‘Linking Up’ For CX Success: How Cloudlinx’s CCW Journey Has Led To Contact Center Connectivity

Whether you’ve been to every Customer Contact Week in-person event since day one, or you’re considering joining us at CCW Las Vegas in June of this year, you likely share two universal thoughts with others who are also prepping for another day on the Exposition Hall floor or arming themselves with knowledge on if it’s worth the trip:

What am I going to learn?

Who am I going to connect with?

Although you could pursue ccwdigital.com for months on end to get a sense of everything happening in the world of customer service and customer experience tools, trends, and technologies, there really isn’t anything quite like rubbing elbows with the mainstays, up-and-comers and newbies to the CX scene.

For some of us, the chance to be social at a networking happy hour is a welcome respite from the standard day’s workflow. But for others, just the notion of sitting in on sessions with dozens, if not hundreds of strangers in a room discussing ideas and terminology you may have never heard of before is hard enough thinking to break a sweat.

The nature of our events ensures that, ultimately, there's something for everyone here at CCW. But the breadth of our consistently scaling community also means that each employee, manager, founder, tech stack developer, and leader has the opportunity to explore, trailblaze and truly find their niche area of expertise among their peers. Some of us who are reading this piece have experienced it, and yet others are still waiting for their moment to shine.

If in your research you happen to still be on the fence or wary of how you might be able to impact and influence the world of Customer Contact, allow us to introduce you to one of our favorite success stories: Cloudlinx. CCW veterans know the contact center consulting firm’s name like they know their own, and newcomers will be sure to commit it to memory after a stop at their booth on the exposition floor.

In fact, co-founder Kevin Sheehan knows that a first-time attendee shouldn’t go to our events without going by his booth–it might just be what helps give you the confidence to find your own niche, just like he and his partners did some years ago by taking a leap of CX faith.

“In 2015 Frank Wassenbergh and I both worked for a very large managed services company based in New York City, selling voice and data services,” he shares with CCW Digital.

“It was a very competitive landscape to sell internet connectivity in New York in the early 2000s post-9/11. It was a massive commodity, it was very aggressive, and it was very much based on relationships that you would build with clients.” he adds.

The duo worked together for the better part of 12 years together, where their sales skills and relationship building helped turn that organization into a $100-million-a-year company. "That's how we sort of made our bones,” he recalls. “I then left in around 2015, and Frank stayed at the company."

Later, in 2017, Sheehan started to recognize that there was this emerging market in the United States call center space, "Call centers who had existed for their entirety using legacy voice services–old school IVRS–which were really just big computers that sat physically in a call center,” Sheehan explains. “Calls would come in and these computers would route calls to agents, almost in the most analog of fashions. Right around 2017, there became this very big market disruption where all that was moving to the cloud.”

Just as Sheehan faced the rapidly advanced transformation, Wassenbergh too was experiencing his own realizations when it came to the future of digital: he wrote an RFP for a company client–Brother International Printing, who urgently needed to figure out a new customer service solution after learning form IT that their call center was being rendered obsolete and shutting down. 

“Frank wrote the most elaborate RFP that I've ever seen in my life. And the two thoughts came together," Sheehan shares. "I said to Frank, ‘Listen, why don't you come on board with me as a partner and let's build a consultancy practice where all we do is focus on this?'” 

And in that moment, the long-standing duo were no longer salespeople selling a commodity, they were real-life consultants

“We were spending time with clients understanding how their businesses function, understanding how the agents functioned, what they wanted, what their lives were like, how they made money, and what their aspirations for their careers were. And we could then take all that information and use technology to fulfill those needs.

What we do is very different from the vast, vast majority of people on the circuit. We don't have a widget which we sell, we don't have a software or an AI technology, or a single brand that we promote…

As best practice advisors, we are strategically partnered with every single vendor, sharing mistakes that we've seen and been part of, so that you don't have to make those mistakes when it comes time to pick a technology to help further your CX goal, free of charge.”  — Cloudlinx co-founder Kevin Sheehan

For the Cloudlinx team interacting with the business people–rather than the business products–was a new concept. “We discovered what CX was and we found that we were actually very good at it,” Sheehan notes.

“And as we went into 2018, we also realized that finding clients was not anything like it was when we were working selling Internet services, and that we were selling to a whole new audience…

If you think about it, if you're a CX pro your business is empathy, understanding what customers need, helping customers, helping your agents grow, helping your agents fulfill what they're trying to do for the customers.” — Cloudlinx co-founder Kevin Sheehan

Despite the co-founders’ knowledge of who these people in customer contact were and what they needed, they didn’t have full clarity on how to find them. “So I actually did a Google search and I came across the CCW Las Vegas event. I remember bringing it to Frank and saying 'This sounds like something that would be great for us.’ But we had never done a conference of any kind before.”

After connecting with members of our team here at CCW, the two determined that cost vs. benefits were well worth the investment. “They were actually great about working with us, getting that cost down as low as it could be” notes Sheehan. But, even so–and especially now with a third business partner, Michael Galeo, on board–it was still a steep price.

“When we started the company, we didn't take money from anyone, we funded this ourselves,” Sheehan explains. “I basically took out a second mortgage in order to get us to pay our small salaries, so we ended up having to give up two months of take home pay for all three of us just to attend the event.”

As he describes it, “we were completely babes in the woods,” but even being green couldn’t stop them from securing their clients through CCW live events. “We met a ton of people, it was fantastic. They were very open to the idea of what we did. We met all these other vendors and t all these other CX professionals there and I knew that this was something that we kind of wanted to be a part of long term.”

The rest, as they say, is history: “We did Vegas, we also did Nashville. We've done several other cities with CCW. But Vegas is always like, we would never miss that.” 

Over the years to date they’ve built out their booth from just a self-made PowerPoint, expanding their clientele through event attendance and even their own session presentations, he shares—“Being part of the greater ecosystem of the CCW events has been very important to us. It's probably the most strategically beneficial business decision that we've made in this–to be part of the CCW community.” 

Photos courtesy of Kevin Sheehan.