Sean Gilmour: We've also heard from our customers, like, we don't need compliance recording all the time. This call is being recorded for quality and service purposes is a very real scenario, right? Like we want our calls recorded, we wanna be able to go through and review them. We want intelligence to be able to reason over them, right?

Like great to have a recap that I could push into CRM. We're listening.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we are talking about the Teams Queues app with Sean Gilmour. Sean looks after various aspects of calling in Microsoft Teams, and we dive into what the Queues app is for some of the new features and capabilities that have recently been added. And a few hints at what's coming on the roadmap as well.

Many thanks to Sean for taking the time to jump on the podcast and share his thoughts. And also many thanks to Luware who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate all their support. On with the show. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the show. Excited to do this one. Haven't had one with Sean for a while, and , a lot has been happening in the world of the Queues app.

So we're gonna take this opportunity to go through a bit of background on, , what the Microsoft Teams Queues app is, , who it's for, some of the features and also some of the, , relatively recently released features. And maybe if we're lucky, a little bit of a forward looking glimpse, , of what's coming.

, if we can get away with that. , so Sean, thanks very much for jumping on. , for those that don't know you, I think most people in our community will know you, but, , for those that don't, could you just give us a little bit of an intro and then what you're responsible for?

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, absolutely. , my name's Sean Gilmour.

, I worked at Microsoft, it feels like forever, I think to be 29 years later. This. You're, , all across the company from Office to Windows and Games, and I've been in Teams for almost the last 10 years working in and around calling, , from the sort of heart of calling the calls app. And, , things like initial PSTN calling in Teams.

And now I support most of our B2C work, so call Queues, auto attendance, and all of their expressions, , on the Teams client, the Queues app. , and then my team also owns Teams Phone extensibility on the client side. , so I think the last time we were here I was talking with you about, , that and Dynamics with Pratichi.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. And it's an interesting space now. Mean Teams phone is up to 26 million users. Mm-hmm. And, , kind of the, I think the foundations are obviously very well established at that level of users now. So it's interesting that you guys have got some bandwidth to think about, like Teams Phone sensibilities to the contact center world and Queues app, adding extra value around the kind of base functionality.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, absolutely. , you know, we see it as a spectrum. , you know, just getting a little bit into the history of the Queues app. , a number of years ago we had shipped, , VEC voice enabled channels, , as a sort of expression of call Queues, , on the client and. While it worked for some customers and continues to work for some customers, it ultimately was very, very limited.

, it, you know, particularly the channel based membership and some of the constructs that ended up coming along with it. , and so we looked, , at what we could do. , and there were some, you know, simple things and ways we could have approached it. We could, should have just all kicked it into the calls app or.

You know, things like that. What we really wanted to do was dive in and look at how call Queues and auto attendance were being used by our customers. , what we found was relatively interesting, , and it was an emerging trend then and is much more mainstream now, which is, , what we call citizen agents.

, it's really about. Workers who both answer customer calls, but also do a lot of information work or other types of work. , and that's a broad spectrum. , it can be everyone from HR or internal help desk all the way to frontline workers like nurses and doctors. Who use, , calling on the daily, , to help treat patients, , and to ensure that calls get routed to the right departments and the right specialties.

And so as we were looking at how we should approach this, , we sort of. Dug in, , and spent some time looking at what the needs were and how we do that. And the result is the Queues app, , which we shipped just a little bit over a year ago. , almost 18 months, I guess. , time really does fly.. Which was our approach to sort of creating a space, a WeWork space, effectively in, in Teams, which is a lot of, , both me work, which is what we think of as the Calls app, where I do my own personal work and it's very, very focused on me.

And then there's places where we do work together. , and the Queues app is sort of our answer for collaborative calling, where you're gonna support customers as a group, , you're gonna come together and, and work on the sort of. Customer engagement side of the house. , and so we spent a, a fair amount of time building out the sort core of, , what we wanted to build for, , call Queues and auto attendance.

, and delivered that, like I said, about 18 months ago, , which is really, Hey, here's everyone that's on the queue. , here's the ability to opt in and opt out very, very easily. Here's a view of all the calls that, that you've had Dialpad. , the ability to sort of dig into the history much like you can, , with a, a call in the calls app, but for a specific call.

Mm-hmm. And then, you know, a lot of work initially around supervisors. , you know, we had never really had the concept of a supervisor authorized user. , and the Teams client side where you could actually sort of offload some of the Admin work, , for a call que and auto attendant to, , someone that you'd authorized to manage it.

Oh,

Tom Arbuthnot: that's, that's been a huge ask historically, like, like with the customer I've worked with, it has, 'cause you don't want to give that person Teams admins into access and that level of like, control. And you don't want them to have to raise a ticket every time they want to slightly change their regional workflow.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, you are absolutely right. It was, it was a huge ask from our customers, and you don't want, , to give people Admin rights, even if you can scope it. , and they also don't necessarily want folks, that primary job isn't Admin to go and mess with Tack like. Tack is great surface for what it does, but it is really built for admins and for folks that live and breathe that kind of work.

And that's not at all, you don't want expertise in that, in in very similar ways since we looked at how we evolve the Queues app to where customers were saying about customer engagement. We don't want people that need to make these calls but also might go on and you know, like I said. Go and help support the team as an HR rep or, , be working in the back office as a loan officer to suddenly switch into a full contact center just to answer a phone call from a customer.

, because that's a huge sort of context shift. It's a new set of tools to learn. And so we wanted to ground the Queues app in, in, in those capabilities. And so. A lot of that first wave was the supervisor features. , the ability to opt in and opt out other agents, , and what we refer to often as delegated Admin.

, all of the settings that can be authorized for these users to manage, whether it's office hours for the call queue, the routing rules for the auto attendance, the membership of the call queue. , so that you set, Ken, to your point. Manage these things as you need to because the supervisors are the experts in what's needed in the moment.

And, you know, offload from the admins. That sort of burden of one, having to manage this all for the entire company or even a small, a small business. , and having them be able to focus on the things they need to focus on. , and so a lot of that initial push was in that, and then we added the capability of moderate whisper, barge, and takeover.

In so supervisors could, , engage in calls, , for agents and listen in, , and help, , as needed.

Tom Arbuthnot: Those are really significant features. Like, like those are traditionally higher end contact center capabilities. So if you had that use case, you were suddenly jumping to contact center, which mm-hmm. You may need for certain scenarios, but if you just wanted to add those capabilities, I'm, I'm really impressed that's in and the level setting for anybody listening to this conversation.

So this is kind of building on the. Native in the box Queues, but this, you would need, obviously you need Teams' phone license, and you would need Teams' premium. So essentially you're talking another $10 list on top for a supervisor or an agent. Mm-hmm. , but getting barge, whisper and , and, and takeover in, in that stack, I think is really impressive.

Sean Gilmour: Thank you. , we, we were responding to what our customer need was, and you know, part of the way we view this and, , you know, I think we talked a bit about this when we talked about TPE, is this is really a spectrum from our perspective. , we're not building the Queues app to be a replacement for something like Dynamics or Genesys or any of any of our really.

Great partners in building contact centers on top of Teams. , it's really built for this niche, , that is, you know, a can be a, a big part of a company's , operation, but isn't gonna be on the phone twenty four seven or. Sorry, eight, eight hours out of the day, , with, with sort of a 24 7 Congratulations.

Yeah. Not yet. Not yet. , and, you know, who knows what the future brings, but definitely not announcing that today. , and, and you know, so from our perspective, this really is about, , that spectrum and we've talked a lot.. Internally, , about how we can properly support that. And TPE is obviously a big part of that Teams phone extensibility where you can have your phone system functioning in something like Dynamics or , Luware or Landis.

, and then also route those calls as needed over to Teams, you know, potentially for, for an agent that's working in the Queues app, so that you can say, have your frontline contacts in or call center. Fronted by something like Dynamics, but then if you need to escalate to, you know, , third tier support, you know, say a fraud department Yeah.

, they can work in the Queues app and have all the richness of, you know. Mm-hmm. Popping out the CRM record for the customer so they know exactly who they're talking to and, , the ability to, , manage that call and have that experience. But in the native Team's experience that they know from day to day, from calling their coworkers or reaching out to customers on the phone.

, and so it is really from our perspective, that sort of continuity, , of experience that allows us to,. Service and, and our Teams' Phones, customers, , and we continue to respond that

Tom Arbuthnot: you might see different, like different pockets of users within a single customer using these things. Obviously the, the customer can choose, so you've got.

Native in the box Queues, you've got this extra capability with Queues app and Teams premium. You've got a great ecosystem with the APIs and with TPE of third parties. Yeah. And you've now got Dynamics in the picture in the last couple of years coming in with a higher end contact center as well. But, but it's not, it's not the case that a customer has to choose a single one of those.

They can absolutely mix and match. Right.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, that's a really important part of what we're trying to do. , we don't believe that anyone's living in a fully homogeneous environment that we can be the Swiss Army knife of, of everything that you might need, , from, from calling, , in Swiss Army knifes are great for what they are, but they also aren't great tools for specific use cases.

And we know and understand that there are capabilities,. That are needed, particularly when you're, you're supporting something at the level of a call center that we're just not gonna build on the Teams side. Right. It, it, it doesn't really align with what we're trying to do. We wanna how, you know, empower those, , platforms to worry about creating those rich features.

Yeah. And, you know, for, with, with the Teams phone extensibility, creating that platform that allows them, , to, to leverage Teams' Phone, particularly as a unifying. Piece. But you know, the, the Queues app is built, like I said, for that very sort of specific side of, of work that we sort of deem citizen agents, these, these folks that are doing tons of other work and answering, , customer calls and engaging with customers, , as opposed to the people whose entire job is answering phone calls.

Yeah, yeah. Or, or doing. Customer

Tom Arbuthnot: engagement, the common use case I see in larger enterprises, like in internal customers, if you like, like I think you mentioned it, like, you know, the HR help desk, the IT help desk? Oh yeah. So they're, they're, they're, they're IT support and they're doing various tasks. Mm-hmm.

And they're in the queue for the, the actual voice support desk.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, absolutely. , that huge. , need is for internal help desk, for HR. , but you know, interestingly, we have seen increasingly, , this need to support like this tier three support. We, we work with a lot of financial institutions and, and they have private banking groups and, you know, they want those sort of ability for the customer to make a call and also reach someone, you know, who has the depth of experience and knowledge.

But those folks work day to day in Teams. You don't necessarily want them, like I said, moving into a contact center. And so we wanna do that. And then we have been talking a lot with healthcare about, , supporting doctors and nurses. A lot of, of healthcare, , leverages call Queues and auto attendance to ensure the calls get routed properly, that on call, , doctors get the calls that they need to, , when they're, when they're doing it.

And so, you know, we continue to evolve and that's where you see things like the integration of shifts, which we announced.. Last year as the ability to sort of properly manage when people are gonna be on, , and taking calls or, , working outside of, of the call queue. , and we'll continue to see the sort of growth of those kinds of capabilities, , on our side just because it lines up against what our customer asks are.

, and what we're trying to achieve from the vision of the Queues app

Tom Arbuthnot: was that some of the impetus, I think since we last spoke about this, you added, , Teams physical. IP phone support as well for the touch Teams phones. Is that one of those scenarios? I can imagine things like security Teams having a, a physical phone in a, , in a Queues app scenario.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah. , desktop phones and, you know, , I, I will pull the curtain back a little bit 'cause I think we've talked about this. , we do on, on Teams, , believe that we should try to support every endpoint. And so mobile is something that we're working on. , it's taking a little bit longer in part because what we try to do whenever we approach an endpoint is understand what the needs are on that endpoint and not just be like, oh look, it's a little tiny Queues app.

Like it's, look, this is the desktop, but it's just a little tiny on your little tiny screen. How's that work for you?. It doesn't work very well. And so we're taking the time to ensure that, , we're designing that experience not to be lesser or not to be, , without, , capabilities, just so that it's focused on the way.

People that are mobile first

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.

Sean Gilmour: Or mobile primary are working. Right. So that they can get in there, get work done, and then get onto what they're doing next. , and that's particularly important is think about mobile workers. Like if, if you're working mobile first, you are generally on the go, right?

You're not, you're not sitting down at a desk, a little tiny phone in front of you and a, and a keyboard. You're, you're on the go. You're a nurse who's on, on the floor.. You're someone who's working, , you know, on a factory floor. Hmm. , you're a retail, , employee who's working, , on, , the show floor or, or in the back room.

And so you need to be able to get to go and you need to be able to do the things you're doing very fast. And so the folks that, , we're working on, , the mobile version of it are. We're very, very focused. So, , and I'm hoping we'll have that. So that's, I might get in a little trouble for telling you that, but not No,

Tom Arbuthnot: no, no, no.

Time line subjects change, ev everybody listening in knows the rules.

Sean Gilmour: I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that we're working on that. Yeah. I think it would be like, if we weren't, they would be like, why, why are you not working on that? , what about, what

Tom Arbuthnot: about Web Sean? Like, obviously it's a, it's an app at the moment, but mm-hmm.

Web can support apps. We

Sean Gilmour: do support the Queues app on the web. There, there are some limitations that we're, we're working through. Monitor Whisper, barge is one of those limitations and that, , has a lot to do with medias stack. Mm-hmm. Media stack's different between the two, , clients, , web and desktop.

, but we try as just we can to ensure that everything has parody on the web. , and it's just generally a matter of time. And that is also true of. Government clouds and special clouds. , it's just a matter calling. I could go on for hours about how complex it is to roll calling features out to government clouds.

, it feels like another

Tom Arbuthnot: podcast. I'm narrowing it down.

Sean Gilmour: I don't think you want to hear me

Tom Arbuthnot: No. For my new issue, the complexity of that is really interesting for this, well, maybe not for everybody listening, but it's for me. It's, , it's,

Sean Gilmour: well, we'll go, we'll go get a drink. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: When I'm over

Sean Gilmour: person and, and we'll talk about it.

I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll talk about it at length, but again, it, it is about being where our customers are. , and you know, there are plenty of, , public sector spaces where call Queues and auto attendance come into for, we talk with, you know, local. Police departments and agencies, , who, who wanna leverage it.

And some of them are in, in our, in our, you know, our local government cloud. Mm-hmm. , which we just sort of shorthanded GCC and it's available in GCC. , and then there are other government and, and, , you know, NGOs in, in the sort of special clouds, , whether they're. , cloud specific to a country or, or to a higher level of security?

,

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. My understanding is the GCC Cloud shares some infrastructure with the commercial, but has special things, and then the GCC High and the DODs are physically. Separate. So it's a whole different ballgame. They're

Sean Gilmour: physically separate and they have to be set up and things have to be deployed, and, and there's, there is that, and, but we strive to have that parody mm-hmm.

Because we wanna be able to serve all of our customers. It's, it's never about, , trying to exclude or trying to just say, oh, you need to be in this space. I can

Tom Arbuthnot: actually imagine there are plenty of, , GCC use cases for exactly this scenario. I know there, , makes sense.

Sean Gilmour: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. So, , those continue to be, to be that, and we continue to, like I said, invest, , you know, and I think one of the big features that's coming, , and there are a, a, a fair number that, that will follow as well, , is shared call history.

, and that's a big add for us, particularly from an agent perspective, , to have a view of all of the calls that have called into come, come into a call queue. 'cause today it's just focused on the ones that, , you as, as an agent or a supervisor have interacted with. So having that view of all of those calls is super important.

, and, you know. This is something that we have wanted from the very beginning. , it it is, it has been. , it is very interesting how something that sounds very simple on paper can end up being very, very complicated. , and takes a a, a large number of, of folks across. , the client team and a number of the service side Teams to build out sort of a robust solution.

Right. Because the other thing that we can't do is, is build a half solution. Yeah. That just sort of works or just sort of delivers, or it's like, well. All of the shared calls except the transferred ones, like I don't think anyone would be super happy about that kind of experience. Right. , so it's longer, later than we had wanted it to be.

, I would say that I would've loved to ship shared call history with the Queues app, , at initial launch. , but we thought there was en enough value in the Queues app, , at that point that we would go forward, , without should call history, but it's going to be so much better.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think this is, , I mean honestly this is a big unlock for like the value of the premium license for the, the agent, like the supervisor value was there straight away in terms of the delegated Admin and the reporting, which we'll talk about.

, but yeah, I think this is a huge one. I say especially in small Teams. Like, you obviously want the other person jumping in to be able to pick up where the last person left off. Yeah,

Sean Gilmour: yeah. And to have all of the details about that previous call to understand what's there and what has happened. And that will obviously get richer, , as we move forward.

You know, you can look at what we do in the calls app space to have a, a view on where we go from here as we add shared call history. , you know. It, it's very clear to us that that things like intelligence and the ability to quickly understand, , what's happened before on, you know, on the previous call are, are really important.

, but we've also done some additional work in that call history space for, for call Queues that's added from what we have in the calls app to, to this point of. It being a space where people are doing collaborative work, one of the key features is, Hey, I, you, you know the, it was after hours and a customer left a voicemail.

Here's all the shared voicemails, right? Hey, what calls were missed right here? Here's all the missed calls. Now, missed calls and voicemails show up in the calls app. , but what we're adding to share call history is actually the ability to do lightweight management. So you have the ability to mark that, , missed call or voicemail as reviewed.

Right. It's, it's not, not a super complex feature. , but it is something that we know a lot of customers need. , as we talked about what should call history would bring is very clear from the get go that some way to just say, yeah, someone looked at this. Yeah, it's

Tom Arbuthnot: been dealt with.

Sean Gilmour: Basically

Tom Arbuthnot: been,

Sean Gilmour: yeah, it's been dealt with is important because otherwise.

You're tracking in the third party spreadsheet, you do your spreadsheet, or now you're investing in a whole ticketing app just to make sure that someone listened to a voicemail. It like that doesn't make a lot of sense. , and so that level of lightweight workflow feels very important to us.. I will say, you know, we don't really have an interest in building some of those larger workflows.

Like we, we don't, you know, we're not an expert in building ticketing systems. It's just not, not the business, , that I'm in. And you know, that is also something that we know.. You know, we have very good partners that have built very rich systems like that. , and if you need that level of, of capability, what we're gonna try to do is ensure that, , everything related to the call can very be easily be, you know, moved into that ticketing system, can be moved into the CRM.

And so one of the goals that I have from my team is to ensure that we can over time allow richer plugins and richer capabilities to be added by third parties.. 'cause again, this belief that everything is homogeneous, that somehow, you know, , only we can build the best tools and only we can provide the best capabilities.

Right. , you know, there's a rich, rich ecosystem built around calling and, and by third parties and, , they, they do a lot of things better than we do. , and so I'd much rather give them the opportunity to, to do that. ,

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, and, and the kind of the Microsoft sort of stated goal is this, , everybody everywhere, right?

Isn't it? So like, actually that API extensibility lets you hit all with partners or with advanced customers. Hit those. Personalized use cases, those workflows, verticals, those kind of things.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah. And that's already supported within calls. Right? Today in, in call Queue calls, you know, , you can, , have a Teams app pinned that opens as soon as a call Queue call comes through.

So if you have a CRM app that you want to do, it can be. Through, , parameters. So yeah, c

Tom Arbuthnot: RL variables, isn't it? So that kind of could fire off a, a web-based CRM

Sean Gilmour: type. We can do the web-based pop out, but we actually support if, if, , if the third party is invested in building a Teams app, you can actually add Teams, apps to calls today and admins can actually pin Oh.

Interesting. Actually in call. Yeah. I haven't come across that

Tom Arbuthnot: use case. That's a

Sean Gilmour: good point. Yeah. I

Tom Arbuthnot: remember when

Sean Gilmour: it launched. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's pretty. Pretty key as we think about, , how you can sort of leverage that. Now, longer term, like I said, we wanna see that being a, a broader capability, right?

If, if you've invested in a CRM app, , we would love to see deeper integrations, , across, , the product and, and deeper into the, into the Q'S surface. , nothing to announce. Today. It's just from a vision standpoint, that's, that's where we want to go and, and what we wanna allow has,

Tom Arbuthnot: has the general ai, like across, obviously I talk to a lot of people at Microsoft, like a AI is obviously hugely important at the moment to the whole industry and Microsoft Yeah.

Has, has that given a shot in the arm to a. API coverage and access to data, it feels like in other Teams, it, it, it has because you can see how the AI tools or the AI agents would want to use that data. Mm-hmm.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, that's a, that's a big part of it, obviously.. That's a big part.

Like we've added, you know, you can, and you know, if, if you have a Copilot license, you can have Copilot acting, , during a call with a customer, , from call queue calls. , so that's capability we added out of the, out of the gate, but certainly getting that data. Plumbed in through available, , in through BizChat available to, you know, all the things that can be plugged in, , to BizChat, , and through MCS is critical from our perspective.

, and that's from calling, you know, from, from personal calls or what we deem personal calls, , which are, you know, on your phone number, , with your, , identity or. Call queue and auto attendant calls. , getting all of that in and, and letting AI go to work on it is really important, right? Because you can imagine, you know, as many charts as I can build in the call queue in the Queues app for analytics.

And as many of the different cases that a customer might have that I can try to cover. , if, if I can get all of that data yeah. Plumbed in through and available in the graph and allow Copilot to reason over it, imagine a much richer surface and a much richer ability to dig deep, much deeper than we're ever gonna be able to do.

And so that's where we see the power of AI coming to bear here. , and, you know. Over time, there's also a rich set of data that you could think about pulling to the fore, , in the midst of a, of a call, right? And no reason to not be able to sort of put the power of all of the intelligence that has that's, that's backed.

. And all of the data that's available to sort of help, , agents resolve calls more quickly, , or help customers, , even, you know, necessarily without involving an agent. There's lots of questions that are very easy, , to offload and deflect. And, and that's one of the things that we see as a, as a vision for, for where we're going.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's really exciting. We've touched on reporting, so let's dig in there. 'cause , I can't remember when it was released, but you have expanded the historical reporting to, I think it's 45 days now.

Sean Gilmour: 45 days. , a after, , a lot of, of, , it, it was a, a good amount of work, but it was also some, some, , work on our part, having conversations with our legal departments and, and different entities, like a lot of the limitations were around.

Protecting customer data. Yeah. And, and being thoughtful about how long we were in, it felt odd

Tom Arbuthnot: externally. That 27 felt like an odd number.

Sean Gilmour: Two, seven,

Tom Arbuthnot: I think, I think I held your piece of fire on that. One of the previous pods. I was like, like, surely over a month will be the default. But

Sean Gilmour: you'd think. , but, but we've, we've, we've.

Broken through that sort of log jam. , and yeah, we're 45 days. That's great. Our goal is to push further than that. We'll continue to push further and further. , you know, I'd love it to be, you know, as, as long as, as we have the data and you want us to, and you wanna have the data. We, we'll see how far we can get, but we wanna keep pushing that.

Like we certainly want to see and understand that. And, and, and from our perspective, when you do think about things like AI, the longer sort of the. Horizon you can put

Tom Arbuthnot: on that. Yeah. The more, the more context, deeper, it's, these people are more context, part-time supervisors in the, in the main, in this scenario, and I, the thing I'm really excited about the AI is obviously I can chat, ask a question like when was our busiest time?

When was our least busiest time? Yeah. Like if I've got time to that, which I haven't because I'm part-time supervisor, but, but the AI potentially, actually you can be like you are. Proactively the ai mm-hmm. To look at this data and work out what's going on and tell me insight da da dah, suddenly actually the a, the, the tool can bring me an insight without me even having to drive the insight, which is really exciting to me.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah. That, that, that kind of proactive intelligence is also something that we see sort of is fundamental to where we go. , right. To your point. Supervisors are very busy, and yeah, ideally you have all of this time to look over the data and dig deep and understand how everything's worked, but the reality of the system is.

You're shorthanded and you've just got two new employees and they've never answered a phone call in their

Tom Arbuthnot: lives. I even more so in this Queues app scenario because maybe in the big contact center you have got an FT. Mm-hmm. I've, I've, I've worked with enterprises that have obviously a contact center manager, but actually have analysts.

On that team because the business warrants it. But there's, I I imagine most, , Queues app scenarios, it's gonna be the polar opposite. Like your part-time supervisor, they're part-time agents, they have other roles. So the, the, the value potential is quite high in this niche.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You're absolutely right.

And, and not only that, they're likely supervisors for more than one queue. , you know, they're, they're. Splitting work. They are subbing in and acting as agents at the same time. And so yeah, the more we can be proactive, the more we can be helpful. , again, you know, Copilot's a good name in my perspective.

'cause it really is about, hey, this is something you should pay attention to. , here's some next steps. What do you wanna do? Not guess what, we behind the scenes, optimized all your cues, and now none of your calls are routing to where they need to go. 'cause, well, you know, is it's really about empowering, , people and, and getting them the data.

Is as they need it to make these kinds of decisions. And, and whether that's, you know, emergent, right? As in, hey, you know, volume's starting to increase. We've seen, you know, last week things just started to creep up and now, you know, every day by four o'clock you got really long wait times to, hey, looking at the last six months of data.

You know, there's this, there are these upticks that happen sporadically. You should be more thoughtful about

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. Thursdays for, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. For Thursday of the month you should over like, have more agents ready 'cause it's gonna happen again ly. Yeah. Which, which to your point is about the window of data you can get, you can get more insights.

Mm-hmm. What?

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, exactly.

Tom Arbuthnot: What about transcript data? 'cause obviously we've now got GA APIs for the recording. Mm-hmm. The recording insights, the transcripts, which is great on the. Personal call side. Any any thoughts on that?

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, so, , yeah, there, there, so currently we only support convenience recording and compliance recording for call Queues.

, you know, that's limiting, right? Because obviously if you're an agent, records a call, which they can. Mm-hmm. , it's bound to them, right? So, you know. We have definitely heard from our customers that they need more, right? Compliance recording is an amazing tool and we have amazing third party partners for compliance recording and it's hard, right?

Like I've talked a lot with those folks about what they're trying to do.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, there was a bunch of work done. Specifically target Queues as well wasn't there because we like it, rather than targeting the. Like traditionally, you would've targeted the agent as a person and they would've been recorded if they were in the scenario.

But you can, as I understand, target Queues now explicitly,

Sean Gilmour: you can. Yeah. We released that capability last year. , and before that, you would've had to go through and go like, oh, who are all these people that are on the call queue? We'll sign each of them individual compliance recording policy, and then that compliance recording policy was all of their calls.

Mm-hmm. It wasn't just. Call queue calls, right? And now you can actually associate it with a call queue, which is great 'cause it means only the call queue calls get recorded. They're associated with that call queue as opposed to that user. And then that user, if they take another phone call on their personal line or their, you know, chatting with their coworker isn't being recorded, , which is great.

, but we've also heard from our customers like, Hey. We don't need compliance recording all the time, right? Like, hey, this call is being recorded for quality and service purposes is a very real scenario, right? Like, we want our calls recorded. , we wanna be able to go through and review them. We want intelligence to be able to reason over them, right?

Like, great to have a recap that I could push into CRM. We're listening. , I can't necessarily announce anything here. Maybe I can very soon. , but we're listening and, and we know what's needed in that space and, and we're definitely working towards it. , like I said, shared call history opens up a world of capabilities for us because it's not just about your own calls, it's about.

All of the calls that have happened in the call queue, it's about, you know, how do we apply intelligence to all of those calls? How do we understand what happened in those calls? And that is very much about getting the right amount of data, , 'cause routing and some of the context is really good, but recordings and transcripts are a lot better.

, so you can imagine that, that were, that sort of. He knows through step. Yeah. And then the next step and the next step.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Nice. Well, we've got, , yeah, we've got yourself and Scott and Wendy on the, , the team's first eye chat in April. So, , that Right. I have no idea about timelines, but I'm, , hopefully we'll have some, , exciting stuff to talk about there.

And, , we'll

Sean Gilmour: have more stuff to talk about. In April, I promise.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome, awesome. Well, Sean, thanks so much for jumping on the pod and really appreciate the, absolutely. The point of view of the, the whys behind some of the decisions as well. It's really interesting to hear. And, , yeah, great, great to see the, , the extended data and the, the shared voicemail and shared call history, that's a big step forward I think.

Sean Gilmour: Yeah, we're excited about a lot of stuff that's coming. Shared call history is just the start. I'm positive. We'll have a lot more to talk about, about Queues app and about calling, , in April. So it's gonna be a good conversation.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Looking forward to it. All right. Thanks so much.

Sean Gilmour: Absolutely. Take care.

Tom Arbuthnot: Cheers.