Stephen Wakeling
Founder and CEO at Phobio

Communication is shifting in all organizations away from email and onto more collaborative platforms that allow teams to overcome the challenges of distance and time. We spoke to Stephen Wakeling, Founder and CEO, Phobio, to understand how CMOs and sales leaders could better leverage Phobio to amplify their Marketing and Sales efforts.

Tell us about your respective roles the team/marketing technology you handle.

I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Phobio. We’re a software-powered services company with a disruptive communications SaaS product called Rodio.

What are the core tenets of the REP technology solution in this integration?

Our focus has been on usability, automation, and scalability. We want the experience of the core communicator to be at par with the best chat communication tools available to consumers and deliver user-friendly AI tools to connect employees to the various systems they need to reference.

How could CMOs and sales leaders better leverage Phobio to amplify their Marketing and Sales efforts?

Communication is shifting in all organizations away from email and onto more collaborative platforms that allow teams to move more quickly and overcome challenges of distance and time simultaneously. Rodio empowers highly distributed or highly sales focused organizations with large numbers of workers in the field. Rodio’s chat platform keeps teams connected and our top-down “bulletins” ensure that teams are focused on the prize by allowing leadership to provide clear direction and drive accountability that each message has been received. Rodio can re-galvanize an organization and supply CMOs with a level of control over traditional email messages that is unprecedented.

Would this Phobio-MarketSource integration be available to others in the market?

We’re super excited about the opportunities that our partnership with MarketSource allows. We’re seeing a lot of positive growth that would be extremely valuable to any MarketSource customer. We envision the use of Rodio across a broad range of retail organizations in addition to applications serving hospitality and healthcare, to name a few.

What excites you the most about how traditional sales outsourcing industry is shaping up?

The labor force in North America is becoming very flexible. I think all companies are going to have to reconsider their relationship with traditional employees as personnel re-evaluate what works best for them. At Phobio, we see software as the nexus that delivers brands valuable, capable, and accountable labor when it’s needed, and empowers workers with more agility around how they work, what they do, and when they work. We’re really excited about how things are going to change in the next five years.

What are your predictions on the role of AI/Machine Learning in Email Marketing and mobile messaging? What potential disruption could spell the end of Email Marketing?

Clearly, we’re experiencing a huge shift. I think it’s a bit hard to see it happening at the moment, because in the last 10 years we’ve experienced this increasing velocity of changes in how we interact with each other, buy things, and work. One thing is evident, AI is clearly the best way for humans to interact with systems. Whether those systems be time and attendance applications, e-commerce, or even the systems that run your home, all of these for the most part, can now be interacted with using common digital assistants. Rodio is driving that as well.

Rather than log into one system to punch-in for a shift and another to trade shifts with a co-worker, and yet another to learn about a specific policy or to download a report; all of this can be handled in a simple conversation with a chatbot that is accessing a database that utilizes all of these systems on your behalf. I think we’ve just lit the rocket on what is possible.

How are you coping with GDPR? What advice/recommendations would you like to provide to other leaders in the industry?

Our philosophy has been to adopt the most stringent standards of compliance and embrace systems and best practices that get make it possible for us to stay ahead of the regulation. Privacy is taken extremely seriously here at Phobio, and we aim to do whatever we can to deliver it to our users and our customers.

Thanks for chatting with us, Stephen.

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