Today we’d like to introduce you to Jackie Bowers.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I started at Call Box two weeks after graduating from SMU in 2011. I was a marketing and advertising major, and the other companies I was applying to were big advertising firms in the Dallas area. Call Box wasn’t, but the analytics the software provided to companies caught my eye and I was pulled in by the impact it seemed I could make at the company. It also just seemed like they really cared about their employees.
I started as a Junior Consultant and handled the company’s largest enterprise client. It seemed like a lot of responsibility, but it was a big opportunity for me. When I joined, Call Box had just 22 people and we wore a lot of hats. I think I was still consulting for that account and others, but I also started handling inbound new business calls. I would quite literally pick up the phone, give a demo of our product, and try to get a signed contract. I’d follow up with leads I hadn’t get signed, and onboard the new clients I signed up. I’m sure I didn’t think of it as sales at the time, but it certainly was.
Each week, I sent our COO a spreadsheet of our leads and highlighted the ones that signed a contract. I was pretty driven by that metric. A lot of leads came to us by word of mouth or referrals, but it seemed to me that if I could generate more leads, I’d get more opportunity to highlight some (pretty obvious, right?). We started sending some direct mailers to businesses in industries we were focusing on and trying other marketing tactics to get the phone to ring more often.
The company was growing ever since I started, but we obviously wanted to accelerate the growth. As we started forming a formalized sales team, we also started forming a marketing team with a more focused approach. I transitioned pretty naturally as a Marketing Manager as we hired more people for the team, like content writers and a videographer. Suddenly, I had this opportunity to help build a marketing strategy from the ground up and try new things and fail a lot, but learn from those failures.
After about a year of working on marketing full time, our CEO sent me an email asking if I’d jump into an opportunity to be our Product Manager. It meant working directly with the development team and Project Manager to push forward new initiatives in our software. I had no technical background or coding experience, but I felt up to the task. I understood our users as we had focused so much on those personas for our marketing efforts, and I worked with users as a consultant. It was an opportunity to focus on user engagement and user experience and to bring some marketing efforts into the product with in-product advertising.
In the role, I learned early on that I couldn’t say yes to every idea or every plea from a client. I got a lot better at saying no and sticking to our priorities for the product. I had some management experience, but I gained a lot more with a larger development team. I managed a lot of different personalities that weren’t as similar to mine, and still managed to ship improvements and features quickly. Ultimately, I was made Director of Product and became responsible for the Support and Network Operations teams as well.
In 2016, our CEO and COO put me on a path towards executiveship and mentored me to be ready for that leadership role. In 2017, I became Executive Vice President, Product.
Has it been a smooth road?
We move really quickly and could take our product in a lot of different directions. For me, the hardest thing has been hearing a lot of good ideas, but turning most of them down to focus our attention and resources on the ideas that are going to drive our product forward and make significant differences in the businesses of our clients.
We also move really quickly, which is exciting, but comes with its own challenges. We’ve scrambled to get minimally viable new products ready for real users we sell to, and to scale our products to keep up with more users and those users’ increasing reliance and expectations on the product.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Call Box – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Call Box is a software company that helps companies Own the Phone. We track and record businesses’ phone calls, then determine how those calls were handled, and alerts these companies when a call needs attention. We provide reports on these calls to show businesses where they can improve on the phone and how they can stop losing money from botched phone calls.
Our target industries are those which conduct a significant amount of their business over the phone, like automotive dealerships that pay hundreds of dollars to generate calls from customers asking about a car on the lot, insurance companies where consumers call for new policies, or healthcare providers booking new patients over the phone.
One of our big differentiators is actually listening to every one of these calls. We created a crowd-sourced review platform where hundreds of thousands of users from around the world log in, listen to calls, provide specific pieces of information about those calls, and get paid for their work. This system allows us to very quickly alert our clients of calls that need attention and wrap up the data in high level reports.
We combine these reviews with artificial intelligence to actually make our clients better on the phone. For example, through Ai, we know who at our client’s business is available to take a call and how each agent actually performs on the phone. When a certain call comes in, we can dynamically route the call to the best-equipped agent.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
There’s always a million things going on in Dallas. I come from a smaller city, so it’s still exciting to me to have almost every big performer make a stop in Dallas, new restaurants and hot spots opening all the time and big sports leagues to cheer for. It’s awesome that with all Dallas has, it’s still a very affordable city to live in.
If I have to pick something I like least, it’s probably that Dallas lacks some of the outdoor activities/natural beauty that other areas of the country have. The cool thing is that Dallas makes up for what it’s lacking. Over the 10 years I’ve been in Dallas, I’ve seen awesome parks like Kylde Warren pop up and our bike trail system expanding significantly.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1505 Federal Street,
Suite 200,
Dallas, TX 75201 - Website: callbox.com
- Phone: 214-446-7867
- Instagram: callbox_ownthephone
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ownthephone/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10261360/
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
