How To Strengthen Customer Connection For Ecommerce Operators With Gianna Scorsone Of Aircall

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Well, hey there, my name is Steve Hutt and I’m the senior merchant success manager here at Shopify. And welcome to the fifth season of eCommerce Fastlane. Whether this is your first time listening or if you’re a weekly subscriber, I seriously appreciate that you’re taking some time today and listening to the show. I know there are plenty of podcast choices out there in eCommerce and direct-to-consumer.

And the fact that you’re here today really does mean the world to me personally. And I know it does for my featured guest. If this is your first time listening, this is an e-commerce show where we have honest and transparent conversations about building and thriving with your store powered by Shopify or Shopify plus.

Now if you’re an ambitious, lifelong learner, which you likely are since you’re here today, you’re definitely in the right place. Now, new episodes are available twice weekly and they’re available through all your favorite podcast apps like Apple Podcasts and, Spotify, Google Podcasts. I mean, we’re all over.

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You’ll have all the links and things we talk about today and some great resources from my guest today. It’s a very interesting show today. And so, in today’s episode, my guest is Gianna Scorsone. She is the GM and the Head of North America from Aircall and what Aircall is, is a cloud-based business phone solution for e-commerce operators.

And they really enable, we’re talking about Shopify brands today, but they just help connect in a more genuinely and consistently more effectively with your customers. And what they do is they provide both contexts to the conversations. They also serve a really need for a voice channel powered with a lot of the tools and integrations and things that are available, and that is including Shopify.

So, it’s very interesting how they work really tightly. I know we’re going to unpack this a bit later on. I believe that they’re turning the voice channel from my opinion from this black box, but that’s kind of what it is to me, anyway. It seems like that. That requires a lot of manual review and lots of recordings and maybe even live note-taking and stuff like that into what I would call more of a smart, almost AI-enabled channel.

So, it’s so interesting. I really believe that they’re making it possible for all brands, like regardless of your maturity, regardless of your complexity. Really, I believe the Aircall is here to drive a lot of customer engagement and just ultimately just drive loyalty at scale. So, if you’re not answering the phone correctly and don’t have data, Aircall’s a very interesting product, and that’s what I wanna unpack today.

So hi, Gianna. Welcome to eCommerce Fastlane. 

Thanks so much, Steve. It’s a pleasure being here. 

Oh, you know what, thank you for syncing our calendars. I know we’ve had some challenges, but you know what we’re here today and you know, what’s ironic enough is that Aircall was on, believe it or not, I think December of 2019 was the first time that Aircall came on. And I know your platform has iterated so much in the last few years. We have to make a pact that we have to at least get on annually to talk about just the innovation that’s happening in voiceover, IP, and phone. And as it relates to commerce, it’s so interesting to me, kind of where the market is headed.

I know I have a couple of questions that I’ve preset up here in advance, just to make sure that we’re keeping on track here, but let’s just talk on high level. First, about Aircall, I mentioned hopefully I didn’t butcher at the beginning here, but what does Aircall do? And how is it solving specific problems for commerce brands like powered by Shopify?

Well, Steve, I think you nailed it. I think you did a much better job than I’m gonna do right now, but you absolutely nailed it. And to reiterate and share with the audience, it’s exactly what you said, we’re a hundred percent cloud-based business phone system, and we really power any customer-facing team.

That’s how I like to really classify who specifically within the eComm world we do so well with and that we were designed specifically to support. And, you know, as you mentioned, we really enable personalized customer interaction by providing context. You know, I think that we talk a lot about integrations, and we talk a lot about that push and pull of information and what it could power.

But what personalization really means is context. We enable all of the agents or reps who have to have these customer interactions to understand the history, to understand past conversations so that we could pick up those pieces. However, the customer is interacting with us at whatever point. We also enable leaders to make really informed decisions through our analytics, through our advanced dashboards.

And, you know, as you mentioned, it’s no longer that black box, right? So, what you know cloud-based means is that you don’t have to have, you know, clunky hardware that you have to shuttle back and forth, and you know, the phone channel was historically a very clunky, slow, and very de personalized way to provide that customer support. And so what we’re now able to transform is that phone channel to a very connected way that your brand can really differentiate from the crowd. 

It’s very interesting. It kind of reminds me, I know Shopify uses a tool called Gong as part of our calls through Zoom or Google Meeting and, you know, one thing this tool does is give some context and some transcript and just kind of understand sentiment about and follow up and next steps and things like that. I think that’s one of the big takeaways I’m hoping to get outta this show today that why Aircall is very unique is because it really is intelligently understanding the conversation that’s actually going on with the agent. 

And then from there through your analytics platform, you’re able to understand, well, how do we action that? Or why are these conversations coming up with this agent exclusively? Is that a training opportunity or are people asking more specific, interesting questions that are not in our help docs?

And so, I think there’s always some opportunity to wanna maybe pivot and fix and learn from the data to make the brand more exciting and more accessible I guess, to everyone. 

I love that you mentioned that, Steve. I couldn’t agree more. And what we’re really talking about is twofold here, right? How the individual user utilizes it and interacts with customers as well as how we make informed decisions as a leadership team to help these agents, then either, you know, build a more thoughtful process, train them at the individual level at the team level once we identify themes, et cetera. 

And so you know, we really are a tool that has, you know, gone after the SMB market. And as we know, you know, an e-com SMB market really means those scaling organizations and to scale is really difficult. And everything that you just mentioned is what really allows those powerful and insightful decisions as you scale.

Yeah, this is lovely. So, let’s talk a little bit about the origin story. I know I talked about it like back a few years, but you know, now you’re part of, you know, the GM kind of, I guess, spearheading the North American operations. And so, let’s talk a little bit about, I mean, the Aircall origin story a little bit, I’d love to understand a little bit about your origin story and just like how you came to Aircall, like what’s your past and then kind of, where do you see Aircall going?

Absolutely. So, I came to Aircall because fundamentally, I deeply believe in the power of a tech stack. Yes. I love voice and I have to be honest; voice is my favorite way to interact when I’m, you know, checking up on my, you know, recent purchases which are pretty vast, Steve, cuz I do love to shop, but you know, putting my self aside on that front.

I like voice because, and when it is paired with other tools and that’s the tech stack that we’re talking about, it provides contextualized conversations. It gives greater insights and coaching abilities, as you had mentioned, and how I discovered, you know, the cloud-based tech stack is my role for 12 years.

I worked for a company called Blue Wolf, which was a tech and digital marketing consulting firm. And I primarily worked in-house leading our rev ops efforts to really power and enable our reps to drive greater impact to grow. We were a scaling organization, so to create those efficiencies and to build a great process around the different technologies that we’re supporting this. 

And, you know, ultimately, I built, and I consistently reevaluated the tech stack that we used in-house to power our business. But this is the interesting part because this is what our business was also focused on for our clients. I was exposed to, and I knew the best of the best in terms of tools. And this is why I’m here today at Aircall. 

Interesting that Blue Wolf I guess was acquired by IBM. 

That’s right. That’s right. I was just speaking with the founder, Eric Berridge yesterday. He’s still a mentor to lose day he’s over at Salesforce now.

Great guy. Oh, lovely. Let’s talk a little bit about Shopify brand owners. I’m sure they can appreciate, you know, this tool. They understand that it’s a needed tool. You need to be able to communicate with, you know, your customers. And I think a lot of people, unfortunately, are using a little bit of a duct tape or they’re like, well, in the beginning, we’re just gonna have a copper wire running into our house, a regular phone system.

We’re gonna advance ourselves a little bit and we’re gonna, multiple phone lines available from within our office, physically hardwired. And then I think the next step is like there’s another kind of voiceover IP type phone system available once again, not cloud-based, but a little bit cloud-based, still going from landline to VoIP.

And so I just like to talk a bit about, I guess, your differentiation to the market right now, because you, I know you have the analytics and I know we’re kind of understanding, and there’s this training and motivation around it all. And you play really nicely with Shopify and other pieces of technology, but I just wanna kind of understand more specifically what your unique value proposition is in the marketplace today.

Yeah, absolutely. I would love, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna hijack this question for a second and get back to something that you mentioned about those copper wires, right? And, you know, wanting that hardwired in on the desk, et cetera. I think something really important to note, and this is something I faced when I joined Aircall was being completely in quarantine.

We were all remote and where we are today, right, is really at any given moment. There are one of three different working arrangements. There’s fully an office, there’s hybrid, there’s fully remote. And this often changes daily, and it often changes daily per employee. And so, when we talk about that traditional, you know, copper wiring that can’t exist anymore.

And so, you know what I really appreciate about our tool and why I think that we’re, you know, very well positioned to help Shopify brands today is because we provide that flexibility. 

Yeah, I think that’s great. I’m gonna be devil’s advocate for a second because I think there’s gonna people that are gonna say, hey, you know what, maybe expensive to implement, maybe I’ll just do live chat only, I’ll do email only. Everyone has different maturities and complexities. And I think as you work your way kind of through your journey in a direct-to-consumer brand. I think at some point you definitely see the value in voice, but it really is more of an add-on than a part of a channel that really can grow a business.

So, you know, I can think of things like, hey, maybe it’s not worth it. Or they think maybe I’m as, too early to provide kind of voice and they’re worried about maybe just the human capital of having to run that sort of channel. And so, are you able to talk a little bit about what you’ve seen on your side from the early-stage companies that are using voice? Maybe didn’t use voice now they’re using it and now they’re being successful using it. 

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve grown 70% year over year, which really shows that you know, more and more companies are adopting this and seeing the need for it. And what I would say is at this point of where we are and what society is looking for, you really can’t afford not to. You know, we’ve seen an increase in customers saying that phone is their number one preferred experience channel. In 2021, we actually surveyed e-commerce customers globally and we found that 87% ranked phone as providing the best experience over web chat and email. 

But what’s interesting, Steve, and this is the point where I was really fascinated was just three years ago. Probably the last time you spoke to Eric, only 31% said voice. So that’s a huge change, but of that 31%, we actually wanna step further and we ask them for an urgent customer support issue, and what their preferred channel is. And 70% then responded that voice was their first choice. So, we knew that you know, always in critical moments, voice is the preferred channel.

Interestingly, over the last three or four years, I’m not gonna do the math in my head right now. You know, it’s too early, it’s too early. There was a 56% increase in terms of selecting voice as their primary go-to channel. And when I think about my own experience, you know, I travel a lot for work. I’m also extremely busy and like anyone I’m mixing up, messing up my travel all of the time.

And so I often have to, you know, handle that and make those changes. And actually, just two days ago, I can share this example. I bought a ticket. Let’s just say I have status with a certain airline of my choice, and I absolutely love them. They had a partnership that they just, you know, enabled where you could buy, you know, a partner ticket instead.

And I did that, but then you have to go to the partner website to select your seat and it was a big run around and I was left, confused. And I was left confused if I would even get the same benefits from having status with my primary airline of choice. And so in thinking about how to interact at that moment, I had very specific questions to ask, and I really didn’t want the runaround of trying to do that over chat because I had a number of questions I wanted to ask.

And so that’s when I picked up the phone and I called them, and I spoke with someone live and we were able to have that conversation a lot faster than if I had tried to do it in chat. And so, I think that just from experience, right, it’s a good showcase of sometimes that human touch of the voice channel can’t be replicated by anything else.

What I was also able to do was provide feedback on how confusing that was and how as an elite member of their program, that didn’t quite work for me, and I shared why and made some suggestions. And that rep was actually able to take down my feedback and shared that she had heard this before and that they were, you know, building a stronger program and that they would absolutely make sure that that was included in their analytics of what people were looking for.

And so, again, a really great example of how voice is integrated with their business systems to enable really valuable feedback, to influence business decisions. 

I had a call recently with a brand. This is because I have a book of business at Shopify and one of the comments was brought up that they definitely see value in voice. The challenge that they have is they’re unsure of how to deal with kind of like the dreaded-on hold times that could possibly happen that could come from headcount, not knowing and how to make quick decisions about how to hire more people if it’s wholly in-house if it’s outsourced kind of customer support using the Aircall platform.

So can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think as great as voice is, and I’m definitely a proponent of it, I agree with you. Chat versus voice, I’d rather get on the phone and talk to someone and wait two minutes to talk to somebody than be in a queue and chatting and having to type, I totally get it.

We can speak much more words quicker than typing. I get it, right? Totally get it. But I’m also worried about the brand’s reputation of yes, I see benefits in this, however, how can I dynamically in real-time start thinking about a drop, a special sale, a promotional thing, or is there analytics to understand when there’s a larger wave of people that are- 

You just nailed it, Steve. It’s just that our analytics, sorry to interrupt you, you excited me here with your answer, but I have nothing to say if I let you continue, because that’s exactly it. What our analytics enable is the understanding of when these waves of high volume come in. And that allows management to make those informed decisions that I mentioned earlier. And this is exactly a great example of what that informed decision is.

How many people do I need to have on staff and at what point? Additionally, because of the, you know, very simple IVR routing, we’re also able to put the correct times at different offices might be open or teams and, you know, really handle the flow of how you navigate, and route calls based on volume, based on wait time, based on the number of rings, based on location.

And so, we’re able to provide a more thoughtful way to handle that load. And as you mentioned, which will really optimize the number of reps you have at a given time to make sure that you’re not wasting money by having too many people at a time when you don’t have high volume. 

And written more questions here because I think this is very interesting to me. Now, what about outsourced partners? Is there the ability or do you have brands currently that say, hey, you know what, just during overflow periods or maybe in the Non-North American time zones, but we’re still kind of expanding internationally? We still want to have people be able to answer the phone call.

Is there alignment with like other outsource partners that kind of already know the Aircall platform and can be onboarded quite quickly to be able to take care of some of those offshore or outside of your regular business hour calls? 

Yeah. We work for a global company and so we’ve got support, we’ve got customers all around the world and so we certainly have seen scenarios, where we have customers, have these outsource partners that as you mentioned, are already affluent with the Aircall. 

Okay, cool. And then language or type of call so if someone was to call in, typically there’d be some kind of a greeting, hey, thanks for calling, you know, direct of a consumer company, yada yada, you know, press one, two or three for whatever.

Is there a self-serve model through your system to let people just automatically just have the system automatically give the information to like, you know, one forward to track your order, and then there’s gonna be a conversation that says, hey, thank you so much for your order? Most orders are received within, you know, six business days.

If it’s more than six business days, then just stay on the line and we’ll jump on the call and we’ll be able to help you out if it’s less than six days, you know, it’s on its way. I guess what I’m trying to figure out is that is it scalable, you don’t need to talk to a human being, but thanks for calling anyways, kind of way of managing it?

Yeah, that’s such a great question. We do have some pre-recorded messaging in a variety of different languages. And then we also, of course, very easily provide the opportunity for organizations to create those recordings themselves in ways that are really appropriate. And then of course set up the right workflows based on that.

I see. Okay. Cool. Okay. That’s awesome. So, I think this is gonna be a good pivot over to, I’m gonna talk at the competition a little bit. I think for me personally, I think where there’s competition there’s business, and I think, you know, you have a great solution, but you can also do a quick search, you know, go to Google or go to the app store and you can see there’s some notable peer’s kind of in this telephone market. 

And so, and I know we’ve talked a little bit about your value prop, but let’s be a little more specific about how Aircall has been more intentional to differentiate from others that also connect to Shopify. 

Absolutely. You know, we’re the only comprehensive business to the telephony phone system with native integration of Shopify and other Shopify partners, right? So, we mentioned that tech stack. So, let’s break that down in terms of what that specifically means between Aircall and Shopify. 

One, it means that you know, the integration provides a very simple, yet very powerful experience. And, you know, as you mentioned before on customer records, we could view contact and order details from Shopify as soon as the phone rings, we could save time and eliminate data entry because Aircall integrates with leading eCommerce help desk tools like Gorgeous and Zendesk and customer to automate ticket creation, log calls, and add custom tags at all. 

And so when we talk about the competition, you know, honestly, they’re really basic click-to-dial. And so, what one really needs to consider, and this goes back to your earlier question as well on can I afford it? Is this too early? What you really need to consider is the power that is lost when you can’t access those past live interactions and all of that valuable customer purchasing history.

Yeah. I love the fact that you play nicely. Obviously, a CRM is number one on a lot of brands. We have to be able to communicate with our brands. If it’s through social or through email or through chat. But I’d argue that a lot are probably not, or don’t have the same analytics and the same kind of source of truth.

And I know that there are two different ways of using Aircall. You can use Aircall with the Shopify connection directly and use the Aircall admin. And that’s the source of truth, and that’s the kind of quote-unquote, “the starting point”, cuz I’m answering the call and I get access to the Shopify records and information.

The other side of the technology could be no, I’m using gorgeous as my primary screen, but I connect to Aircall. I could take a live call but see all the order history and all the things. So, like, can you unpack that a bit for us? 

It’s exactly what you’re saying, Steve. Remember, you know, coming from that Blue Wolf days in owning the tech stack, like I wanted my reps until this day, you know, and my team is out here at Aircall.

I want them to live and breathe in the CRM. I don’t want them to move out of, you know, the business tool of choice. And you know, what I love is exactly what you mentioned, what native integration really means is that it can live and breathe within that primary business tool. And we facilitate the process and function that each brand is looking for.

I love one of my favorite functionalities that we have is with Intercom. And I know you and I both mentioned that our favorite channel of choice is voice. The reality though, is many people do like chat and so we have to meet customers where they are as you know, everyone listening in, we all know this, right?

And so often, you know, a quick chat will suffice, but at what point do you wanna escalate to voice? Right. And what I love is our integration with Intercom as we actually have Aircall now. And so, you could click right on that chat that you’re having and speak with that rep, right? And I think that that seamless interaction between the two parties, as well as the technologies, is such a game changer.

Oh, this is lovely. And so, you likely know this, but we’re in the fifth season now of this podcast. And really, I like to interview founders and platforms, apps, marketing platforms, and, you know, Aircall is, is obviously a premier partner. You’re a plus technology partner for a reason, you know, and thousands, tens of thousands of founders and marketing people that are listening to this show.

And I’m gonna give you an opportunity right now to talk a little bit about maybe a strategy or a tactic, something that you have seen because I think that because you’re merchant facing like I am, you get to see use cases with Aircall and why it’s powerful. We’ll get into a story in a minute, but I just overall, I wonder if you had any strategy or tactic kind of advice you would give those listening today regards to their maturity, their complexity, but just how it relates to Aircall and maybe their D-TOC business, any topics that come to mind?

Well, I think the biggest piece of advice that I have is, you know, to change support from a call center, you know, where you manage your angriest customers to a profit center. Right. And how you do that is through self-service. And I mentioned Intercom before, and, you know, a customer who might have a question about their order status can get a popup as soon as, you know, they open the site and then, you know, a ticket is created, boom, right.

And all of their past orders, their status is right there, and that’s so powerful to be able to resolve it right then and there, and really understand the context as we were talking about before. Right. And so, you know, now, as we thought about, and as we suggested of really understanding, you know, putting the right agents in at the right time. Right. Because we could understand when the influx comes in, everyone’s gonna have more bandwidth as well, which also means they’re gonna deliver even greater customer service. And so, you know, from there, you could then think about how we use that opportunity to be more strategic.

How do we use that opportunity to have a more thoughtful conversation so that as we’re solving issues, we can then really go in and find some upsell opportunities as well, because let’s face it –  we’re all growing brands, you know, that are trying to best understand how, you know, it’s not just about solving customer issues instead, right?

We want to enhance their loyalty to the brand. And so, you know, a great example that I love is, you know, let’s pretend, I don’t know someone, you know, chats in and they’ve got a great interaction and the agent can then say, hey, I see you ordered these boots six weeks ago. You know, we actually have these insoles that make the shoes a lot more comfortable.

Now imagine those $6 insults are getting sold to, you know, all of the customers that might be checking in on their boots or have a question on their boots and you know, that adds up and that becomes a meaningful revenue stream as well, because we’ve created this bandwidth so that you could be more thoughtful in these interactions.

This is lovely. So, let’s pivot to a story. I think we’re all pretty motivated. I think there’s a kind of an education or an inspiration around hearing a story. And I dunno if you can, hopefully, I don’t put you on the spot here, but it would be nice if we could talk a little bit about maybe even a case study, recent Shopify business, they’ve implemented Aircall recently.

You know, I’d just love to uncover specifically what motivated them from either not having a phone copper wire or doing some other kind of VoIP thing they’ve had then moving to Aircall. I just would like to understand, like what happened because of that there some efficiencies were there driving more revenue like this profit center you just spoke of. Just would love to uncover maybe one or two brands, whatever you’re thinking of.

Absolutely. I can definitely share a brand that comes to mind. Cozy Earth. They’re actually one of our largest customers here in North America. They offer luxury bedding, and loungewear, I love them. Anyhow, I think they launched around 2011 or so. And you know, a great example of a company that has just, you know, seen explosive growth.

And as we all know, growth means hiring. It means training new employees, and all of that becomes a greater challenge as you scale. And so, I think it was around 2017 when Cozy Earth was starting to explore, you know, moving off their landline phone system. You know, they had small office space, and they were operating with quite a few manual processes.

And so, their head of customer experience realized that you know, their growing demand and their growing need of support, it was gonna be quite complex to keep up with that massive growth in their current setup. And so, you know, as a Shopify brand, they invested in Gorgeous as their help desk solution.

And then there became a need of, of what is gonna be that, you know, go-to voice platform to integrate, you know, with both Shopify and Gorgeous and that’s when we came in. So, in 2018, what really drew them to us was our simple onboarding process and our easy-to-use voice tool. It’s a very simple setup and very easy to manage.

And so, you know, as you’re in those earlier stages, you don’t have a robust IT team. You don’t have a lot of infrastructure. And that’s where, you know, our tool also can really enhance and optimize the type of tools that people are able to use. And so, once they were set up. They could manage tickets in Gorgeous, including those that were automatically created by, you know, inbound Aircall calls and, you know, a point that I think we’ve drove home quite a bit on this podcast already, but leadership was able to manage, you know, the employee size and the support hours because of the analytics, because of the dashboard.

And so that scale became manageable and affordable. And I think that that’s the big component there because they had the right people on at the right time doing the right functions. And so now Cozy Earth support reps. Can see order information from Shopify directly in Aircall as soon as an inbound call comes in.

And then to further kind of my love for the tech stack, they actually also brought on a QA tool called Clouds and that pulls in their call recordings from Aircall, and it selects the best ones to review. And so that means that they can continuously improve their customer interactions and they can refine their support rep training because of that Aircall, Cloud, Shopify store. So again, I love voice, but I love voice so much more when it’s powered with these other tools. 

It’s interesting. It makes me think a lot about the leadership side, again, like the Director of Customer Experience, or whomever in the organization. But imagine, you know, you talk about this profit center, but imagine, offering some kind of a sales incentive or a spiff, you know, the whole salesperson’s incentive for flogging kind of the, how the is, what the word actually stands for. But like imagine giving some kind of incentive to those that are answering phone calls to do those upsells and cross-sales and to de-escalate some potential calls that are upset customers.

There’s the other side of the coin too, about like, how can we have this delightful customer experience? And then also, it is a business so we’re trying to, you know, get people on the subscription offering instead of like the one-off or whatever it is. Have, have you seen that a lot through maybe some of your past customers that say, hey, maybe there is an incentive more than just, hey, that’s your job? You need to upsell versus no upsell and get a commission on it. 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it all comes down to rewarding the behaviors that you wanna see, right? And so, building those comp plans really thoughtfully can facilitate in that. And, you know, Steve, I think you brought up a very interesting point as well that, you know, we haven’t spoken about one of the things that I think is extremely valuable or drives value from Aircall, which is just the UX UI.

It’s a slick-looking tool. Right. When I think about, you know, who our agents are, you know, this is the demographic that largely, you know, is interacting with technology every single day in their personal lives. And because of that, we’ve created a society that is accustomed to frequent upgrades that are seamless, that are accustomed to easy-to-use, intuitive, and actually positioning, right? That UX, that like is thinking five steps ahead of behaviorally. What we naturally do, are we, you know, looking to the right, because we’re right-handed, right? 

All of those, you know, thoughtful details are what has really powered Aircall to be the leading provider, I believe and voice in terms of our technology and how easy it is and how fun it is to use. We mimic that experience and utilize it in using, you know, different, you know, social media tools, et cetera. And so, when we talk about customer experience. I really believe fundamentally that how we treat our employees is how they treat our customers.

And so now I’m saying and suggesting that we’re providing our employees to use a tool they’re familiar with because of the similarities in day-to-day technology, they interact with the idea that there are constant upgrades and improvements happening just like the technologies that they’re using on a personal level.

And so, they’re happier and they find it easier. All of that is gonna translate to our customers. And for many of the Shopify brands here, that also means it’s gonna translate to our customers, customers that ripple effect, and lastly, I’ll say, you know, as we’re all navigating, you know, the great resignation and now, you know where we are, how, you know, the conversation’s now converging into, you know, making sure you keep your top people and really evaluating teams, et cetera, this is a way to keep your top people, you know, you have to be able to provide technologies that they wanna use to make their lives easier. 

I think that one big aspect that came as a direct result of having been quarantined for so long COVID, et cetera, is that we all need ease in our life. And so having a tool that by nature was designed to create efficiencies, that was designed to create ease is going to provide a little bit of relief so that people feel better about their day-to-day. And again, that’s, what’s gonna translate from our employees to our customers, to our customers’ customers. 

I love that. I love that a lot. I was thinking a little bit about the technology too, behind Aircall, so I can appreciate maybe the customer-facing or the agent-facing part of it and the usability side of it. But I also believe there’s a lot more under the hood from a technical perspective. Are you able to speak a little bit about that? Because I know that technically, you have some interesting technology, some things are maybe a proprietary that you can’t really talk about, but I know that globally, you have a very interesting network that is allowing all of this magic to happen. Able to talk a little bit about that. 

I’m not sure how I very much focus on the go-to-market, Steve, so you caught me off guard here a little bit. What I can say though, is that you know, we’re very much focused on making sure that we are the best in class and that we’re integrating with the right tools. We integrate with over a hundred integrations now.

And, you know, we continue to look at ways that we want to provide more connection. You know, we’re investing more in native AI. So that things like automatically written transcriptions of conversations are available to sales and support leaders. And so that we could do things like sentimental analysis to identify top support request categories without needing to review individual calls.

And so, you know, our team is quite robust, our engineering team, and I think it’s since I joined a year and a half ago, I think we more than doubled in size, which is bunkers and great, but it really is to, you know, triple down on the innovation and the technology that’s really powering us. 

Beautiful. So, we are nearing the end of the show for today, and I know you’ve shared a lot. I mean, I have, you know, pages of notes here that I’ve scrambled. I just, it’s a life of learning, is kind of like my mantra. It’s so great. It’s just, I always try to figure out, is there something that I can take away from today’s show for those listening today? And then even the book of business, the brands that I manage day to day at Shopify, I definitely have some prospects for you that I know can see value based on what I’ve learned today.

The profit center side of it, just the ease of use. Just the fact that you know, as you, you use some stats here about the fact that this is the preferred channel and there is analytics to be able to figure out the headcount and all that. I love all this. I’ve just learned so much. Is there any way we can kind of distill what we’ve kind of learned today? Maybe like any insights or any takeaways that you would like to leave with our listeners today? 

Yeah, I’d rather make it not about Aircall for a second and really touch on something that I mentioned a few minutes ago because it’s something I think really important to note of where we are. There’s so much uncertainty, and so much divisiveness in the world today, and what we’ve learned is that people really want connection and ease more than ever. And so, when you think about how we can provide this for them and if we can solve this for them, that’s how we truly create loyalty and that’s for your customers, for your employees. 

And so really, they’re counting on all of us to remove some of this burden of life and to feel great about the purchases they crave to enjoy from click, to purchase, to receipt and use. And so it’s really thinking again about how we can think of a tool like Aircall that might be able to play into that ideology to create that ease, to create that connection. 

Very cool. So how can people learn more about Aircall? Where do we wanna, I guess what’s our call to action today based on listening to this show.

Absolutely aircall.io is a great place to go straight to our website to find us. We’re obviously, you know, also on LinkedIn and I’d love to say that, you know, we’re also hiring. So, if anyone’s out there looking for a great place to work and, you know, be a part of, a team that’s driving great impact in innovation and a sense of togetherness, we’d love to have you.

Okay, lovely. I know we did speak offline before recording today. I understand that you would like to share an offer for those that agree with the fact that voice is a necessary channel. They just don’t know how to implement it and maybe they wanna kick the tires a bit with Aircall. 

Oh, absolutely. I’d love to offer a two-week free trial of Aircall because I totally believe in test driving. So absolutely come check us out and we’d love to offer that two-week trial as mentioned. 

Cool. So, I’ll have eCommercefastlane.com/aircall, that’s gonna redirect to, I guess we’re gonna have a landing page for that trial offer, and then you can kind of take them up on that offer. And once again, I think it’s worth testing. I think you don’t know what you don’t know. And I think when you actually go and see the UI, you see how the whole platform works, you know, you figure out, well, where’s the phone number come from and you know, can I get a toll-free number? All these things are all part of the onboarding process.

And so, I think you need to kind of have a look at Aircall. If you’re not doing phone right now, or some kind of legacy system that you need to kinda, you know, come to the 21st century now and give Aircall a try. So once again, I thank Gianna for coming on the call today. This podcast is like I said, it’s a life of learning for me.

And I just think you’ve given a lot of value back to the ecosystem. Congrats on being a plus technology partner. It really means you have the reliability and the scalability and the customer support and all the benefits of being a plus certified partner. So early stage through to the biggest baddest brands you’re able to service them and I just appreciate the fact that you got in the call today and kind of sharing everything about Aircall. 

Aw, thank you, Steve. It was a pleasure as mentioned and glad we finally got to connect. 

All right, well, have yourself a great day. 

You too. 

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Well, that’s it for today’s episode, I’d like to thank you, a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms. All with my personal goal to help you build, launch, grow, and scale with Shopify.

Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.