Glia Pitches Unified Interaction Management to Channel

Executives from Glia hope to help channel partners rethink customer experience (CX) platforms with their concept of unified interaction management (UIM).

The New York-based provider last month hired former NICE channel leader Ray Hicken as executive channel advisor. He'll focus on the agent/advisor model, which Glia conducts with tech services distributors (TSDs) and technology advisors (TAs). That's a model Glia had already been working on under the leadership of Chad Haydar, who came over from Talkdesk to serve as senior vice president of alliances and channels.

Historically, Glia had sold through resellers and referral partners, but in the last year it has established relationships with large TSDs and started putting together a pipeline. The former channel models will continue to feature for Glia, but Hicken has come onboard to add a focus on TSDs.

"I think there's lots of levers you pull in building a successful channel," Hicken told Channel Futures in an interview. "You don't pull one lever. You pull multiple levers to be successful. And the problem with some of the suppliers is they think there's only going to be one lever to pull."

Glia's Ray Hicken

Tech advisors, for example, will be a boost for Glia down-market.

"For example, A global systems integrator is generally not going to chase anything less than $3 million or $4 million in annual contract value and generally nothing less than 750-1000 seats. This particular [advisor/referral] channel lives and breathes in that sub-1000, and their success happens there all the time. This channel is the most predictably and productive channel to success in this market segment," Hicken said.

Related:Glia Hires NICE Alum, 'Adding Rocket Fuel' to Partner Strategy

Hicken and Haydar had both competed against Glia at previous companies, and both said Glia had earned a strong reputation. Hicken said the reputation was a strong one, with NPS scores he said were high relative to the rest of the CX/CCaaS space. And key partner contacts of his had recommended the UIM provider to him.

Unified Interaction Management

Glia's leaders stay away from acronyms like CX and CCaaS to describe the company's software platform. They assert that many of the major CCaaS companies prioritize the call center aspect of CCaaS and thus prioritize the handling of phone calls. Moreover, the people that use Glia's platform are not necessarily contact center employees.

Glia's Dan Michaeli

"There are many teams that handle different types of interactions within a business and they do not consider themselves a 'contact center' or CX. That's why we adopt a broader term that says, 'we unify all the interactions between the business and external stakeholders,'" Michaeli said. "And of course, the Contact Center is one of the strongest use cases of UIM."

Related:What Is a Technology Advisor? Understanding the Role, Scope and Size of the TA Model

Dan Michaeli, Carlos Paniagua and Justin DiPietro founded Glia in 2012 after Michaeli and DiPietro finished a stint at Accenture. Their engagements with Fortune 50 clients had highlighted the misery business users were facing in contacting people outside their company.

"Whenever companies wanted to interact outside of their business, it was an awful experience. We kept seeing it with so many different types of businesses and decided that the problem needed to be solved from the ground up with a different approach," Michaeli told Channel Futures.

He said Glia's thesis is that the interaction between the business should be the center of the software platform, rather than a particular "channel" of the platform. For that reason, the company brands its platform as "channelLess" rather than omnichannel.

Glia's Jeremy Smith

"The same agent can switch between a chat, a voice call, a video, right there in real-time, or if they do need to transfer you, all of that context automatically gets synthesized and transferred to a new agent to quickly get up to speed," Glia chief operating officer Jeremy Smith said. "A lot of consumers can relate to that, because it's incredibly frustrating after spending 20 minutes with a chat agent to get sent somewhere else to start all over again."

Decentering the "call center" aspect has also changed the pricing conversation. Haydar said Glia has priced differently than the traditional CCaaS vendor, which tends to mirror phone-centric systems with metrics like seats and minutes. Those different measurements have led to hidden fees that sneak up on customers, Haydar said.

Glia's Chad Haydar

"When customer gets the bill, and there's extra usage fees, it creates a lot of hostility between the customer and the vendor as well as with the partner who brought the deal, because their credibility is on the line," Haydar said. "What I found completely refreshing at Glia was that customers ask me, 'Wait a minute, are you saying that's all? That's the price?' There are no hidden fees, no surprises. It's straightforward. It's simple to figure out, and it removes all of that friction and anxiety in the conversation."

When Hicken joined the company in December, its leaders said the vendor was ready to put "rocket fuel" on its channel efforts.

Hicken said he feels confident that Glia will be a more known entity in the TSD channel in the upcoming year. And that, he attributes to the commitment of the founders to the agent/advisor model.

"They're building it the right way. They're building it to grow, they're investing to accelerate, and they're really trying to be thoughtful about building the right way," Hicken said. "I told them, 'I'm not going to come help you do something that is a splash in the pan and then we walk away; you need to trust the process.' They knew that they had to make a long-term investment here, and they are."