Andy Whiteside: Ben was really good in being able to identify what his requirements were. And they, and they did change a little bit through the process. So having a customer that sort of understands what they're trying to do is useful. Things changed afterwards, Ben, as well, right? So we When the acquisition was made, we, there were other things that sometimes you wouldn't have thought about as part of that initial engagement. So it's understanding what your requirements are today, but then also thinking what the medium term looks like

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the show. You know we like to get a customer perspective on the show, and this week we have Ben from SmartSearch. He takes us through his personal journey in telephony through to Skype and then Teams, and also at SmartSearch, how they went about choosing a recording vendor, why they chose Numonix, and also some interesting stuff they're doing with API integration with Numonix. Thanks to Ben for jumping on the show, and also many thanks to Numonix for all their support of the community. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. You know we like to have a, customer point of view on the show as much as possible, and excited to get a point of view from Ben, who's been in the industry for quite a long while, so we're gonna talk about his history. And we've also got Andy, from Numonix, who are part of, Ben's recent story, so we'll talk about that as well. Ben, maybe you could introduce yourself first of all.

Ben Richardson: Hi, my name's Ben Richardson. I'm a, an Infrastructure Engineer at SmartSearch. I've got around about twenty eight years, previous experience in the industry. Started off life as, a Telecoms Engineer moving to a VoIP Engineer and around about COVID time, I decided to retrain and, moved into the sort of the traditional infrastructure role. And actually I did a, an advanced apprenticeship and did a level four networking course, which was, which was really good to get some accreditations on paper if you like. Yeah, and I've been at SmartSearch for about three years.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Yeah, I'm interested to dig into that 'cause you've gone from the proper voice world into the UC and collab world and that networking part is definitely part of that puzzle. Andy, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Andy Whiteside: Yeah. Hi, Andy Whiteside. I'm the VP of sales for Numonix. Relatively short in my tenure here, but worked in the channel probably, in lots of the, environments that, Ben's talking about, on the voice side from years ago. But, yeah, did a stint, as a, with a Contact Center provider, out of Europe for six years prior to this. But, Mike Levy and I knew each other and threatened to work together at one point and that's where we are today.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Awesome. So Ben, why don't you start off, give us an overview of SmartSearch to give us some context of the organization.

Ben Richardson: Yeah. So we've around about two hundred, staff members. We are an money laundering and compliance, platform seller. So we sell our, SaaS solution to customers who need to do money laundering and, co- identity checks on people. We've recently just acquired another business called Credas who, do a very similar thing to us but predominantly work in the property sector. They're based in Cardiff and, that was a result of, an investment by a private equity firm called Triple, who acquired us approximately two years ago. And their aim is to, grow us and make us, a hundred million companies their target they tell us

Tom Arbuthnot: So big aspirations then.

Ben Richardson: Yeah. And it's an interesting- That's awesome journey. It's interesting to sort of be part of. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's us in a nutshell.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And, like talk us how long have you been there and kind of what was your history, pre and post? Did you go on this telephony journey- Or with them, or have you been in other organizations?

Ben Richardson: No. So I dro- I joined them as a Senior Service Desk Engineer. So I was working with, the s- the everyday faults and, like I said, did this apprenticeship and then got a promotion to the infrastructure team. But that was heavily backed with my knowledge around VoIP, and it turns out actually the technologies are very similar. So I wa- I was always working with client applications in the VoIP world. So that sort of transition into the traditional infrastructure role was quite an easy thing to do, but I've really enjoyed it. And previous to, SmartSearch, I was working at another company called Civica in a very similar role to that. So yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Nice. And, at what point did you get exposed to Skype for Business, Lync, and Teams?

Ben Richardson: Oh, right. So, yeah, so I've yeah, in my Telecoms role, we were 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, still using T- Skype and then Teams, but it was, that was The addition of direct routing to me was a massive game changer, whereas with a traditional PBX VoIP system, to license a user for a video call was quite an expensive license, and Teams just changed the game with that. And I could see a potential death of a large part of the industry I was working in, so that was a big driver for me to sort of do that retrain. So yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And like, y- so you kind of You felt early, you could see the telecom space was changing, and it was going more to UC and collaboration.

Ben Richardson: Absolutely. And I mean s- software as a solution wasn't really a thing at that point. Azure was new, AWS was new, but I could see the direction that things were going and thought I needed to do something about it, and I did.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And you had to like Well, I guess, first of all, it'd be good to t- talk through, are you 100% Teams now at SmartSearch? And do you use Teams for like Do you have Contact Center? Obviously, you have Numonix for recording, which we'll talk about. Is it, is it direct routing? Is it OC? What does that look like?

Ben Richardson: Yeah, so it's direct routing with, We have two SBCs, in Azure that we manage, a hit chipper. Yeah, and we use Teams for everything. So we don't have the sort of the Contact Center element as such. We do have inbound IVRs with call queues and longest agent, routing. We use Power BI for some of the reporting metrics, and we've got the advanced license for some of the team managers so they can opt agents in and out of calls, et cetera. So yeah, we use as much of Teams as we can, and it's that direct routing element that I referenced before that's sort of the game changer for us.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And it is interesting to hear organizations that are, as you say, using what's in the box. The call queues and the Queues app have got a bit more advanced now, so you can get quite a long way these days with what's in the box for, basic kind of queuing and IVRs and routing.

Ben Richardson: Yeah, that's true, and the feature sets are always evolving. It's not a true I don't think we could use it in a true Contact Center element where the, there are really sort of depth reports needed. But for a business our size, it covers 99% of our needs. We don't need any specialist equipment. But I think again, if we did need specialist, you can have ons with the Dynamics, is the Microsoft Dynamics ons for- Yeah Contact Center and things like that. So yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: And what took you to needing, recording? Was it more compliance or more data insights, or a bit of both?

Ben Richardson: It was a bit of both, and we already had a product that was legacy. It was approaching end of support. It was not very, friendly, so the quality ana- ana- analysts had a quite a hard job identifying calls and listening to calls and gathering data. And we also had the requirement to integrate with a third party application for our sales team that, scores their, the quality of their calls based on set criteria that we program. And it was really important that the solution that we chose had that ability, and more importantly than anything, we needed a, an accredited Microsoft third party, for the, for the compliance side of things, just so we were in support and we had, we could have a company that we could trust essentially.

Tom Arbuthnot: No, it makes sense. It's interesting to hear the different requirements there, 'cause when we think about Teams Recording, like a lot of minds usually jump straight towards like we're a company, we need recording for compliance purposes. But actually you had like usability considerations there around the people looking into the data and the reporting and those call insights. And what was the third party that you wanted to integrate with?

Ben Richardson: So they're called Attention. It's, Attention AI, essentially, and it's a really sort of, accurate analysis of the transcription of the calls, and the scoring. And it's created with the ability to integrate Numonix into that. It's created a real sort of drive for the sales team, and we're seeing some real key, turnaround and some revenue sort of come back from that investment, which is always nice, obviously. And the Again, Numonix is the back end, and it's, it was key to have that integration working and stable.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. We'll talk about how you did that in a second 'cause it's really interesting 'cause you e- essentially did it yourselves with the Numonix API. But Andy, I wanna throw to you. How Like, on that kind of what the market's looking for, how much is the split to, like, classic compliance versus insights, integrations, new ways of working?

Andy Whiteside: I think if you, if you had asked me that about a year or so ago, it would be compliance, and that would've been the driver for most of the customer requirements, in that space. I think when Ben and I first talked, w- with first had a initial discovery, we weren't sure whether that would be our TRAS platform or our IX cloud. And actually, they had a mix of users that meant that IX cloud was probably the best option for them. So yeah, I think, I think we're seeing lots more, drivers that are trying to get that, data insight from those recorded calls and do something clever with it. The compliance stuff will always be there, but they're, they tend to be You know, unless you do something really bad, they wanna keep those in place 'cause they're risky and complex. So you know, it's a lot of the new, discussions we're having around, a- around getting insights from those conversations.

Tom Arbuthnot: And Ben, how did you find assessing the market and the market ops? 'Cause interesting because you had both those requirements. Like, how did you go about understanding what your options were? Did you do any kind of proof of concepts? Like how was all that experience?

Ben Richardson: Yes, we did. So we had many workshops, spent out, quite lengthy, that Andy will be able to testify to, documentation, RFIs, security questionnaires. And that was another sort of criteria actually, that was ISO 27001, SOC 2. And yeah, we So we just set up demonstrations with companies and we saw what was on offer, predominantly from that third party accredited Microsoft list. And we just worked through those vendors, a couple I'd worked with before. And yeah, we chose Numonix as the, as the primary sort of place to go to based on that discovery.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And y- that list, that's a great explanation. 'Cause that list is usually everybody's like, well, first off, they've got to be Microsoft certified 'cause we're a Microsoft Shop. So that, but that's quite a long list though. Then you're breaking it down into requirements. Yeah. Like, at the end of that process, what, why did Numonix stand out above any other?

Ben Richardson: It was the simplicity of the solution. It was, the fact that we could do the integration with the API ourselves, and it was just an overall experience we got, and, or we had rather, from Andy and the technical team, just really sort of clear explanations, really, good if we had a- another query because we'd, we'd canvas one team at work and then another team would want to get involved, so there was constantly evolving requirements. Yeah. And yeah, just Numonix were the best at responding and it was, it was overall the best fit for us.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And how was it deploying and going live? 'Cause you've done classic voice recording and like the, in the PBX world, you've done some stuff with Skype. Like, what kind of How hard was it? What kind of timeframe to get to live with Numonix?

Ben Richardson: Well, I booked out probably an hour session to do it, and the actual configuration, initial configuration and hookup was done in about 20 minutes. It was five PowerShell commands, just really simple. With it being, a bot, their bot that we connect to, it was, it was unbelievably simple compared to hooking up contact recorders to, like, going back a few years, ISDN30 lines and having- Yeah boxes of tin on site and large CapEx expenses. Obviously, all that moved to an OpEx and, yeah, it was, it was just really simple on setup, really simple.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's quite a different world to the olden days of recording with, like you say, networking and port mirroring and SIPREC and all ISDN repeaters or that's good to hear. And talk us through the API thing's really interesting 'cause different recording platforms offer different native integrations, and some offer APIs, some gate their APIs a little bit. But i- it sounds like you guys just took actual Numonix standard API they provide to the customers, and you ran with it and did the integration with that third party directly?

Ben Richardson: That's correct. So yeah, we got the OpenAPI documentation from Andy and co. And we had to then set up some parameters. So we had to set up a requirement. We didn't want calls under, let's say, a minute and 30 seconds 'cause we didn't think they would be relevant or have any valid data. Okay. We wanted to only get calls of a certain age. And, we had to, just run the development with the Attension team, and they- their developers were really good. So, it took it two or three iterations to get it accurate and right. But now we seem to be We can get a call. As soon as an agent has finished, the call is appearing within Attension in two minutes, which isn't bad really. -

Tom Arbuthnot: A- An Attension's one of those, like, sales insights platforms. So it's taking the school-- the calls, scraping for insights and sentiment, and helping you understand kind of insights and next actions. Have I got that right?

Ben Richardson: Absolutely, yes. So there are, there are scorecards that, our sales managers set criteria on. So they say it's, it's all done via AI agents, actually. So they will say, "I want my sales agent to mention A, B, C, D, and E about SmartSearch when on a call. Has that agent done that?" and the Attension platform will scrape that transcript and score the call based on that and then automate an email reply. It will then update the HubSpot CRM package with the details of the call via another API. So yeah, it's quite a, it's quite a good platform.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's the goal, getting it into the CRM. Like it's a nightmare- It is getting, salespeople, who A- Andy will give the benefit of the doubt, are very busy and, have lots to do- to get the, to put the notes into the CRM. So anything that can automate that is gold. Yeah.

Andy Whiteside: And,

Tom Arbuthnot: A- Andy, talk us through. You mentioned TRAS and, ICECloud. Like, what's the Explain those two for the community, and what's the difference as far as API and integrations go?

Andy Whiteside: So our end-to-end solution is, it's cloud, and that's the solution that Ben's got. And that comes, with a, with a, an open API for customers to use. TRAS is more Teams recording as a service. So effectively that just uses a bot service. So people like Attention and Gong and Navini and those sorts of guys wanna just capture the call, and then we can deliver the call with the metadata into a folder that they go and do something be- you know, something different with.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. We've had, we've had Gong on the podcast actually talking about their integration, which uses your underlying infrastructure and that they present that to their customers as part of their product. They're gathering the data. There's no Numonix interface. It's just a, your, a kind of integration layer on that scenario. And

Andy Whiteside: I think that's the point, right? So I think we don't wanna be an AI company. Will we bring, AI services that customers can be prepackaged and used? Of course. You know, that's what everybody's gonna do. But ultimately we wanna do what we do well, and we wanna make it as easy as possible for customers to consume that service. So, the, some organizations have got really, skilled back office guys that can say, "Hey, we want to take this, call, we wanna do this with it, we wanna connect to these other systems, and we wanna, have a result that is this." And the API will allow you to do a lot of that, a lot of that. We also then will have sort of the middle ground where, they might want to take our transcription, 'cause that's just easier to bolt those two things together. But they might have a specific requirement to go and do fraud detection on an insurance call that might need a slightly different, tooling set to be able to go and interrogate that and give them exactly what they want. So, yeah, it's, the combination for me is if I can make it really easy for customers to consume it in one of those or a, or a combination of those methods, then, the Typically the TRAS stuff won't consider, the compliant storage, because it's gonna go into another system that maybe it's just using a transcript and then it's gonna do something over the top of it. So there's combinations of all of those different things and tooling that the customers might have. So yeah, in a, in a nutshell, we've got, pretty much any way that you wanna be able to consume whatever we can provide.

Tom Arbuthnot: And on the types cloud, have you seen an uptick in interest in conversations about the API? I feel like AI has unlocked a lot of conversations where things you wouldn't, like organizations wouldn't have done house before, but now they're like, "Oh, actually it's not as hard as it used to be 'cause we can use Codex or Claude Code or, do some of these integrations or Power Apps and Power Platform to pull these things out." is that, am I right? Have you seen like a reflection in like people are interested now in that API access to the data?

Andy Whiteside: Hundred percent. I think, and sometimes we don't even know what customers are doing because they're using the API documentation. They're going off and doing their own builds that, they're bringing whatever they need into those platforms. And, yeah, so we-we've changed a few things, making API calls. You know, we've tried to streamline that a little bit with using webhooks and those types of things, and we've got support for things like private endpoints now. So all of those things that will help, maintain a secure environment for people to pull that data from. But yeah, without sharing with that, we've just launched some AI demand features. And customers that, maybe have been looking at AI in different contexts now can go, "Oh, hang on a second. You know, we If the source of this data is the conversation, and that's a meeting or a, or a call, we can then, on demand or on every call, get a subset of different AI tools just to help them in their, in their day-to-day." And that's really, that's really where we're seeing most of the conversations today.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And Ben, I like, the integration's really cool, so definitely want to talk about that. But you mentioned at the start of the conversation the people using the reporting and the insights on the, like, the Numonix usability side. Yeah. Like, talk us through That seems to have been one of the drivers you talked about on the prep call is, like, the other products you're using didn't have the best reporting, and there was some friction there. Has that changed?

Ben Richardson: Yeah, 100%. The user interface of the I- IXCloud platform is really friendly. Yeah, the QA team can now search for users by group, or they can search for the user directly by the name. They can then go into that call and just see an overview of the call. They can drill down into it. They can extract a sus- a certain section of the audio. It's all presented in a wave form. Th- they can share that with people. They can password protect that share. Yeah, so it's really enhanced the efficien- efficiency of that department, essentially. They can export the They can export to Excel the call listings. And just one other really interesting thing that I forgot to mention, one of the other requirements that we had was the data had to be in preferably a UK data center. But we wanted to bring our own storage if we could, and Numonix were, unique in that for- in that fact, where we are using our own Azure storage that's hooked into their platform, which obviously allows us much greater control. And that passed the InfoSec committee sort of with flying colors. So I thought that's a really important thing to point out.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's a good point. A- and even with, because you have quite stringent InfoSec and, like, SOC 2 and ISO and those kinds, so they were comfortable with, like, Numonix are recording, but then it's coming back into our infrastructure for the data storage.

Ben Richardson: Indeed. Yeah. Yeah, and it's all encrypted. It's e- encrypted in transit, and obviously now it's encrypted at rest as well. Yeah. And I think they, correct me if I'm wrong, do you provide a terabyte of storage, Andy, as default anyway with your if we just selected your storage, but yeah.

Andy Whiteside: Yeah. Normally when we create a tenant, then it's got a terabyte of redundant storage. But, yeah, typically customers will make a decision at the start of the process to say whether they want to use their own or whether they want to use ours, and we can mirror the Azure regions for where customers might sit and where they want the recordings to reside if they do use our storage.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's a nice option to be able to use your own because you can pick your geo, pick your level of redundancy, pick your level of, replication, because it's your data at that point, isn't it?

Andy Whiteside: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, we've got lots We probably overegg it in terms of, but we never know what a customer's requirement is going to be. So, it, we The redundant storage for some is probably a little bit overkill, but, we would much rather have, at least some replication of that data outside of the location, so, -

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah So Ben, like, great to hear that journey story and kind of some insight to why you chose. There'll be companies listening to this who are in the process of evaluating what they're gonna do around recording and compliance, like typically obviously listening to our pod, probably in the Teams realm. Now you've been through the journey, you've gone live, you've done the integrations, what would you say they should do to assess the market options to pick the right player? Like, you've been through the whole process now, so I guess some insights into how to assess and choose the right solution.

Ben Richardson: Yeah, I think it's important to understand what the key requirements are across the business. It was The previous solution that we had was, the decision was made by an IT manager, and it was a recording solution, and it didn't actually fit probably 50% of the department's requirements. So I think get your department heads into a meeting, decide what the key requirements are, and just go out to vendors with an RFI, with a clear sort of guidance, "This is what we want. Show us that you can do that." And I would, I would always try and say pick the simplest solution. Things don't need to be complicated. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's really useful. Yeah, that time invested, spending time with the business is so important. 'Cause if it's just IT operating in a vacuum, you're bound to find someone later puts their hand up and says, "Well, I assumed we could bring this into our sales enablement platform." Or, "I thought obviously recording means that we keep the data in country" or whatever it may be, but you've missed that requirement.

Ben Richardson: Yeah, true. And I, and I think that sort of there's some obvious ones that maybe aren't obvious to everybody. The SOC 2 compliance, the accreditation of being a Microsoft partner, really important I think. Or if you're not using Microsoft, whatever platform you are using. Yeah. And just make sure that y- you do that, sort of that verification and background checking to make sure you're not dealing with somebody in a garden shed.

Tom Arbuthnot: You know? It does happen. Yeah. You can have some very impressive websites and marketing and, then you do, your, certification checks and your credit checks, and it can tell a different story, so that's interesting. A- Andy, I guess same question to you. Obviously, you're gonna fly the Numonix flag, right? But you've got a lot of industry experience. Like, if you had the chance to say to a customer, like, "Here's the three, four, five things you should ask, check, get in writing, consider," what would you say?

Andy Whiteside: Yeah, look, I think the first thing, and especially in the Teams world, is to make sure you're dealing with a certified provider. You know, that gives you lots of assurances. I think, there are lots of options out there these days, and I think you can, you could, you could think you're going down a route where you've got the right level of support, but there's a lot goes behind it in terms of making sure we've got the right relationships with Microsoft and we can get the support and more importantly, customers can get the support from them when you've got other, systems connected to that Teams world. So

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I would go a little bit further and say that is a great shortlist, but of that list, we know there's some providers that are more engaged with Microsoft than others. We get to talk to Microsoft very regularly. It's a, it's a big job keeping up with Microsoft's APIs, Microsoft movement. So make sure that vendor is, it's not just a feature tick, but like they have lots of customers on it, like it's their It's one of their big integrations, not it's a feature tick box.

Andy Whiteside: Yeah, absolutely. And look, we've, we've been through that process in lots of different scenarios. I think the l- the latest sort of change for us was the conference modes, release, which we work very closely with, and we were the first to bring that, to bring that to market. So I think And some of those changes will be service affecting if you don't get those things right. And again, if you're in a regulated environment, that's a, that's a risk you probably don't wanna take. I think Ben, was really good in being able to identify what his requirements were. And they, and they did change a little bit through the process. So having, a customer that sort of understands what they're trying to do is useful. Things changed afterwards, Ben, as well, right? So we When the acquisition was made, we, there were other things that sometimes you wouldn't have thought about as part of that initial engagement. So it's understanding what your requirements are today, but then also thinking what the medium term looks like. And I'm glad to say that we were able to accommodate, those new users, and I think that's a thing that, just makes the relationship feel better when you don't have to then go and ask for a load more money other than, maybe some extra users, at this point. And yeah, I think the SOC 2 thing for me is important. There's a handful of recording providers that have it. From a purely selfish perspective in the, in the sales role, I've had lots of situations where we have security questionnaires with hundreds of security questions on it. I can, I can almost, eliminate that process by getting an NDA signed and sharing what somebody else has third, has verified for us. So, yeah, I think that from my perspective really helps the sales process and helps customers feel that we understand the importance of this and how seriously we take it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, l- listen, thanks so much, guys, for taking the time. Ben, really appreciate you being so open about the process and what you guys have achieved. And, awesome to hear someone taking APIs and doing that integration between the platforms, themselves with the vendors. That's really cool to hear.

Ben Richardson: Cool. Thank you.

Tom Arbuthnot: Andy, thanks for joining us. Appreciate your insights as well. No worries. And, -

Andy Whiteside: Thank you

Tom Arbuthnot: We'll all talk again soon. Thanks

Andy Whiteside: For having us. Thanks, Tom. Thanks,

Ben Richardson: Guys. Cheers. Thank you.