Business: Customer contact management services for a wide range of public and private sector clients
Launched: 2001
HQ: Fort Lauderdale
Employees: 2,000+
Website: OutPLEX.com
OutPLEX is bringing call centers into the 21st century.
Jim Ryan, OutPLEX’s Founder and CEO, explained that they “help build, design, and deploy tools that combine artificial intelligence (AI) and human beings” to manage these business-to-consumer contact points. This use of AI makes customer interactions more efficient.
Unlike its competitors, OutPLEX benefits from a substantial amount of data, which increases the effectiveness of its AI systems. “It’s incredibly hard to design what conversations are going to be without the data, and you need the experience of the human being,” Ryan said. “Lots of startups don’t have that.”
This foray into AI stemmed from OutPLEX’s early adoption of chatbot technologies. Ryan, a former AT&T executive, described the development of AI tools as a “natural progression” from traditional text chat and concurrent chats, “where one agent can have multiple conversations at a time.”
OutPLEX’s industry leadership did not happen overnight. Ryan said that for many years, OutPLEX’s growth was “incremental, but not as fast as I had hoped.” However, in the last three years, “business has dramatically changed.” Now some of the biggest companies in America like Lowe’s, American Express, and Comcast leverage OutPLEX’s services to ensure their customers are given the highest level of service.
Ryan credits this recent growth to his laser focus on bringing tech innovation to the forefront of everything OutPLEX does: “as a tech entrepreneur, I’m always looking at new tech platforms in the marketplace.”
He continued, “I’ve pivoted the business over the years, trying to come up with different services, and now we’ve found a service [AI-powered chatbots] that we have a pull position on.”
Ryan expressed excitement about the state of the South Florida tech ecosystem: “We’ve gone from a spot of tourism and real estate to a wonderful blossoming tech hub.” Having lived and worked in Florida since the late 1990s, Ryan is impressed by “how far Florida tech has come in such a short period of time, the last 5-8 years.”
“Miami has taken the baton and is at the top of the rocket ship,” said Ryan. “It continues to drive this bursting ecosystem because of its size and dense population, as well as the thirst of Latin America to seek mentorship and capital in Miami.”
He acknowledged that Palm Beach and Broward counties “have done a good job considering their size, but there’s still work to be done.” He urges leaders to “work collaboratively” and that they must “support each other, if our ecosystem is to thrive.”
“Isolation is not going to work,” said Ryan, who prefers to take a regional perspective when looking at tech development in South Florida. Ryan highlighted the importance of transportation to the development of the region: “logistics are a challenge, but the situation is improving.”
Ryan is optimistic about the talent base in South Florida. “Covid is forcing and accelerating an exponential growth in South Florida’s tech talent,” he noted, citing key initiatives at local universities such as Florida Atlantic University’s Tech Runway.
Ultimately, Ryan says that “it’s an exciting time to be a tech entrepreneur in Florida.”