Talkdesk launched AppConnect with a group of hand-picked partners. For example, initial workforce management partners include Performetric, injixo, and Teleopti, and call analytics partners are VoiceBase, Simple Emotion, and TalkIQ. Additionally, the ecosystem includes partners like ScreenMeet, a newly launched company providing co-browsing and remote support, and AutoReach, a high-volume dialer for Talkdesk and Salesforce environments.
I spent time with as many of these partners as possible at Opentalk, and one partner in particular had an interesting story to tell about how it fits in with Talkdesk's partner ecosystem: TalkIQ. Below is a short video that lays out TalkIQ's value proposition.
The TalkIQ call analytics solution, developed from the ground up, has been on the market for about four months, Bill Hoppin, EVP of sales, marketing and alliances at the company, told me.
"Voice is the Holy Grail for customer insight and we deliver that by capturing these moments in real time, and layering on predictions and recommendations to help drive businesses forward," he described.
What interested me most about TalkIQ is the company's partner strategy. In the call center space, TalkIQ made an atypical choice of aligning itself with Talkdesk as its sole partner. This means that if a customer comes to TalkIQ and has a Five9 implementation, for example, it's out of luck. Exclusivity is the name of the partnership strategy game -- at least for the time being, Hoppin told me.
"We chose Talkdesk because we do believe they have an innovative app strategy," Hoppin said. "We narrowed our selection down to Talkdesk and focused on integrating phenomenally, rather than working with everybody and diluting the value. In the long term, it's going to be more valuable to us as a company. "
Working closely with Talkdesk engineers, TalkIQ had its AppConnect solution up and running in just 36 hours, he added.
"How can we maintain trust with a partner if we work with all of its competitors?" Hoppin said. "As a company and culture, we have to be humble, focused, and trusted. And this translates into how we do everything. We don't work with competitors."
Now that's just one partner perspective, but if Talkdesk has similar levels of devotion from the rest of its partner ecosystem, it'll be interesting to see how the company continues to grow and expand in the coming year.
Talkdesk has hit the milestone of 100 million calls on its platform, Paiva announced at Opentalk 2017. "It's funny," he said, "It took us almost four years to get to 10 million calls, and then going from 10 to 100 [million] took us less than two years. Next year I think the milestone will be showing how AppConnect has been successful. We started with 16 partners, and by the next Opentalk, we'll have hundreds of partners. And if that milestone happens, we'll be very satisfied."
