Technicians are notoriously bad at documentation.
Some have to be bullied into doing it at all. Others do little more than jot down a few quick notes after closing a ticket. Not because they’re lazy in most cases, mind you, but simply because capturing documentation is time-consuming, tedious work that feels like a distraction from more urgent tasks. The upshot, though, is that they end up squandering data their employers badly need to deliver faster, more efficient service and train the AI-based automation tools more and more of them are adopting.
They’re not the only ones guilty of that sin either.
“Say you’re a salesperson and we’re talking, and we’re on the phone for twenty minutes. We hang up, and now you have to put notes into your CRM,” says Sam Skarloff. Except that takes time and patience you don’t have. “The notes end up being, ‘Talked to Sam. Great conversation. Have to follow up next Wednesday at 11.’”
Which is better than nothing, but only slightly, notes Sklaroff, who is chief strategy officer of Copulo, a recently launched AI startup whose first product, called SyncConnect, is designed to do the post-call work salespeople should do themselves but don’t, along with some things they probably couldn’t do terribly well even if they tried.
“We’re going to go into that contact, and we’re going to put in a link to the voice recording with sentiment analysis, we’re going to put in a link to the transcript, and we’re actually going to take the summary and put that right in so that you don’t have to take any notes,” Sklaroff says.
In doing so, he adds, SyncConnect augments the data in CRM, ERP, and other systems of record that AI tools depend on with additional fodder from a less widely utilized source. “There’s a lot of data in phone calls that people aren’t using.”
Sklaroff has a long history with phone calls, too. “I’ve been in the telephone business for forty years,” he says. He’s still there too: in addition to his role at Copulo (Latin for “to connect”) Sklaroff is CEO of telco provider Axxess Networks. He was also, some two decades ago, an early-generation managed service provider, which is why he and Copulo have MSPs squarely in their TAM sights. SyncConnect is great for sales reps, Sklaroff says. “It’s also great for help desk.”
With both audiences in mind, SyncConnect currently integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, ConnectWise PSA, Zendesk, and roughly 20 other PSA, CRM, and ERP solutions. Within about six months, Sklaroff says, the list of supported platforms will number in the “hundreds”.
Other enhancements on the roadmap include calendaring functionality that will offer to schedule future meetings referenced during calls automatically and an AI assistant that will help users query their notes for facts and insights. A separate product currently in development called CallerIQ will enrich inbound calls seconds before the phone rings with information captured earlier by SyncConnect.
“If you’re a sales guy, we might pop up a summary of the last call you had with that prospect,” Sklaroff says. “If you’re on the help desk, we might pop up an open ticket or the last ticket they called in about.”
One can imagine a couple of things that could trip up a product strategy like this, beginning with the fact that there’s nothing to stop well-known UCaaS names like 8x8 and RingCentral from offering similar functionality. And indeed, Sklaroff assumes they all will.
“But they’re going to do it just on their platform,” he says. “We’re going to be carrier-agnostic, so you don’t have to throw out the unified communications platform that you are using now.”
Assuming you’re using a unified communications platform, that is, which raises issue two: plenty of MSPs don’t offer voice services at present and don’t wish to start. Copulo, working with Axxess Networks, has an answer here too.
“What we’ll do with our channel partners is take their customer list, whether they have 50 or 200 or 500, and we’ll run a campaign to both email and call their customers under their brand,” Sklaroff says. MSPs can pursue any leads that result themselves or outsource that as well.
“We’ll do the quote, we’ll do the demo, and we’ll close the sale for them,” Sklaroff says, adding that Axxess will pay the MSP commissions on that sale for as long as the customer’s account remains active.
Copulo, which is still pre-release on SyncConnect, has yet to finalize pricing for the service, but is currently planning to charge $10 per user per month plus 10 cents every time the solution writes call data out to a CRM or PSA solution. Alternatively, subscribers can purchase a plan with unlimited writes for $29.99 per user per month. If you’re in sales and doing 15 calls or more a day, Sklaroff says, the “all-you-can-eat” option usually makes good sense.
“And if you’re not as busy as 15 calls a day, you probably shouldn’t have a job,” he says with a grin.