Facebook/Meta Joining the Channel? Why Customer Experience Vendors Are Embracing Agents

SaaS-based customer experience (CX) vendors are increasingly approaching the agent/broker channel about partnerships.

CX Effect’s Andrew Pryfogle

So says CX Effect CEO Andrew Pryfogle, who says CX vendors are not only signing more agreements with partners and, most importantly, offering competitive commissions for the first time.

“We now have an increasing number of very innovative, very disruptive SaaS players in the world of customer experience technologies that are recognizing the long-term value that the partner community can provide,” Pryfogle told Channel Futures. “Not only the access to the initial customer relationship but the long-term growth of that relationship.”

Pryfogle, who made a name for himself in cloud services at Intelisys and more recently preached agent/MSP convergence at Pax8, founded CX Effect last year to corner the customer experience opportunity. CX Effect holds contracts with suppliers that provide customer relationship management (CRM), business process outsourcing (BPO) contact center as a service (CCaaS) and similarly focused software providers. It works with a group of customer-facing brokers to investigate, sell and implement CX offerings.

New Breed

In some ways, CX Effect reflects the business models of the tech solutions brokerages/distributors where he previously worked, but with two key differences.

First, CX Effect plays a more active role in the sales process. Pryfogle said the company often joins its adviser partners in selling to the end users.

“More often than not, our partners are leveraging us in customer-facing roles. They see us as valuable in being in front of their customer as subject matter experts around many of these new disruptive solutions,” he said.

And that expertise comes from narrowing the technology focus. Although CX Effect does list offerings like UCaaS on its line card, the company has embraced a niche role as a CX specialist.

“We can effectively do that with a very targeted and highly curated portfolio. We can’t do that with 220 suppliers in our portfolio like other distributors have. When you get that big and broad, you can really only afford to be an inch deep and a mile wide,” Pryfogle said.

Those suppliers include mobile-first contact center provider Ujet, intelligent workforce platform Observe.ai and workforce marketplace provider Shiftsmart. Intriguingly, recently signed customer service platform vendor Kustomer has agreed to an acquisition by Facebook (Meta). If the deal goes through, it would represent a fascinating team-up between the channel and one of the world’s largest tech companies.

A New World

Some of these vendors have never engaged in a commission-based indirect sales model before.

“With newer technology startups, many of them aren’t even aware that the distribution channel that we all know and love even exists,” Pryfogle said.

Consider that Justin Robbins, who now serves as CX Effect’s strategic adviser after working in the CX industry, didn’t know what the channel was when he joined.

CX Effect’s Justin Robbins

“I actually said to Andrew when we first started talking that I was willing to place a really good beer bet that, by and large, most customer experience types of leaders had no idea what the channel was and what it could do for their business,” Robbins said.

Seeing the Light

And he was right. Sure, most of them know what a reseller does, but brokers (agents) were a mystery.

“They often think about the conventional ways of sourcing technology. They just don’t realize it’s there. And that’s been affirmed through a number of conversations with our partners,” Robbins said.

However, CX Effect executives said these emerging software vendors are seeing the value of the channel. For example, Shiftsmart pounced on the opportunity to …