One year after
Thrio, Inc. launched its contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution at Enterprise Connect 2019, the company announced today a significant partnership with TELUS International. TELUS International will white label Thrio’s CCaaS platform for their clients under the name Cloud Contact 360 (CC360).
TELUS International (TI) is the global arm of TELUS, one of the top three carriers in Canda. The company’s focus is to provide multilingual customer experience and digital IT solutions for global and disruptive brands, i.e., it is a business process and IT outsourcing firm. With almost 50,000 team members and delivery centers across North and Central America, Europe, and Asia, TI serves clients in over 50 languages.
I interviewed Jim Radzicki, global VP, TELUS International, and Lance Fried, CMO of Thrio, over video last week to understand the provenance of the relationship being announced. I was particularly interested in exploring the phrase in the press release that CC360 is “one part of its work from home solutions.”
“In recent weeks, we have seen unprecedented demand for our work anywhere solutions,” Radzicki said while reviewing a slide deck on the partnership. “Leveraging our ongoing partnership with Thrio, we have been able to meet that demand, and are exceeding customer expectations on speed to delivery and overall capabilities.”
If TI and Thrio are already helping clients through the rough COVID-19 waters, I asked how long this partnership had been percolating prior to today’s announcement. The two companies started discussions together about 18 months ago, Fried said. Radzicki added that TI put the technology through “heavy lab testing” and put the first wave of customers onto the platform in late fourth quarter 2019.
The companies continued to add customers to the platform in the first quarter of 2020, heading towards an announcement of the partnership, scheduled for Enterprise Connect 2020 in Orlando. And then, in early March, the world changed.
The Thrio partnership, “was on our roadmap pre COVID-19, as they formalized their product, and we formalized our offering and built our digital strategy,” Radzicki explained. “COVID-19 has flat-out put this into high gear. We were just far enough along to package Thrio and get it out there quickly,” Radzicki went on to say. TI says that it currently has thousands of agents deployed to work from home, and substantially more in progress, as it continues to support its clients’ needs in response to COVID-19.
Radzicki explained that TI has been on a journey from being a traditional business process outsourcer into a digital services provider, supplying strategy, technology process, and operations. The capabilities that the Thrio partnership brings — a pure cloud, omnichannel customer experience platform with automation tools, a complete suite of digital channels (email, chat, SMS, social), inbound and outbound voice engines, and AI-driven situation routing and journey management are a key part of that transformation journey.
From Thrio’s perspective, “one plus one equals five,” Fried said. The Thrio founders are employing a strategy like the one they used with their first venture,
Telephony@Work, which they sold to Oracle in 2006. Thrio’s intent is to have strong, strategic partnerships like the one announced with TI to market their CCaaS platform into global communities.
