh, it's a lot of words here. I mean, I get it, but we don't do anything just because we watch how you work, we listen to your pain and then we sort of create products that take you forward and put a smile on your face. But you and your customer Call centers are classic case in point.
Speaker 2:
There's been a movement that we've seen recently I'd say recently, over the past six months or so particularly in the QSR space that you know. Digitalization, all that stuff is great, it's wonderful, but it's come at a price. You know everybody's using these apps to order pizza and whatever. You know everybody's using these apps to order pizza and whatever. But what the price has been is it makes you the business more productive, but it doesn't make Evan, the consumer, more productive. Typically and we've all seen those.
Speaker 2:
You know the TikTok videos of somebody screaming into the phone, representative, representative pounding zero. And so I remember when travel agents weren't important and they got disintermediated by all the aggregators, the orbits, price lines of the world. Well, guess what's back in vogue again Travel agents. So we're kind of seeing the same thing happen in the sort of voice industry which is reconnecting with your customer. I don't want to be a ghost kitchen, I don't want you to view me as just a commodity brand, but by putting all these barriers between you and me, you can't help but think of me as just a commodity brand. Anyway, that's a long run on sentence here, I'm sorry, but we're building those kinds of techniques and products to help bridge the gap. We use technology to do this, but we also integrate that with the human element to get you closer to your customer. That's a big push for us and that's why one of the reasons our big tagline going forward has been voice is the future. So it's back to the future.
Speaker 1:
Love it. Well, what an amazing overview. Tour de force. And you bring technology that's typically been out of reach of franchisees, small businesses. You know your local dentist offices, doctor's offices, car dealers I mean, they really love you. So why is that? What about Unified Office has made them so loyal.
Speaker 2:
I look, I I'd like to tell you it's, you know, our products are wonderful and they are, and they work. The system just works. It's reliable. It hardly never goes down. Really, we built it with that business continuity paradigm in mind, with that underlying HQRP network that we called it. But it's, it's sometimes, it's very simple. It's the fact that we actually answer the phone when you call, when you need something to be done. If you need to sort of recreate recreate a call flow, because some of your offices are open today and others are closed we answer the phone. We actually help you do that.
Speaker 2:
Some of the simple things, by just giving them that support connected to a real human at this company is a big deal. Also, then, blending this AI stuff, all this stuff that they see on television and read about on the internet. They have no hope. They don't know how it can help them. They know how it can hurt them, right, but they don't know what to do. They're not integrators. They're putting stuff in your teeth right, fillings and crowning your, and so we bring those innovations to them to help run their businesses better, and it's quite as simple as that. We don't give them really difficult things to use. We make their lives simple. It's complex behind the scenes to do that right, but making your life simple by doing these incredible things, by taking technology and making it go to work for you, is, I would think, the number one thing that they love about us.
Speaker 1:
That's great. And there's a view among industry insiders that, oh, unified communications is a commodity. Voip is commoditized, there's no real innovation to be done. And yet you're innovating all the time with new capabilities, not just in voice but in the Internet of Things and your offerings there, and you know unique layers of innovation on top of the network. Describe that process, because there's a view that voice is, you know, baked. We've done that, but yet, you know, for many small business owners, voice communications and you know staying in touch with customers is fundamental to their business. They can't simply move on to something more exciting and new and different, on to something more exciting and new and different.
Speaker 2:
Well, I can't tell you exactly why people think that way of voice. I mean, I can obviously hazard a guess. I mean there's a number of companies that have been around for years that have said it's unified communications. It's unified communications. Yeah, okay, 20 years ago, unified communications was an economy. It was a big deal. It was new. Right, you know, any call, anywhere you happen to be, it's unified on your, your laptop, your mobile phone, your ipad, your vitamin, zero water, whatever. Today, it's an expected set of features, um, but the industry in the competition have. All they do is they talk about cheaper price, lower price, save you money, and so they teach your brain that voice is really nothing more. You shouldn't pay a lot for it. It's a commodity and they're not wrong per se.
Speaker 2:
Our underlying voice over IP system is probably the best voice system in the world, but, having said that, you've got to do more with it. It deserves to be done to do more with it. We've done everything with your digital life. We know all about you. We made your digital life wonderful. Excuse me, we've done nothing per per se for your voice life, and so things like spoken word analytics, things like AI-based whisper coaching that we implemented. That helps your CSRs and enriches those conversations between your CSRs and customers and prospects. That's a useful thing that you're building on top of that UX platform. That's a useful thing that you're building on top of that UX platform. So it's the layers of product innovation that you can bring that make the underlying voice platform valuable. It's as simple as that. It's hard work, but it's that simple at least for us.
Speaker 1:
It sounds so simple, yet the complexity underneath is enormous and we saw during the pandemic the value and the importance of customer experience. We all experienced food delivery challenges and we lived through terrible customer service. We're still suffering to some degree today. How do you think about consumer customer experience? For you know, not Apple and Google, but you know the businesses you do business with locally, those mom and pop retailers, those pizza stores, your doctor, your dentist. How do we ensure you know smoother, better interactions with those consumers?
Speaker 2:
Well, I mean, really, I can't make you a better dentist or make you a better office administrator or a better support person. I can give you the tools that help you be more productive and help you engage in a more positive experience with your customers, and again, one of those things is AI-based whisper coaching. Let's just talk about that one feature, for example. Please yeah.
Speaker 2:
You're a sales manager at a large auto dealership and you've got 100 salespeople underneath you. Generally, what you would do is, every now and then you'd break into a call. Whisper coaching has been around in the IP world I mean, sorry, in the PBX world for years. It's the way that you use these features today that make the difference. You can break into that call, that one call, and coach your salesperson and say don't forget to tell them about this new feature in the engine and the new leather seats. The other 99 people you're not able to do that with. By using our techniques and our approach, our new products, with this we can coach every single call. We do that with a variety of ways that we do that. One is, which the most interesting one, is, where you would record a series of messages, Evan, in your own voice, right, and you can do it by the minute, by the day, by the year or however frequently you need to do it, and we find ways to inject those messages into the conversation. We're able to determine whether or not maybe your voice is escalating, and so we'll have a message that's like hey, this is Evan, Try to take your voice down a notch. We're beginning to hear on the other side of the conversation a little bit of frustration. So you can sort of blend and don't forget to tell them about the new tires special that we have. So it's a blending of not just sentiment detection but data classification that helps enrich the overall engagement and I think, and the early returns for us, both parties are happy with this. So the way that you apply AI in that sense to me is a productive experience for both parties.
Speaker 2:
Summarizing meetings with chat, you'd be like, okay, fine, Everybody can just load it up. They don't summarize the meeting, that's fine. I'm sure that makes you know that that's good in some cases. But it's really you need to do those real innovative things. That just listening to your customer, you listen to them Well, they'll tell you exactly what pains them and that gives you a roadmap that you need to go build and eventually, as I told the company the other day at one of our company meetings, you'll learn more about their business than they will and that allows you to take them forward further into the future. That's the goal, that's why we're a highly verticalized company. That's the goal.
Speaker 1:
That's why we're a highly verticalized company. Paul, such a great insight and you know there's a massive need for modernization when it comes to communications and telephony. You know, when I stay at a hotel, I feel like there's a phone system from the 1970s next to my bed.
Speaker 1:
If you're lucky. When I go into my pizza parlor it's like they just have two or three POTS lines and I guess as a view, well, if it's not broke, don't fix it, I can still call 911. That's about it. What advice would you give to small, medium-sized businesses to kind of refresh and update, Because there's so many opportunities that are not taken advantage of?
Speaker 2:
well, some, look at the. Not every one of these people care enough to do it. I, there are businesses out there that I visited that you just go like that. They're happy running that way. It's, you know, especially in the pizza world, the independent world. It's a family business. They don't, you know, they don't want to be modernized. They like what they got. They've used to working that way. The hotel operators but not all pizza places are like that, by the way, we have thousands of them around the country, which they probably make up probably about 52% to 54% of our mix right now. Eight years ago it was 100% and that's a vertical that chose us, the hotel operators.
Speaker 2:
Operators, your point is well taken. Here you go, you're paying 400 bucks a night at this hotel, maybe 500 a night, and you walk in the room and there's this thing sitting there that hasn't been used in 25 years and my brain and I was in new york city five years ago six, six years ago, I can't remember at a marriott and and I had the room and I had that one phone that nobody used, right. And then I had two tablets and I believe they were Android tablets. One tablet ran the lights turn the lights on and off and those kinds of things you know that mattered. The automation for HomeKit, whatever it was back then. And the second tablet was you could order food or reserve a table at the restaurant inside the hotel. So what out of those three things were making money for the hotel operator the food, the lights that was a gimmick. I'm not paying you $500 a night just because I can. I'll get up and toggle the switches switches. So if I could find a way to merge those three things into one device and then allow the hotel operator to not just advertise their own amenities but advertise local area attractions by putting visible tiles, that kind of change and move to get your attention.
Speaker 2:
And sponsored ads. And whether the room is occupied or not, the mere fact that you have sold an ad that appears in 400 rooms is generating revenue every day, occupied or not. That company, disney, whoever it is, has paid to put their ads there, and so that's something that we innovated with and we put a couple of patents on that, and we did that a few years ago, just before COVID hit. So talk about bad timing. But you look at the hotel operators and you say I can return passive revenue generation to you again. Number one. Number two I can help your labor become more productive.
Speaker 2:
That same concierge portal that we put in the room can also allow you to order things for the room. It'll integrate. If you wanted to use a robot we don't make money off robots, we reference sell them. If you want a robot to augment your existing labor, to help do the delivery to the room or whatever, we integrate with that and make that happen as well. So you've got the productivity increases, you've got the sponsored advertisements that are generating passive revenue and, by the way, it's making you happy. You're in a place you've never been before. They're telling you this place is a good place to go. You're going to go there nine times out of ten. And then we provide the analytics behind the scenes, the back office analytics, to the marketing teams that sell that we don't do that. Hotel operators do, so they know how much they're able to charge for those sponsored ads and whatnot.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, analytics is really interesting. Maybe double down on that, if you would real-time analytics into who's calling, into their customers, into missed calls or dropped calls. I mean, there's a lot of data there that seems left on the table when it comes to interacting with customers.
Speaker 2:
You're exactly right. We developed something called Visual Performance Suite for the quick serve restaurant category several years ago. The beauty of that platform is not just telephony analytics. There are analytics that are unique to that market. There's time to service, there's average on-time delivery, there are metrics that that particular company uses to measure their franchise owners, and so we create those, and some of them could have been patented. We just haven't done that, but I'm digressing a little bit.
Speaker 2:
But take that same concept. You can do the same with the hotel industry, the same kinds of exposing of analytics with car dealers, by putting up a screen, whether it's on your laptop or it's on the wall Evans called it and it shows you. It shows that you're a repeat customer, pulls up your information, what kind of cars you own, what you're looking for, and, by the way, it'll start to age out as nobody's paying attention to you. And as that happens, we sort of squawk out the speakers and we send out text messages and however else you've configured it to wake people up, your boss or somebody to get on that call immediately, and then you know all about that call, that call. Context is saved If somebody puts you on hold, some stranger picks it up and knows immediately that it's you and what you're calling for, so you don't have to rediscover that all the time.
Speaker 2:
So I mean, that's a smattering of what we do, a small portion of the value that we create across all our verticals, same with the dental practices it's. Everybody wants to see the same set of information. They want to know who you are, why you are. It's all about delighting you and, by the way, it's making their job easier. On both sides they're not going. What's your?
Speaker 2:
name again. I'm sorry I'm going to put you on hold. Somebody else picks up what's your name again. What do you?
Speaker 1:
want yeah, that's far too common Switching gears. What's it like being an innovative, smaller company in a world of tech telecom giants? I mean, you've got Verizon and AT&T and the like doing their thing. You've got Microsoft and their dominance of teams, telephony and communications. What's it like navigating that world both from a regulatory standpoint as well as just being an independent?
Speaker 2:
It's funny, we're actually not that small when you look at how we've accomplished scale Compared to AT&T.
Speaker 1:
Wow, oh wow. Of course that goes without saying oh well, of course.
Speaker 2:
That goes without saying Well, look, it's the same thing. You've been around the business for a while, you've been part of several startup companies, as have I. The smaller company already always has the. They always have the advantage right they have. They're agile, they're quick to market, they're innovative, they're not strangled by this giant customer base and, worse, if you're a publicly traded company, you're strangled by the markets. And so I've always loved being that smaller company guy. I've done it all my life. It just allows you to get out there. It's the small companies that drive the innovation.
Speaker 3:
It is it always is. It's the small companies that drive the innovation Right.
Speaker 2:
It is, it always is. It was always Apple when they were small, it was always, you know, microsoft when they were small. I mean these things Zuckerberg, right in his dorm room, or whatever, or the. You know, small companies always, in my opinion, have the advantage. I always use the speedboat versus the oil tanker metaphor AT&T, great company, great partner of ours, by the way, same with Verizon, in fact. Verizon was here last week visiting us for a couple of days. We drive a lot of business to their 5G platform for various reasons. But no, they love what we do. They love the value that we bring. They love the volume of business we're bringing to them. They love what we do. They love the value that we bring. They love the volume of business we're bringing to them. And it's such a small company, it's really a large platform that we've managed to deliver at scale. And thankfully our partners like Graybar, arrow Electronics, these multi-billion dollar companies that partner with us, give us the scale.
Speaker 2:
You couldn't have done this 15 years ago. It would have been almost impossible. You didn't have virtualization back then, rackspace wasn't a thing. There's so much disruption that you can bring to a market today quickly. It's mind-boggling the amount of opportunity that's out there still, especially in the AI space. You'll see a little bit of a crash and burn there, I think, after all these lawsuits, and the dust settles. But then I think out of that, out of those ashes, you'll see what AI really is, and I don't think it's what we think it is today.
Speaker 1:
Great insight. The other trend I'm seeing is you know a lot of folks editing the market. You see NEC. You know a longtime supplier of PBXs and key systems getting out of the market. People are leaving. There just isn't the value in these kind of CPE devices and services. How do you see that? Yeah, so how does someone who maybe has a key system or a PBX? How do they get started? What are the steps to coming on board? What's that transition like from legacy to a new architecture or new platform?
Speaker 2:
It's not. It's really not that difficult. I mean, if you do it right and you're working with the right partner, it's almost invisible to them. The thing that you'll let you get a kick out of is it's the. So there's a couple ways you do this. One is you'll see somebody this, I look. I've had this phone from my desk for 20 years. I don't want anything else to take its place, but you know. So you use a terminal adapter to take that old pbx phone and bring it into the internet world. That's one thing. And then you bring to them this device. That's a tablet with a soft uh, you know keypad on it and like 20 seconds later they'll get. They'll start pushing buttons and it's it's, it's done right, it's believe it or not, it's the actual device that ends up hanging.
Speaker 2:
A lot of these people I've only know how to do this. You know, I remember and this is doesn't really relate to this, but it's kind of funny my mom, uh, years ago I tried to get her to use a computer, so I brought one of my early MacBooks to her and I showed her how to use email right. So you, we can email together right, and so I'll send you an email when I get home. You reply to it and you're going to be, you're going to be loving this and this is how you get on the internet. Blah, blah, blah. I don't get anything from my mother for like a month. So I fly back down there. I visit my mom. Hey, mom, I sent you a bunch of things I haven't heard from you. She goes. I can't seem to catch the pointer. It keeps running away from me. I tried hard as I could. Mom, that is an extension of your hand. That's not something you can catch.
Speaker 2:
So some people look at the phones like they're reluctant to change the device. They don't care what's behind it and how it completes phone calls, right, I think. I don't think like everybody now has some form of smart device. So I think that the step is certain. That really is starting to go away now and for NEC and the rest of these guys, even this a natural evolutionary process. I still think you've got a 15-year tail on that. To complete the cycle, you can't find copper lines anywhere these days. It's really hard, right. So that whole thing is still driving the movement towards just plain old VoIP. Whether you like it or not, it's happening. The carriers can't afford to run two networks. They never could and that, coupled with the FCC and the FCC sort of liberalizing their guidelines around powered lines has ushered in a has made things a lot easier.
Speaker 1:
Well, I could go on and on. You have so much insight and unique perspectives to share, but you know it's New England. It's our time to thrive this summer. What are you up to? Hopefully some R&R, not just all work, no play, and enjoy some of the beautiful mountains, lakes, beaches in New Hampshire. What are you up to?
Speaker 2:
I was doing some hiking up until I decided to blow my knee out a month ago and I was to be in Washington DC next week testifying BFCC and I had to put that off until I can actually start walking. I started physical therapy yesterday. It's a long story but it's not. I had all the x-rays. I have a small meniscus tear, but I kind of strained every other muscle in the leg area doing something really silly in my garage. So my hiking stuff is still in the back of my car.
Speaker 1:
Uh, we'll move from hiking to swimming. You know here's to a quick recovery and you know amazing work. Thanks for sharing just a half an hour. I look forward to catching up soon. It's been fun, Evan, as always, Good to see you. Yeah, Thanks for that, Ray, and everyone reach out to Unified Office Check them out. So much interesting opportunity there, whether you're a partner, customer analyst. What have you? Lots to explore. Thanks, Ray, Thanks everyone.
