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Diabolocom Executive Interview

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 Sheri Greenhaus, Managing Partner, CrmXchange, sat down with Diabolocom’s Collin Ehret and Ben Shakespeare, both Senior Account Executives & GTM North America Territory, and Walker Scott, Senior Solutions Engineer - North America. In this interview, the speakers discuss their backgrounds and the advantages of their proprietary AI solutions, emphasizing their focus on providing highly customizable, easy-to-integrate products that enhance customer service with real-time and post-call analysis. They also highlight the importance of targeting mid-market clients, offering a flexible approach that grows with the customer, while acknowledging the differences in sales processes and customer needs between enterprise and smaller organizations.

Sheri Greenhaus: I see the company, in some form, has been around for about 20 years. Where are you focusing now? I know AI is a big area for everyone, but what’s the real focus?

Collin Ehret: We started as a communications company and have evolved alongside technology over the past two decades. Our founder, Frederick, was a telecom engineer who saw an opportunity to build and provide cloud-based contact centers for businesses across Europe.

More recently, as we expanded in the contact center industry, we identified a new opportunity to develop our own AI platform. One of our former product managers, who had been working under the Diabolocom banner, left to start his own AI platform. About 18 months later, Frederick and Diabolocom reacquired it, integrating it natively into our platform.

For the past 12 to 18 months, we’ve been heavily focused on AI solutions—both for our existing European clients and for new businesses. While we still lead with our contact center platform in Europe, our U.S. strategy is different. Here, we are almost entirely focused on our proprietary AI solutions.

We’re not trying to disrupt large enterprises by overhauling their existing communication stacks. Instead, our go-to-market approach is to offer targeted, easy-to-integrate AI solutions—one or two key capabilities that seamlessly fit into their existing environments. This allows enterprises to gain AI-driven insights and extract value from their vast amounts of customer interactions without making wholesale changes to their infrastructure.

In the U.S., our primary focus is AI, but there are clear benefits to using both our AI and contact center solutions together. Our goal is to make AI accessible, intuitive, and adaptable—whether a company operates in the cloud, on-premise, or within a custom-built system we’ve never encountered before.

Sheri Greenhaus: Our audience is very familiar with AI—it’s everywhere. Every message they see is about AI. How is what you do different from everything they’ve been hearing?

Benjamin Shakespeare: I can speak to our proprietary AI. Most AI solutions out there focus on building a front-end engine while relying on open-source models like OpenAI on the backend. There are several issues with that approach.

First, those models are general-purpose—they aren’t specifically designed for customer service or customer experience. Training them on a company’s unique data to achieve accurate, business-specific responses takes time and extensive tuning.

Second, data privacy is often a concern. Many of these open-source models train across all their customers' data, meaning a company’s proprietary information could inadvertently contribute to a shared knowledge base rather than remaining exclusive to their business.

What sets us apart is that we have our own proprietary AI. Our team has developed custom large language models (LLMs) in collaboration with top universities in Europe, specifically tailored for customer service. Unlike generic open-source models, our LLMs are already optimized for customer interactions, which significantly reduces the time needed to train and fine-tune them for each business.

Additionally, each of our customers gets their own dedicated LLM. Their model is trained exclusively on their data, ensuring privacy and accuracy without cross-training on other customers' information.

Being headquartered in Paris, we operate under strict GDPR regulations and other European data privacy laws. In recent years, several enterprise companies have faced lawsuits due to AI-related data privacy concerns, often because they weren’t fully aware of how their data was being used. With our AI, customers can have peace of mind knowing that our backend is designed with privacy and security at its core.

Walker Scott: One of the key advantages of having our own proprietary AI LLMs—rather than relying on OpenAI or Gemini—is that we have full control over the technology. If an issue ever arises on the AI side, we have all the tools needed to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve it ourselves.

Not that this is something we often worry about—our models are incredibly robust—but in the rare event that something goes wrong, companies using third-party AI solutions are at the mercy of the provider’s timeline for fixes. With our AI, we control the entire process, ensuring faster resolutions and a more seamless experience.

Beyond reliability, owning our AI models allows us to build deeper, more advanced solutions. Our core product, DiabolocomAI, includes both out-of-the-box models and customizable models tailored to each client’s needs. On top of that foundation, we’ve developed quality monitoring and agent assist platforms that provide real-time and post-call analysis.

I like to think of our quality monitoring and agent assist tools as a step above the competition. Not only do we offer knowledge management integrations, but we also incorporate dynamic object completion—which means agents don’t have to manually document every detail during a call. We’re actively enhancing this capability to enable automatic field population in Salesforce in real time.

Because we own our entire tech stack, we have the flexibility to innovate quickly, implement changes efficiently, and avoid the delays and limitations that come with relying on third-party AI providers.

Sheri Greenhaus: The CrmXchange audience is particularly interested in AI-assisted features like auto-fill summaries, sentiment analysis, and quality monitoring. In North America, companies are already familiar with established providers like NICE, Verint, and Calabrio. If they’re currently using one of these solutions, what would make them consider bringing in a new vendor?

Walker Scott: I think the answer comes down to proactive vs. retroactive value. Many companies appreciate the convenience of bundled products—like Talkdesk, where Collin and I previously worked. However, what we often found was that while the core contact center platform was strong, the additional features—like workforce management—felt more like add-ons than truly integrated solutions.

It’s a “jack of all trades, master of none” situation. On the surface, these bundled solutions appear comprehensive, but when companies actually implement them, they realize the individual components aren’t as robust as they expected.

That’s where we come in. Unlike large enterprise providers that started as contact center platforms and later tacked on AI features, Diabolocom was built with a different mindset. We understand the growing demand for specialized point solutions—high-quality, targeted AI tools that integrate seamlessly into existing systems without requiring a full-scale migration.

Our value proposition is simple; we do exactly what you need, and we do it exceptionally well—something that many bundled solutions can’t always claim.

Collin Ehret: As Walker mentioned, large providers often face legacy constraints, and those limitations vary from vendor to vendor. Instead of forcing companies into a complete system overhaul, we focus on filling the gaps where existing solutions fall short.

We’ve designed our platform to be easily integrated within days—not weeks or months. Many of the larger providers operate on an all-or-nothing model, with little flexibility in their offerings. We take a different approach, allowing businesses to adopt only the AI capabilities they need, on their terms.

Sheri Greenhaus:
Okay, let’s take a step back. Can you each share a bit about your backgrounds?

Benjamin Shakespeare: Before this role, I worked at InflowCX, which was later acquired by Amplix. InflowCX was a CX consulting firm primarily focused on the contact center space. Our strongest partnership was with Genesys, but we also worked with Five9, NICE, RingCentral, and Zoom, both on the contact center and unified communications (UC) sides.

As AI started gaining traction, we began working closely with AI vendors as well. Our role was twofold:

1. Direct Customer Support – Companies like Five9 and Genesys would bring us into deals to provide implementation and support services.
2. Independent Consulting – If we worked with our own clients, we’d conduct in-depth analyses of their current contact center setup, identify their goals, and offer unbiased recommendations. If they didn’t already have preferred vendors, we’d create scorecards to help them evaluate the best options.

Beyond the initial selection process, we stayed with clients throughout their journey, offering additional services to enhance their implementations. Through this experience, I gained firsthand insight into what customers liked and disliked about many of the solutions we now compete with.

Collin Ehret: I spent nearly three years at Talkdesk, working on their mid-market team and selling across various industries. About 60-70% of our business was focused on financial services, healthcare, and retail.

Before that, I was at 8x8, where I worked in both unified communications and contact centers. At Talkdesk, however, my focus was exclusively on contact centers, particularly as the company expanded its AI capabilities. Over time, we positioned Talkdesk not just as a contact center provider but as an AI-driven platform.

That experience gave me firsthand insight into how legacy contact center solutions are evolving into AI-powered platforms—and how to effectively position them in the market.

Walker Scott: My background started in healthcare software, but when I left that industry, I began looking for sectors that required strong healthcare integrations. Talkdesk stood out because of its robust Epic integration and its Healthcare Experience Cloud, which was specifically marketed to healthcare organizations.

I joined Talkdesk in a mid-market role, similar to what Collin described. However, when the company restructured, the SMB and mid-market solutions engineering teams were hit hard.

Having worked with multiple contact center providers, I’ve seen many companies struggle—not just against industry giants like Genesys, NICE, and Five9, but also with technical execution. Some vendors don’t know how to properly build an outbound dialer or create a configurable inbound routing system, and that lack of technical expertise forces sales teams to oversell features that don’t actually exist. That approach works—until the contract is signed. Then, the implementation team is left scrambling to deliver on promises that were never feasible in the first place.

I take the sales process and product integrity very seriously. Selling should be based on what a product can actually do and what’s truly on the roadmap—not just what sounds good in a pitch. I also believe in making sure the implementation team has all the tools and resources necessary to successfully execute what was promised in the statement of work. For me, that’s the difference between a company that thrives and one that constantly struggles with customer dissatisfaction.

Sheri Greenhaus: I agree with you, Walker. The ‘old-school’ way of selling—where a salesperson simply says, "Sure, we can do that!" just to close a deal—always comes back to bite you.

I’ve seen a shift, both in our industry and others, away from sell at any cost, who don’t truly understand the product. Instead, companies are moving towards sales consultants—people who grasp the challenges customers face and can offer meaningful solutions, rather than just making promises.

I understand you’ll have a booth at Enterprise Connect, who are you hoping to speak with?

Benjamin Shakespeare: It really depends on the organization’s size, but recently, we’ve seen an emerging role: Customer Experience Directors or Chief Experience Officers. These are common titles, but we also speak with COOs, and for smaller organizations, we connect with CEOs and owners. We often engage with Directors of Technology as well.

It’s important to note that our strategy typically starts at the C-level and works its way down. Multi-threading and getting into an organization from the top is significantly easier than trying to work from the bottom up.

Walker Scott: If I may add a sales engineering perspective; we’re often tasked with extracting meaningful business use cases and ensuring that our product meets the customer’s needs. One challenge we see across the industry—and we’re not unique in this regard—is the trade-off between enterprise clients and mid-market clients.

Enterprise clients know exactly what they need and have all the established processes, RFIs, and documentation that can streamline the sales process. However, the trade-off is that these clients often look for solutions with greater market awareness than what we currently have.

For now, most of our deals tend to be in the mid-market space, and we find a strategic advantage in growing alongside them. The challenge here is that mid-market clients don’t always have the same level of industry knowledge as enterprise clients, so the implementation process can become more complex as they discover their needs. We often have to either say, “Yes, we can do that” or “No, that’s not possible.”

As Ben mentioned, the persona we work with truly depends on the size of the client.

Sheri Greenhaus: What do you think is important for everyone to remember?

Walker Scott: One thing to keep in mind is that our solution is designed to work with any existing systems. We’re OpenAPI-enabled, which means we can integrate with any contact center solution. All we need is the audio from a call, and we can handle the rest. If you have a contact center that can export a call file or pass a URL to a call file into an API, we can make it work in the implementation phase to meet your specific needs.

What’s even more exciting is that we’re focused on low-code/no-code environments. We understand that not everyone has technical expertise with queries, JavaScript, or APIs, so we’re building an environment where any company, no matter their size or tech stack, can easily extract actionable feedback—both in real-time and post-call—from any recorded conversation.

Currently, our API is for post-call analysis, but we’re also developing a real-time analysis API to further enhance the capabilities of our virtual agent, which is powered by proprietary LLMs and AI tools.