Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018

Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018Talkdesk ProfileA Frost & Sullivan White Paperwww.frost.com50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership

Frost & SullivanCompany Background and Current Performance. 3Portfolio Description and Analysis. 4Sales and Services Model. 6Customer Recommendations. 7Best Fit. 7Caution. 7Legal Disclaimer. 8The Frost & Sullivan Story. 8TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018Talkdesk ProfileCOMPANY BACKGROUND AND CURRENT PERFORMANCEOf all the “written on the back of a napkin in a restaurant” stories of how start-ups occur, Talkdesk is certainlyone of the more interesting ones. It was created out of CEO and founder Tiago Paiva’s desire to create a start-upand was achieved when he entered a Twilio-sponsored hackathon to win a MacBook Air laptop. His vision—toreinvent contact center solutions—enabled him to win the laptop and the attention of investors. In 2011, helaunched the resulting software-only contact center solution as Talkdesk and began providing services in 2013.Soon thereafter, the rapidly growing company moved to its current headquarters in San Francisco.By 2015, Talkdesk had garnered quite a bit of press and nearly 20 million in venture funding from DFJ, StormVentures, and Salesforce Ventures. It was named to the Forbes list of Top 100 Cloud Companies in 2016–2017 andnoted as Forbes’s next billion-dollar company. By Q1 2018, the company had grown to 300 employees worldwide.It continues to grow, particularly in the areas of R&D. This is an area of heavy investment, with more than 50% ofresources dedicated to engineering. In Portugal, where its R&D resources reside, Talkdesk expects to more thandouble its 150 engineers over the next year and grow to 500 engineering personnel within 18 months.Talkdesk’s platform resides in eight global data centers, supporting customers in more than 80 countries, with anadditional data center coming online in 2018 in China.As of 2018, the company claims it has grown to 1,400 customers, supporting 52,000 agent seats. An annualgrowth rate of more than 100% in 2017 makes Talkdesk the fastest-growing player in the contact centersoftware market.Initially aimed at the SMB market, the size of Talkdesk’s customer base has increased along with customer growth.As of early 2018, customers with more than 100 seats represented 40% of its business. Talkdesk now supportscustomers ranging from very small to more than 1,400 seats. With the March 2018 launch of its Enterprise ContactCenter Platform, this number will continue to increase.All rights reserved 2018 Frost & Sullivan3

Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018Talkdesk ProfilePORTFOLIO DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSISTalkdesk Enterprise Contact Center Platform is an omnichannel contact center solution built on microservicesarchitecture. It is designed with the scalability, reliability, and security required to support large, global organizations.The platform runs on US-based AWS data centers, with secondary backup to Google servers. Non-US-basedagents are supported on regional media servers. The company also offers SLAs for uptime and call quality, boastinggreater than 99.99% uptime and a top-tier call quality MOS of 4.22.Talkdesk designed its platform for maximum ease of use with the goal of enabling customers to set up theircontact centers in weeks rather than months. The administration interface is designed to allow companies to makeconfiguration changes on the fly—changing IVR rules, assigning new agents, and using clicks and pick lists withoutrequiring IT.The platform includes desktop call control, intelligent routing, outbound dialing, automated workflows, WFM, QM,and analytics—some natively built and others through AppConnect partnerships. Highlights of capabilities include: Callbar, a freestanding app that allows agents to make and receive phone calls anywhereon the desktop, without requiring them to search through tabs. It provides single sign-oncapabilities and an intuitive user interface for agents using Callbar CTI or deep integrationwith Salesforce, Zendesk, and others. The app allows for screen pops and continues to logcalls and notes directly into a company’s CRM or helpdesk solution, even when agents areworking elsewhere. Talkdesk CX Manager, which utilizes data to route the right call to the right agentand features a simple-to-use, visual interface to design routing flows, without requiringcoding. Talkdesk’s goal is for its customers to be self-sufficient in implementing complexflow routing designs, leveraging a context platform and a flexible attribute-based matchingassignment system. Context Platform, a suite of products that provides real-time information and contextfrom self-service interactions to agents. Context Mobile is the first application in the suite; ituses context to route the right call to the right agent and carries context from a user’s mobiledevice to the agent, giving real-time information on what the customer was doing prior torequesting an agent. Features include authentication and callback capabilities. AppConnect, the industry’s first enterprise app store, designed to allow one-clickdownload and integration to third-party applications. It is populated with more than 20(and growing) applications, including WFM, WFO, and speech analytics. In addition toAppConnect partners, Talkdesk has partnerships/integrations with more than 30 otherbusiness tool, CRM, and software providers, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, MicrosoftDynamics, and Zendesk.4All rights reserved 2018 Frost & Sullivan

Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018Talkdesk Profile Talkdesk APIs, a set of synchronous REST APIs that allows developers to access andintegrate the functionality of Talkdesk with other native and third-party applications. APImethods include managing calls, call workflows, and user accounts. Talkdesk Live, a real-time reporting platform integrated with Salesforce. It enablesadministrators to manage their teams from anywhere and create custom dashboards,thresholds, and alerts tailored to business needs.In addition, the company announced offerings geared specifically to service and sales: Talkdesk for Sales is for inside sales teams to drive more productive prospectconversations. Powered by AI, the Talkdesk for Sales product suite includes power dialing,voicemail drop, local presence, and Salesforce Sales Cloud integration. Talkdesk for Service enables service teams to elevate the experience they provide tocustomers through intelligent routing, contextual customer information, actionable reporting,and customer satisfaction measurements (including sentiment). Built on the TalkdeskEnterprise Contact Center Platform, it offers an intuitive user interface, along with the“floating” Callbar app and one-click integrations through AppConnect.The company is committed to enhancing its feature set at a rapid pace, with three major releases a year. Its latestrelease, for example, is a visual flow designer, the foundation for attribute-based routing and omnichannel agentpresence. This release had a particular focus on security requirements and included SOC2 Type II certification andsupport for HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR.Talkdesk’s partner program includes Afiniti, Autoreach, Contactually, Clearview, Deepgram, Grow, Highrise,Infusionsoft, Injixo, Kustomer, Microsoft (Dynamics), Nimble, OnePageCRM, Pipedrive, Procedure Flow, Radius,Salesforce, Screenmeet, ServiceNow, Simplemotion, TalkAlly, alkIQ, Teleopti, Voicebase, Zendesk, and Zoho. Itprovides outbound dialing through a partnership with Autoreach.All rights reserved 2018 Frost & Sullivan5

Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018Talkdesk ProfileSALES AND SERVICES MODELTalkdesk sells through a direct sales force and a referral partner network.While the company has a professional services team for implementation and custom integrations, the platformwas designed for ease of use, with free online training and self-service tools and education. In addition to 24/7phone support, it offers dedicated customer service representatives for each account and an internal customersatisfaction rating of over 98%.STRENGTHSCONCERNSThe company prides itself on fast and easyDespite recent wins in the larger-scaleset-up, use, and administration, claiming theenterprise market, Talkdesk still is a newcomercontact centers can be up in a few weeks ratherto the high end of the market and needs marketthan months, with POC deployment up andattention from reference accounts to increaserunning in a day.brand awareness in this segment.Talkdesk has more than 20 integrations in itsAppConnect application store, providing lightningfast, one-click download and integration of thirdparty applications, with pay-as-you-go billing and30-day free trials. For instance, if a customer wantsto try a WFM solution from one vendor, they cantrial it and switch to another one with minimal effortand investment. All integrations are displayed inthe same, familiar Talkdesk interface. In addition,Talkdesk integrates with more than 30 additionalbusiness tool, CRM, and software providers.Because Talkdesk is built on a flexible, microservicesTalkdesk provides a wide variety of applicationsthrough third-party suppliers, providing alow-investment option for choosing a vendor.However, it does not natively support somekey functions, such as WFM, nor control coreR&D focal points, such as agent training andengagement, leaving development from clientrequests out of its hands.architecture, customers can choose the solutionsthat best suit their needs, rather than depend on aone-size-fits-all platform with limited choices.The company has gone a long way in creatingTalkdesk can provide global voice-quality SLAsbrand awareness in the past several years,based on MOS measurements. The ability to seeincluding being a key supporter at Salesforceacross all centers with global visibility, with oneDreamforce, yet still lacks the broad brandglobal view and reporting, is attractive.awareness of many of its larger competitors,particularly outside of the United States.Reliance on IT is limited. Talkdesk provides codefree configuration changes on the fly using clicksand pull-downs.6All rights reserved 2018 Frost & Sullivan

Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2018Talkdesk ProfileCUSTOMER RECOMMENDATIONSBest Fit For companies that want quick setup and implementation of new or branch contact centers, Talkdeskprovides an attractive option. Talkdesk’s ability to allow customers to “play” with applications using one-click integration on a trialbasis would be a good fit for companies with multiple sites using differing CRM and other thirdparty packages or those seeking to trial new functionality. This would enable different sites to try andperhaps standardize on one or two without large-scale investment in time or money. For those wedded to their Salesforce implementations, Talkdesk is financially backed by Salesforce andclaims to have the deepest integration with Salesforce of any contact center vendor. This includes deeplevel, channels, context, data, reports, and dashboards and status of calls and recording.Caution Companies looking for an all-in-one provider and a central point of contact for feature upgrades mayprefer more traditional providers.All rights reserved 2018 Frost & Sullivan7