CallCabinet and Webex Partner Podcast: Compliant Call Recording
In this Webex Partner Podcast Kyle York, Director of Strategic Global Alliances, and Kevin Adamson, Webex Ecosystem Partner Program leader, discuss how CallCabinet is elevating call recording with compliant and AI-analytics solutions for every platform.
Read the full transcription below.
Taryn Montero: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Webex Partner Podcast, where we talk about Solutions Plus and our ecosystem partners. This is season two, episode 21 with CallCabinet, our Solutions Plus partner. For a brief background, CallCabinet has been on the Cisco Global price list since 2022. Whether on-prem, hybrid, or cloud, CallCabinet delivers future-proof compliance, call recording, and next-generation conversation analytics.
Join us as we welcome back one of our most loved Webex cohosts, Kevin Adamson. Kevin previously worked for Tropo before it was acquired by Cisco in 2015, following which he spent eight years at Cisco and is currently leading the Webex Ecosystem Partner program. Kevin, welcome back again.
Kevin: Thanks, Taryn. Episode 21, they keep ticking up! Good to be here today.
Taryn: Great to be here. It’s been more than a year and a half, and we’re still rolling. And you can now tune in and listen to Webex Partner Podcasts on Cisco Podcast Network on Spotify, SoundCloud, Audible, and most streaming channels. Don’t forget to click the Subscribe button. You can also catch our previous and latest episodes there as well.
Now join me as we welcome our guest for today’s episode, Kyle York. Kyle has been a technology executive leading business development sales, go-to-market strategy, and strategic alliances for 28 years. Previously, Kyle has been with Cisco for over 14 years and has led the go-to-market initiatives with a key focus on cloud and software as a service. He was also one of the founding team for HCS Collaboration Solution, and now serves as the Director of Global Strategic Alliances at CallCabinet. Now, without further ado, let’s get started.
Kevin: Welcome to the episode of the podcast, Kyle. It’s a pleasure to spend some time with you again today. Let’s start, as we always do in these podcasts, by giving our listeners some background on yourself. So, I know that you were born and raised in Texas. Are there any other cities you’ve also lived in?
Kyle: Thanks, Kevin and Taryn, for having me on the podcast today. And yes, the Dallas area is my home, but I’ve also lived in other cities like Austin and Denver. I currently live in Frisco, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. And I have my wife of 20 years and two teenage kids.
Kevin: Which was your favorite of those locations?
Kyle: I tell you, I love Denver. I am a Texan, but I do love Denver. I’m an outdoor enthusiast, so all of the things that go with that, like mountain biking and hiking, and all of that. I just love the geographic area of Colorado.
Kevin: Yeah, it’s ideal for those types of activities. Great. So, I also hear that you have experienced singing as a child. So, talk to me a little bit about that.
Kyle: Not many people know that about me, Kevin, and some would probably not believe it. But I did sing opera as a youngster pre-puberty. So, I was a boy soprano. Opera taught me a lot about the importance of preparation and how to engage audiences, which has really proved useful in my sales career over the years. So, let’s just say that all my best singing now is done in the car or the shower.
Kevin: Yeah, likewise I think! So, based on some of that experience then, your first job was in tech or somewhere else?
Kyle: I was actually in the magazine industry and advertising. I worked for a company by the name of Texas Monthly Magazine in Austin, and it was really pre-tech boom. It was just a great experience. But I realized that if I wanted to make some money, I might need to get out of the magazine industry and start looking at other opportunities. And tech was one that presented itself because it was just up and coming. There was so much going on.
Kevin: And there still is a lot going on. I think it’s that ever-changing industry where it doesn’t stand still. So, I know also that you were in and around Cisco for a period during your career. So, how did you get into that transition from Cisco to the call recording industry?
Kyle: So I spent 14 years at Cisco and collaboration strategy roles, and I actually came to Cisco from a fixed mobile convergence acquisition in 2005. And so, mobile was really my life for a long time. And as I was working at Cisco, I had various different roles. Taryn had mentioned also the HCS team and really starting HCS from the ground up.
What I loved about Cisco was the fact that we were capturing a lot of market transitions at the time and working towards mobile and cloud. The technology that collaboration provided and the value that it really provided customers was something that I really resonated with. And as I look at exiting Cisco and working for CallCabinet, as an ISV of the Cisco ecosystem, a Webex ecosystem, that really rang true, that there’s a lot of value for customers in the ISV solutions, especially as they attach to Webex and to Cisco calling across the globe.
There’s just so much value that the ISVs, like a CallCabinet, can bring to not only Cisco customers, but also Cisco Partners and the Cisco team. So, that was really an emphasis for me to continue my career in technology and working with the Cisco ecosystem. I really consider Cisco and partners to be my family, so I didn’t want to lean far from that as well, Kevin.
Kevin: So, let’s switch gears a little bit now and spend some time to double-click a little bit on CallCabinet’s journey since our last podcast. I don’t know when that was, but it was certainly a few months ago. So, I know as Taryn alluded to as well, CallCabinet has been a partner now since February 2022, something around there. But you’ve recently gone live with some new solutions. Maybe you can give the audience a little bit of an update on what’s new and why now.
Kyle: We have been a Webex ecosystem partner since February 2022, but we’ve been in business for over ten years, and we’ve focused on the Cisco platform, so we have been working within the Cisco ecosystem. Of course, working in the on-prem area as well. So, although we were new to the partner program a couple of years ago, we’re not new to Cisco. We have introduced some new offers within CCW that are available for partners to purchase and sell to customers. And really, as we were looking to refine our offers, there were quite a few different themes that we were focused on. But the big one was making sure that we had a robust feature set and build-out across all of the Webex suite. Our customers have really asked us to have a single platform, a single unified experience for all of Cisco recording.
So that’s what we’ve been diligently working on, is making sure that we can bring it all into a single platform that really provides the ability to record and capture conversations not only on-premise, but also in the cloud and in mixed environments, in hybrid environments. That was a really big, big push for us to ensure that we’re refining our offers to expand that.
The other things that we’ve been doing are that we know that customers have different requirements, and they need flexibility dependent upon data sovereignty rules, etcetera, and they need to be able to store their data the way that they want to. So, we provide flexible options now, not only in the cloud, but wherever the customer would like to store those recordings. We have the flexibility to meet their needs and requirements. The other biggie that we’ve heard is that we need to have the ability to scale to the needs of the clients. And so, we have the ability to customize a lot of our components within our app to scale to help those customers scale to where they need to be, which is really important.
The other big factor, Kevin, that we’ve heard from customers is that they’ve been recording for some time, and they’ve been on legacy platforms. And so, if they want to move to us, there’s also this factor that they may need to store recordings that they’ve had on the shelf for some time. We now have the ability to jailbreak that customer legacy recording data and to be able to pull that into our platform as well. That was a really big impetus towards some of the new enhancements that we’ve made in the offers.
Kevin: Excellent. It’s one of the reasons we brought you guys onto the program for a couple of those key things you mentioned there, the hybrid piece. So, it’s not just cloud or on-prem; it’s both. And whether they want dedicated instance or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s accessible from your technology as well as that moving of legacy recordings. It’s an important thing that we heard a lot from customers where they’re like, “Oh yeah, I can move here, but what about all my old recordings?” So, both of those things, I think, were pivotal in why we invited you guys on.
Kyle: We’ve also with that, Kevin, expanded our analytics packages and what we offer through CCW, which is a really big piece of the release that we’ve done as well.
Kevin: Excellent. So, with AI being such a buzzword recently all over the media, tell us a little bit more about how you guys have advanced your analytics. Because I know there’s a huge AI component in that as well.
Kyle: Great question! And it is a very confusing time for customers, right? They’re definitely looking for ways to compete, grow revenue, and provide the excellent experiences for customers, employees. The one thing that we’ve been able to do is help them understand that they can use that conversational data that we can record and capture and utilize our analytics engine to really transform that data into meaningful business insights, which they can use to better inform their decisions, improve in customer experiences, employee experiences. So, a lot of what our new analytics offers provide is being able to look across multiple data sources.
It’s not just Webex calling or Webex Contact Center, but it’s also Webex Meetings. How do you pull all that conversational data together, put that in one UI, which really helps to better analyze the customer data and provide those business insights we were talking about? And so, that’s one of the things that our new analytics engine can provide. But it’s also about meeting the customer where they’re at. We know that many customers have global operations, so we need to be able to work in those environments. So, we’ve also announced our multilingual transcription as well, within our analytics package, which does provide, again, multilingual transcription of the conversational data, which is a big deal. The other thing that we’ve heard is that we need better reporting – we need better reporting and analytics. We need the ability to do that out of the box.
What we’ve done is we’ve actually created out-of-the-box dashboards, which are customizable to meet the customer’s specific KPIs and how they want to measure those. But that’s a really big deal, Kevin, that many customers don’t want to just run reports, they want to get exception-based reports to also be able to see dashboards that have the meaningful information that they need at their fingertips. One of the things that we can do with that is provide notifications and summary reports, which help them get those anomalies to their desk quickly or to the right people for them to be able to respond to customer situations or employee situations. Having that ability to instantly email or notify someone or supervisor of spoken word of something happening, that’s a really big deal. So, that was a biggie.
But also, how do we reveal deeper insights for the customers? And that’s again, what they’re looking for. So, some of the things that we can provide out of the box are things like quick insight into sales metrics and won-loss metrics, things like customer retention and churn data, but also historical trend analysis of what’s happening from customer conversations or particular agents that may be taking calls. It’s really about getting deeper information and insight for the customers across multiple platforms and really pulling that into a single interface where they can do that easily.
Kevin: And I think it’s that collective effort of pulling all of those use cases that you’re seeing from the field and from general market trends into your new solution, I think, will just elevate it again in terms of not just being able to record, but then to be able to do something with the recordings and the data that you collect, which helps with IT management and all sorts of other things. So, that’s great.
Kyle: Absolutely.
Kevin: Since our first podcast episode, tell us how CallCabinet solutions have grown across the Cisco portfolio? Because I know you started small, and maybe what’s planned for future solution releases?
Kyle: Another great question. You know, we’ve listened a lot to our customers and partners to help build our solutions, Kevin, which is a novel approach. We know that a lot of these customers are really invested in multiple collaboration solutions and technologies. And they’ve either moved to the cloud or headed there. But we know that there are still many customers that are going to continue on-prem. The overarching theme is really regardless of the platform, customers want to be able to consolidate that data from multiple sources. That’s what we’re going to continue our work on, making sure that we have a solution that’s end-to-end across all the Cisco and Webex platforms, from calling to conferencing to contact center.
Being able to pull in and capture conversational data from every modality. Multiple conversation streams, whether it’s on-prem, cloud, or hybrid, and pulling that into a single pane of glass. That’s really important and a major competitive differentiator for CallCabinet, that’s what we want to continue to expand on – making sure that we’re continuing that development across the Webex Suite and Cisco Suite, but also making sure that we’re really focused on customer admin value and user experiences and our global expansion. So, it’s a big deal!
We’re also seeing, Kevin, I would say, new use cases creeping up as well. We’re really making sure that we’re able to fulfill use cases across certain verticals, across certain industries that are really critical. And we’re seeing that a lot of this capturing of recordings is really beyond compliance recording, where they’re starting to utilize data and AI to really solve more than just compliance problems.
A big use case that we’re seeing is that this data is being used not just by the compliance folks, but it’s being used across the company or the organization. You now have compliance teams that are using it, HR teams that are using it for training, sales teams that are using it, and also marketing, to better understand the conversations that are happening across the business. And so they can, again, be more informed.
Kevin: I think that’s great. If you just look at even a few years back when you took a recording, it was just exactly that. It was a recording of a moment in time that happened. It’s elevating that from just being an MP4 file to something which actually drives business value. And I think that’s key.
Kyle: Exactly.
Kevin: Excellent! So for folks that want to connect with you or CallCabinet or they want to say more information, talk about customer opportunities they potentially have, what’s the best way that they can reach out?
Kyle: The best way for our end customers is to contact us through our website, and we’ll definitely get back to you the same day. Super responsive there.
For our partners and Cisco Partners, they can find us in the Webex app space. We have an Ask CallCabinet, Webex app space, as well as materials and collateral within Cisco SalesConnect as well. And we also have a partner portal that our Cisco partners can also join to get more information. But the Ask CallCabinet Webex space is a great spot for partners to find information on us.
Kevin: Excellent. I will also add that CallCabinet has a tile in the Webex App Hub, which is another stopping-off point. And we do have a new page now for Webex Solutions Plus ecosystem inside of SalesConnect. So, that sits alongside the collaboration product portfolio, so that page is readily available there as well for those that frequent sales connect.
Thank you for that, Kyle. Very crisp and concise. So, let’s finish off here with a quick lightning round, as we always do. So, mountain biking or scuba diving?
Kyle: Oh, wow! That’s a tough one. I’m going to go with scuba diving. It’s a little hot in Dallas right now, so I’d like to jump in the ocean.
Kevin: Excellent. Favorite travel destination?
Kyle: Well, it’s going to go along with the scuba, I would have to say Cayman Islands or Maui.
Kevin: Excellent. And I’m going to throw one extra in here. What’s your favorite day of the week?
Kyle: My favorite day of the week would be Saturday.
Kevin: Well, thank you, Kyle, again for spending your valuable time on the podcast today. I look forward to seeing what you guys can do in the coming months and continuing to talk about the evolution of this partnership. So, thanks very much!
Kyle: Thanks so much, Kevin and Taryn! We appreciate the time.
Taryn: Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Kyle. And I hope you guys enjoyed today’s episode with Kyle York from CallCabinet. Next time, we’ll get into more episodes with Solutions Plus and our ecosystem partners. As always, don’t forget to click subscribe to this podcast on the Cisco Podcast Network that is available on most streaming channels: Spotify, SoundCloud, and many more. And we do appreciate your help getting the word out and leaving a review. That is where we live. And you can find other great podcast episodes there as well. Until next time, thanks for listening.