Enterprise Buyer Persona

# Persona: Derek the VP Ops

## Overview

**Name:** Derek Okafor
**Age:** 45
**Title:** VP of Operations
**Company:** CallVault (customer support outsourcing, 500 agents)
**Experience:** 18 years in operations, 8 years in BPO/contact center industry

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## Background

Derek runs operations for CallVault, a company that provides outsourced customer support for retail and e-commerce brands. He manages 500 agents handling 15,000+ calls daily across 12 clients. He's evaluated dozens of contact center tools and is pragmatic, data-driven, and allergic to risk.

He signed up for Wavelength Voice Agents because the voice quality was dramatically better than anything else he'd tested. He ran a pilot with 50 agents. Then the problems started. He ultimately churned after 5 months — but he doesn't want to. He wants Wavelength to get better.

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## Goals

1. **Reduce cost per call** - AI agents handling routine calls saves money. But only if they actually work.

2. **Maintain service quality** - His clients measure CSAT and first-call resolution. AI can't make these worse.

3. **Scale predictably** - Needs to handle 15,000 calls/day reliably. No surprises.

4. **Meet compliance requirements** - SOC 2, PCI DSS, sometimes HIPAA. Non-negotiable.

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## Frustrations

1. **Latency kills the experience** - 800ms delay is noticeable on phone calls. Customers say "hello?" thinking the call dropped.

2. **AI hallucination is costly** - Agent gave a customer incorrect refund information. Cost $12K. Nearly lost a client.

3. **No guardrails** - Can't set hard limits on what the AI agent can and can't say. No policy controls.

4. **No SOC 2** - Procurement rejected Wavelength. "We're working on it" isn't an answer.

5. **Interruption handling broken** - Real callers interrupt, get angry, talk over the agent. The AI freezes.

6. **No SLAs** - "Best effort" reliability. No uptime guarantees. No financial penalties for downtime.

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## Day in the Life

- 7am: Review overnight performance dashboards
- 8am: Ops team standup
- 9am: Client calls (CSAT reviews, staffing discussions)
- 11am: Vendor evaluations and procurement
- 12pm: Lunch
- 1pm: Workforce management and scheduling
- 2pm: Quality assurance reviews
- 3pm: Strategic planning (automation, AI, efficiency)
- 4pm: Escalations and incident review
- 5pm: Reporting and KPIs

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## How He Evaluates Tools

Derek evaluates with a checklist. Literally. He has a spreadsheet with 47 criteria. If you can't check the box, you don't make it past procurement.

| Category | Weight | What He Checks |
|----------|--------|----------------|
| Security/Compliance | 30% | SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA, data residency |
| Performance | 25% | Latency, uptime, scalability |
| Cost | 20% | TCO vs human agents, ROI timeline |
| Quality | 15% | Voice naturalness, CSAT impact |
| Support | 10% | SLAs, escalation paths, dedicated CSM |

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## What He Values in Vendors

- **Reliability over innovation** - He doesn't care about "cool." He cares about "does it work at 3am on Black Friday."
- **Documentation** - Security docs, compliance certs, architecture diagrams. If it's not written down, it doesn't exist.
- **SLAs with teeth** - Financial penalties for missing uptime. Not "best effort."
- **Gradual rollout** - Beta → 10% → 50% → 100%. Never all at once.
- **Incident response** - When something breaks, he needs a human on the phone in 15 minutes, not a chatbot.

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## Quotes (from research)

> "Your voice is a 10 out of 10. Your enterprise readiness is a 3 out of 10. I need at least a 7 in both."

> "You have a Ferrari engine in a go-kart frame."

> "'We're working on it' means 'we don't have it.' In enterprise procurement, that's a disqualifier."

> "I'm not going to deploy a podcaster tool in my call center."

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## How Wavelength Could Win Him Back

- SOC 2 Type II certification
- Sub-200ms latency (300ms minimum)
- Response guardrails and policy controls
- Interruption handling that works with angry callers
- SLAs with financial penalties
- Dedicated enterprise support with named CSM
- Enterprise positioning separate from creator branding

## Why He Left

- 800ms latency in production (was 400ms in POC)
- AI hallucinated refund policy — $12K cost
- No SOC 2
- No SLAs
- Interruption handling broken
- Switched to Amazon Connect (worse voice quality, better everything else)

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*Persona developed from: Churn exit interview (Nov 2025), sales pipeline analysis*
*Last updated: November 2025*