Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk to you, because we're going to talk about CallMiner, which is a company that's in a very important segment of technology. And that's conversation analytics. So let's unpack that. What is CallMiner?
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Sure, again, thanks for having me. Love venture fists. CallMiner is a conversation intelligence platform that, essentially thinks of any major enterprise company that has a large customer service center. So our platform is used in the Customer Service Center. And it helps with real-time coaching for the customer service representatives, and also analytics for all of the managers of the Customer Service Center. And then across the organization. If you zoom out a little bit and think of, you know, millions of calls and texts and chats that happen for customer service, there's insights within that, but at scale, that's really hard to do. So our artificial intelligence can sift through those billions of interactions, and send up insights to the product team to r&d to the Chief Marketing Officer. So essentially, that's what our value proposition is.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
And that's a very, very difficult problem to solve. Because if you're channeling all that information through different mediums, how words are said are one thing, but what they actually could mean would be different things based on tone and inflection, or
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
100%. There's just the tone and inflection, but there's nuance and emotion and everything else that has to be interpreted. And so our platform, if you think about it, there's just so much that happens in an interaction between two humans. So the artificial intelligence does a really great job of understanding all of that at a human level, but doing it at scale, which humans can't do, obviously. And the insights are invaluable. You know, good example that I always like to talk about is, if you're familiar with OtterBox, which, you know, you think about the indestructible phone cases. So a product insight that they were able to glean from millions of customer interactions led them to find an issue that they had with one of their products. And they were able to save a ton of money, because they were able to sift that back up to r&d, and make some changes in product development. So that's just an example of how our platform is used beyond the contact center.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, Eric, you're the chief marketing officer CallMiner. So talk about your background, and what led you to join the company.
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Sure, I have a little bit of a nontraditional background for for your typical SAS b2b marketer. I started my career out on the ad agency side, actually. So I've always been engaged in digital marketing in some way or shape. But I was on the ad agency side, couple of big agencies working for everyone from Google and Microsoft to Acura and Jet Blue. So really, you know, sort of learned all the fundamentals about the brand and about marketing there. And then I moved over the client-side at a company called aqua, which is in the SAS space, different proposition, different industry than CallMiner, but, you know, did a full rebrand there, ran, you know, the marketing department there in terms of demand gen brand, the website, etc. And then I joined CallMiner in July of 2020. That's been a really fast two years almost, which was an interesting time to join a company because we were all in the middle of the pandemic. I have never joined a company and, you know, met my team for the first time, a year and a half later. So it's been an interesting ride so far. But I've been there for a little over a year and a half. And in that time, we've completed a full rebrand and we've kind of overhauled our marketing tech stack, we've overhauled our demand gen strategy, everything.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's the current stage of CallMiner in terms of, you know, the number of employees or whatever else you can share?
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Sure. So we are currently at around 400 400 employees right now. We're expecting about 40% growth this year. We've been on a fast clip, the last five years, we've been growing, you know, around 30 to 35% year over year growth from an ACV standpoint. And all the other metrics are sort of following in suit of that. From an employee base standpoint, like I said, we're around 400. Right now, our company spans across the globe. So we've got an office here in Boston, two offices here in Boston, actually, one in Waltham, which is a suburb and then one in the city, which is where our business development representatives work. The BDR team, we have an office in Fort Myers, Florida, which is we have a lot of our support team down there, and we have a lot of our engineering there. And then overseas. We have an office in the UK, which supports our EMEA foothold.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now in terms of hiring, are you hiring pretty much across all functional areas across the company?
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Yes, absolutely. We have a little over 100 positions open right now and that span in pretty much every department, you know, big focus, I would say, of those roles in engineering, and customer success, and definitely in the BDR and sales area, you know, one of the things we've seen is coming out of the pandemic, especially inside sales is one of the hottest roles out there. So it's very competitive. And so we've had to really for our BDR, team, and inside sales, look at the compensation and everything else and make some adjustments on the good side for any candidates out there that are looking, especially candidates coming from the SAS space, which is generally what we try to look for.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
In terms of the culture of the company, what's it like working as a CallMiner, in terms of the day-to-day?
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Sure. Well, first and foremost, it's, I think, as you know, work has changed dramatically. So I think, you know, I wasn't there before the pandemic. So I can't speak to what the culture was like when we were all in the office together. But, you know, what I would say is we've replicated that quite well, in a remote workforce type scenario. We are open again, and all of our offices are open again. But what we found is, I don't think work is going to return to the way it was before. We have a policy that, you know, essentially, you can work remote, or you can work in the office or some hybrid version. And what we're finding is everybody seems to be either remote or some sort of hybrid version, where they're coming in a couple times a week, as what we're finding right now, we think that might progress over time. But overall, you know, we have a really strong core set of values from teamwork to, you know, step up on it to diversity. And I think that's just a red thread through what you find in the people there. It's really, as a year and a half ago, as a new member of the team, I was really pleasantly surprised at one, how inviting everybody was, especially in a remote pandemic type environment, but just a great company to work for.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So the job market out there is very active right now there are lots of opportunities for people to explore, which is a good thing. So why is now the ideal time to join CallMiner?
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Well, so we are the leader in the conversation intelligence space, especially when it comes to speech and voice of customer. So as a leader, we're one of the fastest growing in our industry, the industry itself, you know, anything any Sass company related to artificial intelligence is going to be a hot segment. But our particular industry, even coming out of the pandemic, what you're finding is a couple of things, digital transformation has just been pushed into overdrive. So these things that were six, seven-year-long projects are now condensed into a year and a big part of large enterprise organizations where they're trying to transform is their customer service center. Everything from the technology they're using, which is where we step in, but also even their processes. If you think about it before the pandemic, a lot of these big contact centers and customer service centers were largely in person, it's like the cliche with the headphones and everything else, they had to immediately shift to all working from home working remotely. And that really requires a reflection on what technology you're using and what your processes are. So our industry is growing very rapidly, if you're familiar at all with our industry, but some of the players in it. It's massive activity in terms of m&a right now, which is always a good indicator that you're in a hot market. It's definitely as I was evaluating different options, one of the things that I factored in when I made the decision to join CallMiner, beyond really just engaging with some great people during the interview process.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Or if you are incident exploring opportunities that call money and you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings, go to venturefizz.com/callminer, and you'll see all their listings there. Eric, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Eric Williamson, CallMiner
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
