"Know your customer and their communication channels. Choose a solution that can aggregate these channels. Engage with your customer-facing people as well as your customer-facing people. Work with them. If they are happy, your customers will be happy. And automate!"
Jiří Havlíček | CEO @ Daktela s.r.o.
Does the CEO have to work his way up through the company from the bottom to be the last to know?
Or is the CEO position a profession and a craft like any other?
What an opinion, what a person.
Jiří Havlíček from Daktela has a clear opinion on this. How could he not. He has worked his way up through the company from a "jack of all trades" (check out Zážeh and you'll see he's amused ) to a
top executive position. This allowed me to ask him questions about everything. No more "I have to ask"
and "here's to it". I have people." That's also why we were able to go pretty deep into building customer care. An area that's prettyoverlooked. Yeah, even by me. You just feel like you don't have time for her despite all the building. And yet your money's going down the drain. But we've talked about a lot more than that:
🔸 What's the biggest problem in customer care?
🔸 Where are the boundaries between marketing and business?
🔸 Why have a dedicated team for big clients?
🔸 How to choose the right partner for expansion?
🔸 How to plan and develop partner performance?
WHY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. If you like anything that I'm putting together for you, whether it's a podcast, a blog, or a newsletter, run over to my website now, www.martinhurych.com/newsletter. Sign up for my newsletter, which more are already subscribing to at
the moment more than 1,100 owners and directors of technology, engineering and manufacturing companies. You won't miss any of what I produce and it will allow me to invite even more great guests like today's. Today I have Jirka Havlicek from Daktely, hi.
Jiří Havlíček
Hey. Hey.
Guest introduction and what's the biggest he's ever flown?
Martin Hurych
Jirka is the CEO, however, he's been at Daktele for a bunch of years and this is not the only position he's been through, so I'll definitely be asking him about that and we'll be asking about what customer care and customer care software looks like today. Before we get to today's topic, I did find out that you're a pilot, very likely the first licensed private pilot sitting here. What's the biggest thing you've flown as a pilot?
Jiří Havlíček
It won't be a big plane, it will be a four-seat Cessna 172 at most. You can fly to the Canaries with a plane like that, if you stop a few times on the way to refuel. I think it's got a range of about 1,800 km, so you can fly it pretty far.
Martin Hurych
You're in charge of a company, international expansion, a family, a daughter, a bunch of hobbies, most of themtime-consuming, how many times a year do you get on a plane?
Jiří Havlíček
I'm not giving it much this year. There's a requirement that you have to fly 12 hours a year, which doesn't seem like much, but it's at least 12 weekends that you have to dedicate to it, so it's true that it's more time consuming. You have to drive to the airport, spend an hour there, an hour getting ready, an hour flying there, an hour flying back, so it eats up at least half your day. So it's definitely time consuming and I don't give it much, I would definitely like to give it more.
Martin Hurych
Is there any way you can hook up with family, fly somewhere on weekends?
Jiří Havlíček
It's ideal if your family flies with you. This is already the big license, you can fly as much as you want, you just take a plane on Saturday morning and fly to Austria. So it's ideal to combine that, that you really fly like that on holidays, during some time off and stuff like that, which I don't quite manage. My daughter is 3, so I don't want to take her on a plane quite yet, but maybe that will come one day.
What's Daktela doing?
Martin Hurych
I told you you were from Dactela. What is Daktela for those who may not know Daktela yet?
Jiří Havlíček
Daktela is a Czech company that has been on the market for 19 years, and we make software for customer care. The main idea of the software is that it unifies all communication with customers. If any company needs to talk to those customers on the phone, in emails, in web chats, through social networks, they can use our software for that. In practice, the way it works is that the customer contacts that company using a phone number, email and other channels, the customer care agent comes into work and spends all day in our software servicing those customer requests. He handles them, he answers them, and he has it all in one software where he can see what that customer wanted, for example, through other channels. When he's writing an email, if he called, what he just wanted, how it ended, he can play the recording, the transcript and all that stuff around. It's all in one place, he doesn't have to go into some 3, 4 software, he can see everything in our Daktele and just communicate with those customers through that.
Martin Hurych
So if my package doesn't arrive or if I'm claiming something, do I go through Daktel?
Jiří Havlíček
There is a good chance that if you have ever dealt with this in the Czech Republic, you have called Daktel at least once in your life and more than once.
Should the CEO work his way up from the bottom?
Martin Hurych
You're the CEO of Daktely relatively new, since February this year, but you started at the company as a bit of a jack-of-all-trades by training. Get a customer, find out what they want, program it, install it. From that initial phase, what do you find useful now in your role as boss?
Jiří Havlíček
I think absolutely everything, because I think it's really good when the CEO in the company has worked out that path and worked through all those activities. I started out in a role that really did some of that. So there wasn't quite the acquisition of that customer, but there was at least the selling of that business time that was there for that customer. I tried to somehow convince that customer, explain to him how the solution was better, price it in some way, prepare the project, implement it myself and then train that customer as well. The process there is end-to-end and then as you go higher and higher up in the structure, you understand very well how the processes underneath you work and you are able to intervene in them. You're able to maybe even jump in there, you're able to make decisions quite quickly about what could be improved, how things work and so on. So I really think that the CEO and even the level below him at least should have that experience and it's a really big advantage when he has it and can see into that detail. Often the way it works today is that there are companies that are specialized in one particular activity and that organizational structure flattens out rather than somehow expanding into the corporate. So these CEOs are becoming more and more
hands-on.
How to get rid of micro-management?
Martin Hurych
I see relatively often with technicians and those who grew out of the shop floor that they don't want to get rid of it and talk to those downstairs for a long time. How did you get rid of it?
Jiří Havlíček
It's hard, of course, but I think you get there a little bit naturally by not having an unlimited pool of time. So gradually you start to find that there are activities that you have to delegate to someone else. That's where the basic problem of delegation starts to come in, that I would do it better. That's kind of the first thing that you have to let go of, that it's probably not going to be to your liking, that you're going to give that trust to somebody else and you're just going to explain to them what the constraints of a task are, what the goals are, and leave it up to them. Then when he gives it back to you when it's done, you have to swallow a little bit that it's not your way. But if it does what you want it to do.
assignment, if it's doing what it's supposed to, then you need to step back from that and really look at what's important and what's not.
Martin Hurych
If I understood correctly when I looked at your site, you are in the B2B2C business. You're selling to companies that very likely have B2C business. Is that right?
Jiří Havlíček
Yes, but it can also be B2B. There are also companies that do some kind of work for other companies, let's say you would resell airline tickets to companies or arrange some kind of services for them. You also need to somehow aggregate that communication from them, acquire that, build your communication history with that customer, so you can use that for B2B as well just fine.
What is the biggest problem in customer care?
Martin Hurych
What do you think is the biggest problem in customer care in the Czech Republic?
Jiří Havlíček
Of course, the recent trend in customer care in general is AI. There's a lot of companies that are terrible explorers at it, pushing it forward and leveraging really what's best in that market. But there's still a lot of companies out there that haven't really gotten into it and may still be in a bit of a quagmire. You need to look at how they operate today and start from the ground up. If I'm interacting with customers, having thousands of interactions a day, and I'm still running on Outlook, then something is wrong. I still haven't progressed from the stage that I need those agents to be able to shuffle that information between each other and look under each other's arms. If that customer is emailing me and at the same time they're emailing one of my colleagues and we're not seeing each other, that's a mistake and there's a lot of companies that unfortunately haven't gotten from that stage to having some sort of solution that will bring that together.
Martin Hurych
So if I were to oversimplify, you're doing CRM on angry clients.
Jiří Havlíček
We don't like to call ourselves a CRM because that's a segment we don't want to interfere with at all. But there is a CRM module, we often integrate with CRM. If I were to pick the first system that we integrate with, it's quite probably CRM because that's where the customer has those contacts. We can maybe even export there the activities that are happening with those customers, we can import that CRM to us so that just that agent can see exactly what's happening with that customer, when did they text, when did they call and so on.
How to communicate "product for all"?
Martin Hurych
We were discussing before the shoot who you were for and what segments you were doing and you said here that you were actually for everybody. Of course, a lot of marketers don't like to hear that because they want to have a bunch of profiles planted next to each other. But you've done a marketing pivot, so how do you communicate something that's for everybody?
Jiří Havlíček
It's not easy, you need to explain to each segment what the added values are for them, which is of course a huge amount of work that marketing is in this case. We've kind of started from scratch, one of the terribly important things around marketing for me is that the marketing understands the product very well and understands what we can do for that customer. I'm not at all a fan of these empty messages like that, that I'm building the future of customer care. That customer needs to hear what that particular value proposition is for them, and for that marketing to be able to explain that to them, they need to understand that product very well, what they're actually doing. We also take every single person we onboard, including marketing, through a week of training where they learn how to configure inbound routing and the completely downright technical details. It's so that they understand what the product actually does and what it is, so that we're not really hiding behind these empty claims.
The first step in this whole marketing spin we've been doing is to change that messaging to be specific. Now if I compare the website that was there a few years ago versus now, now it should be clear from that website what the value adds are, what the core messaging of the whole thing is, what it's going to bring to that customer. The redesign of the website was actually the first step, even the whole rewrite of the text, it was of course related to the change of the organizational structure and the fact that I entrusted the website to people who I think are really capable of doing it. They're dynamic, they're flexible, they still have some young thinking, so they were able to do a really cool thing with it I think. The second thing, as I said, was changing that messaging, what are the USPs, what is the main message that we want to communicate to those customers, and all the materials have to be built around that.
Another thing that needed to be done is to improve some of the marketing processes a little bit. I've done that before and I still do that today, that we go to an event for example and I go there on a cuckoo to see what it actually looks like, unannounced. I'll get there at 3pm and I'll take a look and the impression I get from that I have, then I can determine a little bit what the customer's impression of it is. Do you get any impression when you walk up to that booth at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you've got some roll ups rolling around, you've got salesmen talking to each other and standing with their backs to the aisle. But you get a completely different impression when you go there, there's some nice screen, nice graphics on that booth, there's people around it, and there's merchants actively talking to those customers. They're trying to figure out their needs and you can really see that it's alive around that booth. Those are the kind of details that there's an awful lot of that you have to evaluate in that marketing and a little bit of feeling and you have to go and improve and figure out that process of how to support that.
One of the ways that we have improved the event, for example, is that we had quite a big problem before that there was no sync between marketing and sales. For example, it wasn't clear what the main message was at the event, what we wanted to say to those customers, what the lead process was going to look like, whether we were going to collect business cards or whether there was going to be a QR code or how the whole thing was going to work. So we sat down with the head of sales, we put on the table what points he needs to know when and we set a process for when, what time before the event what's going to happen and what we're going to communicate. We put together a brief for that, every sales person can open that brief the night before the event and see how to collect leads, how they should be dressed, whether they should wear a Daktela shirt or a Daktela shirt. They'll see what time to be there, what the booth is going to look like, what maybe the customers wanted, because it looks really bad when the customer comes to the booth and says they read something in our newsletter and the salesperson doesn't know.
There are a bunch of activities in marketing that need to be improved to make the whole thing work better. I think it's bearing fruit. We've been to DIGIFEST now and we followed that process and I think it was great. I really feel good about it, and I feel like even our marketeer did a good job, the sales people did a good job. When I arrived at the booth, it looked pro, our sales The director gave a great talk there, which I think everyone remembers, and we got a bunch of leads from it, so for me it's going well.
How to communicate USP to different personas?
Martin Hurych
I really like the way you're keeping it structured and procedural. For some companies I see USP's for different decision makers mixed up on the site, you go to big companies, I wouldn't assume you are decided by the power of one vote. So how do you communicate USPs to different decision makers so that they don't get their heads mixed up?
Jiří Havlíček
Our ideal customer profile is not always a big company. It's a solution that really ranges from units of agents, which are people who are also doing maybe something else in the e-shop, to those large enterprise clients in the hundreds of agents. So those segments are different and of course each segment has a slightly different USP. When you mentioned, for example, those enterprise clients, often for them it's important to have some security and some assurance that you're a robust enough solution that if there's any the customer service line is posted somewhere, so it's de facto 24/7. The solution has to be reliable enough for them to get it. Then there needs to be that decision maker in the form of that contact center boss, where it needs to be comfortable for those agents to be able to do different exercises with it, to be flexible. The value-add that we communicate to the decision maker needs to be different and you kind of have to figure out what's important to who at that enterprise client and kind of run with it. Then of course there's some committee where you're communicating all this within 2 hours, they're challenging you, there's always a discussion at that enterprise client.
Martin Hurych
Does it mean that the website is made more for the middle segment of small and medium-sized companies and you are dealing with enterprise sales completely outside?
Jiří Havlíček
Primarily, I think so. Of course, the enterprise client, the opener for it is usually the website. There, some contact center boss does his research and he gets to that site as well, just like the others. But it's true that you have more influence on that medium-sized client on that website, you have to convince him more there. You then deal with the enterprise client, you explain, you present, but with the medium and small client, he often makes his decision based on what information is publicly available. So the website is more of a sales pitch for him than it probably is for the enterprise client.
Where are the boundaries between marketing and business?
Martin Hurych
Where does marketing go in pulling the client onto the billing list, where does marketing go and where does sales take over?
Jiří Havlíček
I think that these two departments should definitely work very closely together. Our marketing also sits with our sales and they should interact almost daily. When a marketing campaign is launched, those sales people just need to know what's going to happen. For me, it's almost like one department, they just have slightly different activities.
Martin Hurych
For example, do they have the same KPIs?
Jiří Havlíček
The KPI of all marketing and sales is definitely sold customers, definitely. Of course, there are several metrics along the way that we measure and that we evaluate. It's not quite as simple as saying, now it's just deals and that's the end of it, because it could also be that marketing does a good job and sales maybe doesn't, or vice versa. So it's a little bit interconnected, but the criterion of the whole team is the deals. What we used to have is that the teams were not completely connected and there was a bit of a shifting of responsibility. Today, I think that doesn't happen anymore and that the teams really work as a de facto one.
Why have a dedicated team for big clients?
Martin Hurych
When I look at the references, I see Rohlik, Notino, big brandy. Do you have any departments or people who specifically target these big companies?
Jiří Havlíček
We have. That was definitely necessary, it was de facto also created as part of my role at that time, about 5 years ago, which was a really universal role. We have an enterprise team that's dedicated specifically to these big customer projects. If that customer comes in and they need to bend the solution in some way, they need to customize it, they have a more complex case, they need to prepare analysis, blueprints, order the project, that's not a problem. We have an enterprise team dedicated to that.
Martin Hurych
Enterprise business is the wet dream of a bunch of companies, it's not easy, we both know that. How does it work for you, how do you structure your business process, for example, if it's not a trade secret?
Jiří Havlíček
The enterprise deals can fall de facto anywhere in the team, but if they fall there and are above some criteria we have defined, the enterprise manager and the sales director are involved. That team is then obviously bigger, which is already in that presales phase, and if we were to go to a presentation to that client, we'd take more of those people in there and we'd take these more senior people in there who have to keep an eye on it.
Martin Hurych
So do I understand correctly that within the Czech Republic and Slovakia you are already such a brand that primarily clients come to you, or do you still have to do cold calls and cold e-mailing and things like that?
Jiří Havlíček
I have to say that here in the Czech Republic the brand is already working really well. I would almost say that if a customer is choosing a customer care solution and they choose, say, 3 candidates, we are almost always there. I would rather see a big potential there to reach those customers who don't know they need something like that yet. I would almost say that's kind of the more interesting segment for us right now, because we're kind of coming out of that passive. The main goal of that marketing today is to explain to those customers that they should have that customer care at some level, that they should be unifying that communication, and that agent should have a view of that communication. They should even try to automate that communication in some way with AI, which is a very big trend right now and we made the good move of buying Coworkers 2 years ago. That's now an internal unit of Daktely, which is kind of our AI dedicated team, so we have it all in-house. In the last year, we've seen a terrible boom in that sort of reality curve in that Carter model. It's kind of that realization of what the use cases already are. A lot of LLM and GPT has helped that, of course, and you're seeing a lot lately that those companies are trying to at least save or scale their communications, automate and spend that time on something else. But we still have a bunch of customers who are at that stage 0, who we should still be able to explain to that Outlook is not the right solution for customer care. If you want to automate something as well, it would be good to have it in a system where you can manage it in some way and see everything, monitor it, report on it and so on.
What percentage of customer care tasks can be automated?
Martin Hurych
For the informed, what percentage of customer communication traffic, for example, now goes through an automated interface? How likely is it that I will call and a robot will answer?
Jiří Havlíček
If you're the customer who bought it, then normally 30% should be given. If you don't even give 30%, there's something wrong. We have cases where 90% of the communication is already automated. It depends a little bit on what those customers are calling that company with, what the structure of that base is, what the business is, but it's something between 30% and 90%. Obviously if you have some really big customer care and you put 10, 20% savings in there, that's still good, but if you're saving on 20 agents, you'd want to automate at least that 20, 30%. In the last year, we've had They've done an awful lot of implementations, I'm sure there are over a hundred, so I think almost everybody who calls somewhere or writes a chat or an email will come across it today.
Martin Hurych
So the fact that my last package was delayed was very likely automatically written.
Jiří Havlíček
I'm sure it is. You've got a lot of it on passive today as well, the first one to come up with it often are those big companies that save a lot of traffic volume. If you have a high volume and you make a 10% savings there, that's good for you. So if you call today to say your package is delayed at some of the big logistics companies or maybe some of the retailers, you're going to hear that voicebot there quite often.
What cultural difference shocked Jirka during the expansion?
Martin Hurych
Going back to business, you're trying to expand right, left, east, west. I was interested to note in the preparation that there are big cultural differences even within Europe. Which one shocked you the most?
Jiří Havlíček
Rather, he made our job a little more difficult. The most different market within Europe is the UK, which has a completely different setup of what you deliver to that customer. In the UK, it's virtually non-existent that you sell them a solution and the customer sets it up themselves. There, it's absolutely expected that you install it, you deploy it, you de-support it, you pick it all up for them, and many times it's almost free. Delivery is absolutely a standard part of the service there and the level of attention you have to give that customer is terribly high and if you don't deliver, they'll replace you. Tomas Chupr often says that's where he got the customer obsession from and I see what he means. It works terribly well there, which of course comes with a cost, which means that you then have a higher price level in that market. That market is ready for that and that market is mainly used to outsourcing. Like I said, nobody sets anything up themselves, they'd rather call you and pay you more to set it up for them.
The other thing that goes against that and pushes you from below in this whole model is that the market is very saturated. The first language that you put into that product, other than your mother tongue, is usually English. That means that most of the solutions that are out there in the SaaS world are in English and therefore available to people in the UK. So if you go there with a solution, there's a pretty good chance that you're not fighting with three, but you're fighting with 100 solutions that they can get instead of you. The differentiator then is the contacts, some of your network and of course the level of service that you provide outside of the product itself. It's about how you're able to set it up for them, how you're able to consult, present it, in short that level of those professional services and that delivery around that is significantly higher there.
Otherwise, I was surprised that I would almost say that the most similar market to the Czech Republic is Romania, which is quite advanced technologically. It's surprisingly expensive too, for example, if you look at the wages, it's pretty much at our level. We have always had them here as some kind of backward market somewhere in the east, the last addition to the European Union and so on, but in the end that market is terribly advanced and it is terribly similar to ours. Of course, Slovakia is also close to us, but I still kind of think of them as our brothers from the east.
Is direct expansion or a partnership model easier?
Martin Hurych
One thing that really struck me, you said that eastwards you build your own internal teams, westwards you try to build a partner network. Maybe just in a couple of sentences you could say why that is, but what I'm most interested in, because you're already in a couple of countries, is what's paying off for you at the moment as the easier channel, maybe on ROI, if you've done some of those calculations. If you could choose which way to go again, would you repeat it the way it is today?
Jiří Havlíček
I would certainly repeat it, I think that's a good way to go. You can't really benchmark it completely against each other, the markets are really different, it works much more in the west that those customers want to buy from an established partner. You need to have a name there and it takes a long time to build a name there, so if you need to accelerate that growth in some way, doing it direct is really hard. To the east those markets are smaller on average, we're talking about the fact that in the west those countries have tens of millions of people, in the east we're talking that if it's 10 million that's good. So even the solutions that are available there are smaller, more local and it's not that attractive for those big companies to localize it into Hungarian and so on. So we are fighting more with the local companies there and when we go and see that competitive solution at the product level, we are usually really much further away. Those solutions are where we were 15 years ago, so then we're just talking about how to sell it in the best way to make it work, how to price the product for those customers and so on. The Czech Republic is generally doing well in terms of quality.
How to choose a country for expansion?
Martin Hurych
How do you choose the countries you go to? What will be the next one?
Jiří Havlíček
I don't have a particular one picked out right now, but it's always about some market research. You need to evaluate several parameters. The first one of course is that competition and that market coverage of our segment. If we go there and we see that there are 3 very mature solutions in that market that are going to be very difficult for us to attack, then it's probably not a good fit to expand there. The second thing is the purchasing power of that country and then there are other parameters which are more and they are also important. One of the parameters is certainly some sort of legal enforceability, but that applies to basically any investment in any country. Although it may not seem like it, the maturity of the judicial system is one of the important parameters for whether or not to go into that country. Because if you do some business deals there, from which you will have some claims or even liabilities, if you are not able to get those claims from those customers and you have no leverage at all on the other side, it is not worth going to that country. You're going to have an awful lot of bad debts there.
How to choose the right partner for expansion?
Martin Hurych
How do you choose partners for the west? I suppose it's independent of whether you're going east or west when it comes to choosing countries. Is that right?
Jiří Havlíček
We are open to anyone who has sufficient customer potential. If I were to go and actively choose those partners now, which we are doing, the first step is definitely to define an ideal partner profile. That is, who is the company that sells their customers the products that are closest to ours or that can be used best with our solution. For example, if you're selling PBX, classic PBX for the back office people in the company or for the sales people, you probably have some customer care alongside that that might use some more advanced solution. So quite often it depends on having some complementary products that you want to sell alongside your own.
Martin Hurych
What are your chances of driving them? What I see is that a well-functioning partner network is the holy grail of international expansion. Everybody talks about it, few have succeeded. What I see a lot is that companies hire whoever comes in, even if they have an adequate profile. But because there's not enough management of that partner at the end of the day, that partner will try it, get excited, and if it's not automatic a hit in that particular market, then from his point of view, the enthusiasm automatically wanes a little bit. What do you do about it?
Jiří Havlíček
The most important thing is that the partner is able to sell the solution well. If he is able to explain to the customer how it is good, there is a good chance that he will succeed. We have done a fairly strong and extensive training program for those partners. One, we certify just to support that partner, if he decides to do L1, I have a whole certification program where we train him, give him some videos and test his knowledge. It's for the reason that those provide customers with quality customer support. But before we do that, we need to train those salespeople to tell them what the benefits of the software are, what the USPs are, what to sell it on, how to explain it. If you do that, there's a pretty good chance that that customer base will grow for that partner. If you do it wrong and he sells it wrong, then what you're saying will happen.
We call it Daktela remote onboarding nowadays, we have various videos for it, tests, it's really quite high level already. It's about training the partner, what material you're giving them, what support you're giving them. For example, we even go with them a lot to those first showcases to those customers to show them how it's done, we don't let them completely bathe in it. It's true that a lot of companies do it by shooting the product out to their partners and telling them to sell it, giving them 3 PDFs to go with it, and that's it. You have to work with that partner and explain it to them all the time. Plus, the product is already relatively difficult to sell because it's actually a platform. Then it's obviously more complicated for that sales person that you don't give them one recipe, one sentence or one paragraph that they read to that customer and that customer buys it. It's consultative selling, and in order to be consultative selling, you need a network of experts who understand the industry, and that's why you need to train them. I think that's the critical success factor, that you get that curve of that customer base with the partner to grow and not decline, so that you don't end up having him exhaust his base of 3 customers who just happen to want it. You need to actively reach out to those customers and offer them the solution and explain to them what it's good for. It's a lot about that education where you have to explain to those customers what it's good for and why they should want it, create that need. Your customer care is not very good, let's improve it and this tool will help you do that.
How does the competition between headquarters and partners work?
Martin Hurych
How loyal are you to your teammates? I have a partner in Munich, the Munich company, the Bavarian customer centre, will call, find you via Google and call you directly. You know you have a partner in Munich. Will you give it to him?
Jiří Havlíček
The partner does a lock-in on that customer, so we see what came first. If the customer came through us first, it's ours. If the customer came through the partners first and the partner locked it in, it's his. There's a process for that, there's terms and conditions for that, how many months the lock-in lasts and things like that, so if the partner locked it in, it goes through them. But in any case, you have to look more at what makes sense. There are also cases where we preferred the partner because the set-up made more sense. The customer, for example, is getting a data center from that customer and wants it to run there, so there are cases where it's a negotiation. It's always a discussion with those partners, we have regular syncs with them where we talk about how to set it up and it's case by case. Obviously you have to be fair about it in some way because if you do it once and undercut your partner, they won't trust you.
Martin Hurych
So from the lock-in, I understand that you are not cultivating any exclusivity, you are professing a fair market competitive approach to the matter.
Jiří Havlíček
I'm sure. In B2B, it's all based on some relationships, so if a partner has a really good relationship with that customer, on a personal level, he has a better chance of success, so many times it makes sense to make that arrangement.
How to plan and develop partner performance?
Martin Hurych
This branch is often a black box for planning what will happen next year. Do you know how much your partners will bring in next year? How do you figure out in a fair way what the right partner should put in your piggy bank so that you still see them as a classy partner?
Jiří Havlíček
It's important to say that you don't have hundreds of these big partners, the strategic ones, it's more like units, lower tens and so on. You're talking to them about the fact that they represent you in a market and there should be some growth there because if that partner isn't growing, then you have the opportunity to grow yourself. So either they're helping you or they're not helping you and you're working on those big partners to solve those goals. We even maybe a lot of times we sign them a little bit or more like agree on a piece of paper where we say what the goal is for the next year and they should commit to that. If they don't meet it, then we talk about why it happened, whether it's them or whether it's the market, whether there's some strong competition and what to do about it. In the amount that we have, it's still possible to talk about the fact that we deal with them on a one-to-one basis. If the partner is not that strategic and is smaller, then those Plans probably don't always need to be specified. If we are talking about customer units, the partner works somehow, serves those customers, they are satisfied and we are satisfied.Of course, the goal for us is to build primarily those strategic partners who are growing, who have the ambitions that we have, who will bring those customers to us.
What is Jirka's mission?
Martin Hurych
You have been CEO since February, what is your mission for the next 5 years, where do you want to take Daktel?
Jiří Havlíček
At least to Europe, more likely to the world. We started as a Czech company and if you think about it, there are not that many Czech companies that have successfully managed to expand into Europe. We are profitable all the time, we don't have any investor there to finance your long-term loss, when at the end someone inherits a huge debt package that nobody will pay. We are profitable all the time and we want to grow organically at least in Europe, more likely in the world. We are now trying partners outside of Europe, we have some countries that we have opened up in Asia for example, we are trying Malaysia now to see how that works, we have tried the Philippines in the past. So we definitely want to export the Czech success to the world and as I say, at least start with Europe and I would almost say that we are doing very well so far. The Philippines is the call centre of the world, there are about 1.5 million agents there, so it's a big market for customer care. On the other hand, there's a big problem there, for example, is that here a customer care comes to you and says they have 50 agents, but there the average deal that comes to you is maybe 2,000. So you're talking about a whole different scale there.
How is the product developed for subsequent scaling?
Martin Hurych
How do you develop a product to be deployable somewhere where there are ten or a hundred times more agents?
Jiří Havlíček
One part is of course the product side and the other part is the technical side. The technical side will be solved by some technological development. We have our own R&D teams, which by the way is an awfully big advantage that we do it ourselves, that we really have those IT experts that are dedicated to it.
If there's a problem, there's a bottleneck, they identify it, they come up with some architecture to solve it and they just solve it. The product side is about whether those needs of large call centers versus small call centers are that much different. In the end, you might find out that they're probably not. Those big call centers are often running some couple of processes on a large scale, which you kind of model there. The other case is that the call center is broken up into these little units where each one works a little bit differently, that you have 20 little units under one big call center. There are cases where you have an IVR, you have 8 calls there and each of those calls goes to a completely different call center and it's handled by completely different people, completely different team leader, completely different vendor who maybe needs their own solution. So you've got one solution that just routes your calls, and then you've got 20 small solutions or 8 small solutions depending on how many options you have that work for that particular call center. You don't even have one solution on one customer line, but of course this applies to the big cases, which are not so many in the Czech Republic. If you look at how many call centres here have more than a thousand agents, it's definitely units.
Martin Hurych
That's why I started talking about it, it was more of a strategic view, am I developing the platform to be ready to enter these markets or am I going in with what I have. Then when I get a deal, I improvise for a while, like a lot of Czechs do, and I fix it somehow, and then once I'm there, I develop the infrastructure so that it's scalable to those brand new conditions.
Jiří Havlíček
I wouldn't say that the Czechs do it, I would almost say that it's the opposite, that the Czech mentality sometimes is that I have to have a perfect product first and then I go to sell it. The startup, when it is created here, spends a year developing it and then only then decides what to do with it.If you look at some Israeli startups or American startups, they first make a presentation, show it to investors and maybe even customers, and then they figure out what to do with it.
We mainly through our UK office also participate in the tender where we have 10,000 agents as a requirement and there is of course a time limit by which you have to implement it. But it's a bit of an ambition I guess that you have to have to give it. There are a few strategies on how to go about it. The first is obviously a technology upgrade, because putting 10,000 agents is not impossible technologically, that's fine, you just spend some time figuring out how long it's going to take to deliver. So the one way is a technological upgrade, where you replace some chassis that's holding you back, and you keep replacing it until you can get the 10,000 agents. The other way is you go through the business side and you make a deal with that customer and you make it 20 little units like I said before. The processes even in these big markets are rarely that you have one process that you repeat a hundred thousand times. It's more that there's multiple teams that have to be managed somehow, they're broken down into some structure and you're able to build that system accordingly even today. So there's more than one of those ways to do it, and the main thing is to have that ambition and to believe in yourself and sometimes maybe sell a little bit before you do it. The solutions that we produce and do here in the Czech Republic are mostly really good and I think that sometimes we don't trust ourselves enough in the global market.
How to build good customer care?
Martin Hurych
Could you summarize in a few sentences how you think a person who wants to build a modern customer care today should proceed?
Jiří Havlíček
The first thing is of course to know your customer, to have some profile of him, how he works and what he expects from me. That's the basis for me to actually tell myself what channels I want to have open with that customer, how I want to serve them, whether they're a person who's calling me, they're in a car somewhere, or they're a person who's going to email me. The next obvious step is to have a solution that puts it all together for you, by which I'm not referring to any particular course. That's where I sit those customer care agents and then the most important part comes, I have to work with those agents in some way. The technology side of things is one part, the other part is you have to have that customer care set up in a way that makes that customer happy. You have to work a little bit with the people who are there to service those customer requests. Like today it's almost a must have to see if I happen to have some part of my process that I can automate with AI or maybe just speed up. I don't have to go for 100% automation right off the bat, I can talk about reducing some wait time somewhere, reducing the average customer service by that agent, that kind of thing.
Martin Hurych
This, viewers and listeners, applies whether you have a firm of 3 chimney sweeps or 10,000 agents in Malaysia. Thank you so much for being here. One last request, what you just listed here, can we squeeze that into some kind of listener bonus? Just one A4 where we write down what you just said.
Jiří Havlíček
I'm sure we can provide.
Martin Hurych
Thank you very much and I wish you to get into this world and to be another one of the few Czech companies that can do it.
Jiří Havlíček
Thank you so much for inviting me.
Martin Hurych
You see, customer care for small, medium, large companies, we've got the information here, both how to do it and also what it looks like from the back end. If you enjoyed today's podcast, run on over to my website, www.martinhurych.com/newsletter, and sign up for my newsletter, which is already subscribed to by over 1,100 owners and CEOs of engineering, technology, and manufacturing companies. If you're still in the mood, like or subscribe wherever you're listening or watching us right now. For a bonus, run over to my website as well, and I have nothing to do but cross my fingers and wish you success, thanks.