Dialpad has acquired Surfboard, the contact center workforce management (WFM) provider.
With Surfboard, the enterprise communications contender gains trusted solutions that planners can utilize across the WFM cycle. That cycle has four stages: contact center forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
Expect Dialpad to combine these solutions with its Ai Scorecards and Ai Coaching offerings to build a rich workforce engagement management (WEM) suite.
In time, that will likely come part and parcel with the Dialpad Ai Contact Center Platform. However, it could also form a standalone offering that businesses can plug into a rival CCaaS platform, CRM system, or UCaaS solution.
Alvaria and Zendesk have taken a similar path this year, spinning out WEM propositions of their own.
While it is not certain that Dialpad will follow suit, it cites Surfboard’s cloud-native foundation as a critical motivator for the acquisition. That foundation will ensure easier cross-integration of both provider’s products.
Sharing more on the strategy behind the acquisition, Vincent Paquet, Chief Product Officer at Dialpad, said: “In our hybrid and platform-powered workforce, enterprises want a single place for all business communications and organization.
The team at Surfboard has created an exceptional product for workforce management, and we’re excited to combine our capabilities to bring customers the very best, AI-native WFM on the market.
Dialpad also praised the WFM provider’s intuitive solution and culture.
To enable that intuitive solution, Surfboard is more design-led than most competitors. Indeed, each group of engineers has a dedicated designer who focuses on user research, UX, UI, and core product design.
Meanwhile, it has established an “own the problem” culture. So, whenever Surfboard engages with a customer, it doesn’t jump to solutions but stays focused on understanding the issue’s depth.
Critically, that involves mapping out WFM processes, identifying friction points, and taking a more consultative approach to overcoming issues.
Such differentiators are critical in a space where vendors often compete by offering more forecasting models, shift patterns, and metrics. Hopefully, this distinctiveness won’t get lost in the acquisition.

Another critical focus for Surfboard is scalability, so when a team has to make a significant change to their operations – be it in their opening hours or onboarding a new location – they don’t have to reimagine all their WFM workflows. Instead, the vendor strives to simplify the change.
That’s evident in the Surfboard metaphor. During an interview with Intercom, Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder & CEO of Surfboard, explained:
When you’re running a support team, you’re dealing with waves of inflow, and we provide you with the tool to navigate those waves, which is the surfboard.
“Everything we build relates to how we equip the customer support team to be able to navigate those waves in the most effective way,” she concluded.
Alongside all this, Ratanshi-Stein is a proponent of humanizing WFM and taking planners from the outskirts of customer service to the center, so they’re not the “computer says no” crowd.
Part of that involves pushing back against “intrusive” contact center surveillance, which has become more prevalent since the shift to remote and hybrid work models.
“When you can’t see where your team is or who’s handling calls, chats, or refunds, the temptation for surveillance grows,” continued Ratanshi-Stein. “This is where technology can be misused, and that’s something we don’t want to facilitate.
Our goal at Surfboard is to build tools that eliminate the need for that kind of oversight.
While Surfboard may become part of a WEM suite, it’ll certainly strengthen the Dialpad Ai Contact Center Platform, one of the 11 most prominent CCaaS solutions globally. That’s according to the Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for CCaaS 2024 report.
However, Dialpad doesn’t feature in the CCaaS Magic Quadrant. Why? A critical reason is that Gartner only includes vendors with resource planning solutions. Now, that’s no longer a problem.
Additionally, it can piece together a more extensive WEM suite than many of its CCaaS rivals. Jim Davies, Co-Founder and Executive Partner at Actionary, hopes this is the case.
“This acquisition aligns with the ongoing trend of CCaaS encroaching into the WEM market,” he told CX Today. “But, what is encouraging to see here is the ambition to move beyond just supporting WFM as a tick box functional add-on.”
Indeed, Dialpad has the potential to leverage Surfboard’s cloud-native foundation to more closely integrate its capabilities. That goes beyond bringing WFM and quality assurance (QA) together. The vendor could also tie WFM into its reporting, routing, and other contact center functionality to deliver more differentiative innovation.
Dialpad’s C-Suite Additions & $300MN Milestone
Alongside its acquisition, Dialpad has announced two new faces for its C-suite.
First up is Atit Shah, who comes from JP Morgan-acquired WePay and joins as Dialpad’s first-ever Chief Security Officer (CSO).
Next, Jen Grant, a long-time board member, becomes Chief Marketing Officer, having previously served as CMO of Looker (acquired by Google), SVP of Marketing at Box, and – more recently – as CEO of Appify.
Grant will aim to reinvigorate Dialpad’s marketing efforts, which have gone quiet recently. For instance, it launched a campaign in April 2023 to release 12 AI innovations in 12 months. But that dried up in November.
Since then, its most notable announcement was the launch of its Ai Sales Platform, which is somewhat distanced from Dialpad’s enterprise communications heritage.
Most importantly, however, customer feedback has remained positive. Indeed, the aforementioned Peer Insights report suggests that 95 percent of its clients would recommend the company. That’s up from 87 percent in 2023.
With that positive foundation, the acquisition, and this c-suite reshuffle, Dialpad signals that it’s ready to ramp up its innovation and marketing efforts once again.
Although, it hasn’t rested completely on its laurels, maintaining successful partnerships with the likes of Cisco Webex, Google, and Microsoft. Its self-service offerings are also reportedly helping to support new customer acquisition.
Now, it can perhaps push this further, with greater earnings to boot, having also surpassed the $300MN in annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone.
Dialpad credits its “modern cloud approach” and 2018 investment in AI as key enablers here.
The latter is perhaps most significant, as Dialpad does AI differently to most other enterprise communications vendors, bringing everything in-house.
That offers significant benefits as the vendor gains greater control over its roadmap and integrations. After all, it doesn’t have to assemble various capabilities through partnerships.
With that autonomy, Dialpad will – hopefully – push forward and reassert itself within the enterprise communications space in 2025.