Dialpad acquires Surfboard: A new chapter in workforce management

I have always admired how Apple owns every aspect of their products (from the silicon to the hardware to the operating system and beyond) and how that allows them to consistently build beautifully well designed products that users love. We strive to do the same thing at Dialpad with our fully unified, cloud based, AI-powered Communications Intelligence platform. That’s a lot to say, but it means that our native and proprietary AI platform analyzes and understands all aspects of a business’ conversation with their customers.    

We recognized that businesses also needed to have a similarly modern and cloud based  Workforce Management (WFM) capability as part of their overall strategy to serve their customers as WFM allows businesses to accurately forecast how many resources they need to have available at any given time to handle the demand from their customers. As such, Dialpad has always kept an eye out for a great team and product to add to our unified solution so that we could provide these WFM capabilities to all our customers in one integrated platform. 

Finding the right partner, however, wasn’t easy. We needed a company offering a cloud-native product that’s both effective and intuitive, alongside a team that shares our culture of solving age-old problems in innovative ways. We’re thrilled to have found exactly that in Surfboard, led by Natasha Ratanshi-Stein and her team in London, UK.

Founded in 2021, Surfboard has reimagined the WFM industry by combining advanced technology with an intuitive user experience. This empowers customer service teams to become both profit centers and sources of delight for their customers—two things very in-line with Dialpad’s own offerings.

The team at Surfboard always believed that the future of customer service would be a hybrid of AI-enabled work powered by humans. Over the past couple of years, Dialpad has led the way in evolving how customer service teams integrate AI, not just with disparate add-on services, but with a human-centric and AI-native approach that empowers teams. Surfboard and Dialpad share the philosophy that technology can improve customer outcomes and team efficiency—together, we’re excited to build products that allow our customers to achieve these goals.

About Surfboard

Surfboard is a cloud-native WFM platform designed to help support teams streamline and consolidate their operations with tools for scheduling, forecasting, and performance analytics. 

By integrating seamlessly with existing systems—such as voice and digital service providers, ticketing systems, HR platforms, and calendar tools—Surfboard enables organizations to optimize staffing and resources as business needs evolve, allowing support leaders to focus on coaching agents and improving customer experiences.

What this means for Dialpad

We’ve invested heavily in expanding our CCaaS offering, and Surfboard’s WFM platform makes our contact center solution more comprehensive than ever. In the short term, this integration will allow Dialpad to provide a best-in-class AI-powered Communications Intelligence platform that’s paired with native workforce management tools and insights.

Looking ahead, by combining Dialpad’s AI capabilities with Surfboard’s WFM solution, we plan to develop a unique offering that leverages real-time voice, digital activity, and conversation data to create smarter forecasts and actionable recommendations for businesses of all sizes. This integration will set us apart in the market, offering a differentiated, AI-powered WFM experience.

A big thank you

This deal marks Dialpad’s fifth acquisition and is a further, important, step in Dialpad’s strategy to fully integrate all of the essential tools needed to provide excellent customer support in the contact center space into one, beautiful, AI-powered  solution. I am thrilled about this deal and am very thankful and appreciative  to both the Dialpad and Surfboard teams for their hard work in making this a reality. 

A special thank you goes out to our customers for their continued trust and support. We’re excited for what’s ahead and encourage everyone to stay tuned.

We can’t wait to share this new chapter with you!