Dialpad has acquired Surfboard, the contact center workforce management (WFM) provider.
With Surfboard, the enterprise communications contender gains trusted solutions that planners can utilize across the WFM cycle. That cycle has four stages: contact center forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
Expect Dialpad to combine these solutions with its Ai Scorecards and Ai Coaching offerings to build a rich workforce engagement management (WEM) suite.
In time, that will likely come part and parcel with the Dialpad Ai Contact Center Platform. However, it could also form a standalone offering that businesses can plug into a rival CCaaS platform, CRM system, or UCaaS solution.
Alvaria and Zendesk have taken a similar path this year, spinning out WEM propositions of their own.
While it is not certain that Dialpad will follow suit, it cites Surfboard’s cloud-native foundation as a critical motivator for the acquisition. That foundation will ensure easier cross-integration of both provider’s products.
Sharing more on the strategy behind the acquisition, Vincent Paquet, Chief Product Officer at Dialpad, said: "In our hybrid and platform-powered workforce, enterprises want a single place for all business communications and organization.
The team at Surfboard has created an exceptional product for workforce management, and we’re excited to combine our capabilities to bring customers the very best, AI-native WFM on the market.
Dialpad also praised the WFM provider’s intuitive solution and culture.
To enable that intuitive solution, Surfboard is more design-led than most competitors. Indeed, each group of engineers has a dedicated designer who focuses on user research, UX, UI, and core product design.
Meanwhile, it has established an "own the problem" culture. So, whenever Surfboard engages with a customer, it doesn’t jump to solutions but stays focused on understanding the issue’s depth.
Critically, that involves mapping out WFM processes, identifying friction points, and taking a more consultative approach to overcoming issues.
Such differentiators are critical in a space where vendors often compete by offering more forecasting models, shift patterns, and metrics. Hopefully, this distinctiveness won't get lost in the acquisition.
[caption id="attachment_64461" align="alignnone" width="850"]
Meet the Surfboard team![/caption]
Another critical focus for Surfboard is scalability, so when a team has to make a significant change to their operations – be it in their opening hours or onboarding a new location – they don’t have to reimagine all their WFM workflows. Instead, the vendor strives to simplify the change.
That’s evident in the Surfboard metaphor. During an interview with Intercom, Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder & CEO of Surfboard, explained:
When you're running a support team, you're dealing with waves of inflow, and we provide you with the tool to navigate those waves, which is the surfboard.
"Everything we build relates to how we equip the customer support team to be able to navigate those waves in the most effective way," she concluded.
Alongside all this, Ratanshi-Stein is a proponent of humanizing WFM and taking planners from the outskirts of customer service to the center, so they're not the "computer says no" crowd.
Part of that involves pushing back against "intrusive" contact center surveillance, which has become more prevalent since the shift to remote and hybrid work models.
“When you can’t see where your team is or who’s handling calls, chats, or refunds, the temptation for surveillance grows,” continued Ratanshi-Stein. “This is where technology can be misused, and that’s something we don’t want to facilitate.
Our goal at Surfboard is to build tools that eliminate the need for that kind of oversight.
While Surfboard may become part of a WEM suite, it’ll certainly strengthen the Dialpad Ai Contact Center Platform, one of the 11 most prominent CCaaS solutions globally. That’s according to the Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for CCaaS 2024 report.
