Rowan Trollope, Five9 | CUBEConversation, January 2019

Everyone, welcome to this specialCUBE Conversation. I'm John Ferri here in the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. We are with special guest Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9s, formerly with Cisco, formerly CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for joining me today.

Great to see you, John.

So let's talk about the future of the contact center. You got a new role. CEO of Five9. Looks like a great opportunity. Tell us about it.

Well, the contact center is really where it's at right now in the UC space and in the collaboration space, and frankly, in the digitization trend for most companies. They're realizing that the experience that they give to their customers has got to transform. You know, customers are telling them that if they don't fix the experience they deliver, they're going to leave. The businesses that they're doing business with. And so I think that's, you know, it's really emerging as this really hot space and interesting space and a place where businesses recognize they have to spend money and do a much better job.

One of the things that we've talked about in the past, certainly that you're always on, is the wave of cloud data AI. You've always had that vision in our previous conversations. Five9 now in this contact center, kind of an old legacy, old way of doing things, voice over IP, you know, managing customer relationships, whether it's support inbound or outbound seems to be changed with cloud computing and the role of data and now machine learning and AI has really been an accelerant.

Yep.

What's your vision over the next 5 years as this starts to transform and people reimagine what that's going to look like for their businesses? Because certainly customer relationships are changing. People have multiple devices, they're on any platform, they're horizontally moving around different websites, different places, different on the go. A lot of change happening. What's your vision?

There is a lot of change happening, and it's change that's primarily driven by consumer behavior and sort of enabled by technology. So the biggest factor, in my opinion, that's affecting business is that you have the age of this empowered consumer. You know, 10 years ago, for example, my wife Steph was bugging the crap out of me about fixing— cleaning up my garage. And so At the time, the way that I did that is I ran down to Home Depot, I looked at what they had on the shelf, I picked a, you know, a shelving system, and I brought it home and I set it up. 10 years later, and this was just about a year ago, we have moved since then, and, you know, the garage is yet again a mess and I've been getting a hard time about it. So finally I said, "Okay, okay, I'll organize the garage." And so what do I do this time? I go out and I get on my phone and I search for garage organizing systems, and I get lots of different forums and people talking about things and reading customer reviews and so on and so forth. I do a whole bunch of research, actually call a couple of the companies. I think I made 3 different calls just to get some of the details about their product that I couldn't get online, and ultimately ordered one and it shows up at my house. So 10 years ago you have sort of, you know, a not very empowered consumer. I took what was on the shelf, that's what I got. 10 years later, you have zero trips to retail brick and mortar. You have a very empowered consumer, me, that has lots of options, lots of choices, and 3 calls to a contact center. That happened in the span of 10 years, powered by the internet, powered by my mobile phone, powered by connectivity, and so on and so forth. So any business who's in, you know, every business essentially is dealing with this challenge. And my expectation in terms of who I'm going to do business with was heavily influenced by the quality of their website, the quality of the experience that they had, the quality of their community, the user reviews that were coming back in. You know, some of them, some of the commentary like, "I got this thing, it was missing some stuff, I couldn't get a hold of them, it was super hard to deal with." I'm not going to do business with that company. So what, you know, part of that transformation over the last 10, 20, 30 years has been the empowered consumer gets to make a choice. And they don't have to do business if you don't have a great experience. So that's moving the contact center industry from being a sort of an extension of the phone system that we really don't want to think about very often into something that's really, really important for businesses. And I was seeing that left and right coming from my previous job.

It's interesting. It's an opportunity too. It's a challenge on one hand for companies dealing with the old way to do it. It becomes an opportunity when the user expectations and experience is impacted. That's a buying decision or a relationship, emotional decision. What does this opportunity mean for companies? Because now this now flips to the potential sellers of services and products. They have now an opportunity to take advantage of this new dynamic where users are in charge of being empowered. What's the opportunity for companies?

So it's two things. One, if you're a disruptive company coming at, you know, any— or starting up a new company and you're going after this, You can look at the user experience as part of your differentiation value proposition. So I'm not only going to have a great product, but I'm gonna wrap that in a great experience, and that's the expectation today that any new company can meet. Look at, take a company like Square, for example. Yes, they have a beautiful little card swipe reader and they have a nice industrial design, but that's not just what you get. You get a team behind that coming from the company that provides great support. And a great experience. And when you sign up for Square, I guess the first thing you get is an email from their CEO sort of welcoming you to the community. And you see that with a lot of modern companies. Tesla is another great example where you see a really tremendous experience being delivered around what is fundamentally a great product. And that's not something that you would see with the incumbents. So I think if you're a disruptor or a new company or you're looking at transforming an industry, then the opportunity is think about the holistic customer experience. If you're an incumbent or you've been in the business for a while and you're facing one of these sort of digital disruptors, if you want to call them that, then your opportunity is to reimagine your customer experience end-to-end and put some time and effort into it. You know, the reality is still, and I was in the call center 30 years ago almost, the customer, the call center in most businesses, most incumbent businesses today, is a cost center. Because it's something that you sort of essentially have to deal with once this product has been sold. And it's not a place that most executives in most businesses want to go. In fact, in many cases, it's been sent to other countries. Your contact center is— you don't even know where it is. It's in the Philippines, or it's in, you know, some other country, or it's in India, or it's in a state, you know, a less expensive state, which is all fine, but it's not fine that executives and companies don't want to go and see where the frontline of their business is, which is the place where they that experience meets the customer. So if you're an incumbent, you really have to think about, you know, you have to think about putting your contact center as a priority for your business and reimagining the experience. And look, go walk a day in their shoes and experience what it's like.

One of the things that we've been reporting on over the years, and you know, you've been following TheCUBE and SiliconANGLE, is the talk of CX or customer experience has been going on for many, many years. Somewhat aspirational outside of the corner cases of companies that actually specialize in differentiating on customer satisfaction and user experience, and that's obvious, then check the box there. But as the market changes, it's now attainable. We're seeing the real actionable execution for companies to modernize what was once a call center, as you pointed out. How do they do that? What's the opportunity? Certainly cloud computing helps. Data and AI are kind of at the table. How does a company that wants to modernize and have a real advantage and change their business approach, what do they do? What's the plan? You guys seem to be positioned for that. What do I do? What's the playbook?

Go to Five9.com. No, the reality is that the first thing you have to do is really believe that this is an important aspect of delivering your business to your end consumer. And look at what's making up your competitors' offer, not just their product, but their offer, and sort of internalize and get the idea that, okay, yes, this turns out it is important and I care about it. I'm gonna go spend time on it. Because look, the reality is we know how to deliver, any business, you don't have to be a genius to figure out how to deliver great customer service. You know, what customers want is actually really simple. When I call you, answer the phone. Don't send me through some rigmarole of IVRs and other, you know, technology hurdles. Don't hide your phone number when I want to get a hold of you. Make it easy for me to contact you. And when I contact you, what do I want? I want someone who understands me, who knows the problem that I have, who's an expert who can help me, and who has empathy, you know, who can really connect with me and relate with me. And if there's a problem, It's not just about, "I'm gonna solve the problem," but it's like, "We understand and we're sorry, you know, and we're gonna make this better for you and we're gonna follow up with you." So that's a big part of what you have to— and it turns out doing that is not hard. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to do it. Now, there are lots of technology companies that are out there today that make that easy. And the history of the contact center, essentially, over the last 25 years has been essentially kind of stuck in the, you know, in a phone closet somewhere with some technology that has actually hindered what smart people knew. We knew how to do this. We knew how to deliver a great experience. The problem was you had like this legacy technology and you had to call somebody in the data center or somewhere else and they were like, "That's gonna be hard and it's gonna cost millions of dollars. Our system doesn't support that." And so there was a technology sort of shackles that were on customer service experts. And executives and businesses, it was like, "Wow, that sounds like it's going to be expensive. It's going to take a long time." Now we're in a world with the cloud where within a few clicks and a few minutes you can deploy a contact center.

So with cloud—

You can go to our site or other sites and you can instantly have, you know, very, very quickly have a contact center that is modern, that is flexible, that is, you know, has all the latest features and functionality. And so technology is no longer the hindrance. That has been taken off the table. Our company was born in the cloud. There's other companies out there people can use. The bottom line is, this is not really a technology problem anymore.

So people have multiple devices, there's a lot of different channels of how people engage. That's the expectation. On the company side, there's a variety of sets of resources that can be deployed at any given time. So you kind of have this now integrated kind of philosophy with cloud. How— what does cloud and data and now AI do to the contact center? How does the contact center data center change? What does it look like?

Yeah, so the real, uh, most important thing that has happened with the cloud computing wave is, uh, you know, first that it made technology easy to consume. You know, it used to be really hard and expensive, like we just talked about, to just to get technology. And then once you got it, you were stuck with it and it didn't change ever. Okay, we're kind of beyond that now with the cloud. And that, those were the table stakes. But something else happened when we started moving technology to the cloud that was more important. And that was that we started collecting data. And as we started to collect data, that became really interesting because of one other thing that happened, which was the revolution that happened in machine learning. And it started about 10 years ago with some very, you know, big scientific breakthroughs on deep learning more specifically. And what that deep learning approach needed was lots and lots and lots of data in order to work. So it was a great scientific breakthrough, but it kind of stalled a little bit at the beginning because it didn't— there wasn't a lot of data out there that could actually— you could get the benefits. Well, as companies have more and more been moving to the cloud, what that's creating is centers of data. And not just data for your company, because lots of businesses don't have enough data actually to power machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are famously data hungry. You know, there's a famous saying from, you know, well, a bunch of folks in the AI industry, but it's that more data is better data. You know, the more you have, the better you are. In fact, you can also say that, you know, if you have more data, it's better than having a great algorithm, right? The more data will always win. So what the cloud has unlocked is massive amounts of data, and that data is important to to actually get at the root cause of the problem of bad customer service and support, which is with that data and the breakthroughs in machine learning, and that data in our industry is customer conversations, what your customers are actually telling you, either by text or by voice or by email. That information is really interesting and can be married with machine learning technology to provide automation.

It's interesting you mentioned customer. I think that's, I think a key point. As we look at the data world, people look at, certainly from a tech perspective, let's apply technology to data. Great, that can assist in things, but when you talk about customers, and you're in business to serve customers, that's probably the most valuable data. So as you said earlier, people hide the phone numbers, they want to shy away from engaging with customers to not support them or hope they go away. They might be indifferent of serving them. You're saying the reverse, be proactive, engage the customer, get that data so you can iterate on that. So I get that, I think that is real innovation. In terms of the direction. But as you're dealing with customers, there's also the human side of it. Customers want to know that there's someone on the other side. You bought your garage organizing system because of that component. How is the role of humans and machines impacting this new transformation from customer center to— contact center to essentially customer center? What is that piece of humans? Super important.

Yeah, we don't see technology replacing all the humans, actually, because— and this goes back to my experience in the contact center, and, you know, many years ago, and my observation was— and in fact, my first job, I sat, you know, in between two different agents, and one of them was named Dave and one was named Ken, and Ken was really warm and effusive, and he got— I remember he used to get gifts on his desk from customers. They would send him flowers and chocolates chocolates and their products and so on. And he could tell a customer to shut up in a nice way, and they would love him after it. I mean, it was amazing that he could do this. And it was all about empathy. He didn't actually know all the answers to all of the questions, but he created these incredible fans amongst the customers. The guy to my right, Dave, he was super smart. He just had as much empathy as a rock. And he could answer all the questions really fast. Okay, and so I used that because I would learn things from him, but customers didn't like him. And the answer, you know, when I saw in those two folks was that you can't do one or the other, you need both. And what computers are, and what machine learning specifically, now that we're getting all this data through the cloud, is able to do is we're able to predict the answers to what customers, you know, what the questions from customers, we're able to predict those things really quickly. So that's a sort of a mastery. So machines can help with mastery. They can help with being able to answer every question instantly or know the best thing to say to a customer at any given time. But what machines can't do is empathy. Humans are the ones that have to bring the heart. So what we're working on at Five9 is using machines to help agents, human agents, give them mastery. And we're letting the humans then focus on what they do really well. Well, which is bring the heart to the customer. And that creates a bond between a brand and a customer that is like unbreakable.

I think you're onto something big there because if you look at digital, the impact of digital technologies, and you can look at a variety of examples, mainstream media to technology companies to any kind of industry or vertical, there's a lot— lack of emotional IQ or emotional quotient. And this seems to be what people people are looking at. You can just look no further than some of the polarization with digital in terms of media coverage, politics and whatnot. You start to see this focus on how to bring more empathy and more emotional IQ to systems. And I think users are responding to that. Can you comment on your reaction to that?

Yeah, part of this starts with confusion that is rampant in the contact center industry, which is that people don't really want to talk anymore. And, you know, this has been observed because of the fact that, you know, we have new generations entering the workforce like millennials. You know, we all have our kids out there who would prefer to text us than talk to us often. But the reality is, and we surveyed this, that actually even millennials still prefer voice as the primary form of, you know, communication. And that what has happened that is the mistake, what is the error that people made? The error that people made is assuming that or actually conflating a bad voice experience with the fact that voice is bad. And that's just not true. And it's observably not true. We've gone and actually proven this. So what we've sort of realized is that what you need to fix is the bad voice experience. What is that? It's like wait, going into an IVR. Okay, that's frustrating. You know, reaching—

What's an IVR real quick?

Interactive Voice Response. So it's the push 1 for this, push 2 for that. Everybody hates it.

Everyone hates it.

You know, every company uses it. And it's like a stain on humanity. We need to get rid of those things because they're just awful. So you go into this tree and all that. OK, so get rid of it. By the way, everybody 5 years ago said, oh, we can fix that problem with bots. And that actually is almost worse. I've been trying to use bots for the last 3 months. I've been doing my own little test on this and communicating only using text. And whenever I hit a bot, it's like the last thing I want to do is talk to I want to get to a human. So my first question now is, are you human? Which is my version of push 0 to get through the IVR, to get to an agent. OK? So, you know, there's been a confusion about this. And when you go back to what you had said earlier, this notion that users, that, you know, the empathy is what has tended to be lost. Well, turns out it's much harder to make an emotional connection on text than it is with voice. And people just in general are not as good at communicating that emotional content on text, 'cause they're not very good writers generally, and they don't have time, whereas they're excellent at doing that with their voice. You know, I'm not happy versus I'm not happy. You know, there's a huge range of emotion that can be communicated with the human voice, which is extremely powerful. So if we can fix the bad voice experience, take away all that crap so that when you get someone, they know who you are, they understand you, they can get to the root cause of your problem very quickly, then it turns out that the human voice is extremely useful. And we're now entering into an era where we can use the computer to talk to humans in unique and interesting ways. Now, that, I believe, is actually still a little bit further out because of a variety of reasons. But in the meantime, computers and AI can help agents master their craft and let them focus on the empathy side of things.

So in terms of Five9, the core problem that you're solving is what?

So we provide a flexible, easy to configure, easy to deploy cloud-based contact center. Okay. And it's minutes or hours before you can have this technology deployed. You don't need to have a phone system. So you look at a call center that's sort of from the old days, and it's like lots of phones on desks.

With our—

in our world, you sweep those away. You have a computer and a web browser. You plug in a headset. Your agent can be sitting anywhere in the world. They get a beautiful web UI that's deeply integrated into Salesforce or Zendesk or ServiceNow or Oracle or any CRM system that you have. And we give you this really, really tightly integrated end-to-end experience. Experience, and we just make all of that easy. And it handles any kind of contact, whether it's voice or text or email. It all goes through our system. It's all in the cloud. It's really easy and it's affordable.

And the data management is pretty straightforward. Is that going to be flexible and agile enough to use with other things as people start having different touchpoints?

Absolutely. In fact, with our system, all your calls are recorded into the cloud, as are all of your contacts. All of that is stored securely in our servers and is accessible to you. You can— there's a whole range of apps in the contact center you can plug in on top of our platform, including things like Varent or Calabrio or CSI, you know, this whole area of workforce optimization and so on. So lots and lots of technologies are actually built on Five9. So when you buy our technology, you're really buying a technology platform with a rich ecosystem of apps that plug in on top of it. And where we sit really in that value chain you know, is the core platform that delivers the data and the pipes, and we sort of provide the intelligence also that runs on top of that data, and that's where we're heading.

And that's your core innovation, pretty much, to get that cloud-based, stand it up fast, to get the focus on—

That's part of it, and I'd say the second part of it, that's sort of product and platform. The second part is really the offer. So it turns out that if you go to most companies, the things that make their customer experience poor that they want to fix are solvable through capabilities that are already available in the platforms that they generally already have. What they're missing is a partner who can help them make that happen, because it turns out it's not easy. You know, we've got a very flexible platform. It's been built over more than a decade, so it's like really rich in features. But the question, and more and more what we see our customers wanting from us, is a complete offer, and that includes professional services onsite support, you know, people to help you, you know, handhold and walk you through that process. So we'll kind of go the extra mile for our customers and give them an end-to-end solution to their problem, not just a piece of technology. Now, if just technology is what you want, and our technology works for businesses with 2 support center reps, so it's, you know, we can scale all the way down to 2 folks, but we also have contact centers running that have 4,000 reps. So we run that entire spectrum. For the small customers, they want something easy, pre-configured, off the shelf, just go. Okay, there's nobody coming on site for those customers. You have 4,000 reps, we've got people on site. We darken the skies with our support people and our engineers and everyone else to actually provide a complete solution to our customers.

That's great. Well, congratulations. I think having that innovation and having the cloud approach gets it up fast, gets the value delivered, and then as they grow, you can flex with the size of the organization. You're not limited.

Exactly.

So I want to get to, you're doing a panel discussion at Enterprise Connect coming up in Orlando. That's where we first met. This has been a show that's been talking to the enterprise customers who have been evolving from voice over IP, integrated communications, unified communications, that world of voice, data, and systems, to now an open cloud-based data AI Should be exciting. You're on a panel. I don't want to give it away, but what are you going to be talking about? The title is "Why Customer Engagement is Leading the Enterprise Communication Conversation." Give us a quick teaser.

I'm going to be focused on what's coming next. One of the big reasons that drove me to this company that's attracted some top talent in the industry is that many of us see that the era of the cloud has actually opened these golden doors to a new LAND, which is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. And that we see that solving some of the root cause problems that we talked about earlier, bad customer service and experience, that have essentially been talked about for a long time but haven't been solved. That finally the technology has actually caught up to the problem. And so our big play at Five9 is to become the world's best self-learning intelligent contact center. Contact center platform. And we see that the contact center has— is shifting from being less a contact center and more a center of customer data. And that is the key insight that we had is that, wow, this is a lot of really interesting data. You know, it turns out what your customers say to you is really, really important. And today in almost all contact centers, almost everywhere, That data goes nowhere. It goes away because it's not very useful. Most of what customers are telling you is actually voice traffic, and that sits in WAV files, if you record it at all, which many customers don't. And then they're not very useful, so they get thrown away. We figured out that that information is ridiculously valuable, but it's only become valuable recently because of advances in machine learning that allow us to do speech-to-text reliably, as good as humans. Okay? Speech-to-text has been around for a while. It's just been really crappy. Now it's really good. And now that it's gotten really good and affordable, every customer can take advantage of it. So because all of our customers have all of their data stored on our cloud and all calls get recorded, we can now start to translate those voice wave files into text and provide that as insight back to the customer. We signed a partnership with Google to leverage their technology to help us make sense sense of all of those spoken conversations and then ultimately all of the text. So we believe the next generation of the contact center is going to be less about a contact center and more about a center of customer data, which can be used to drive automation and insight back into the business. That's the big transformation for the next decade in the contact center.

Taking the contact center, making it the customer center.

This is kind of compatible with the big customer data center or center of customer data.

I mean, it's really kind of in line with how DevOps changed cloud computing, where you had dev and ops coming together, and you're taking that concept and that ethos to the contact center.

You know, look, I'm not sure that it's exactly like DevOps, but I guess you could draw that correlation. I think what you do see in business is that there's new functions popping up all the time. A recent function that's popped up is customer Customer success. And what is customer success? It's all about reaching out to your customer to help make them successful. And the insight that led to customer success is when you have a services business, if you engage with your customer proactively, you actually can make more money and drive higher value, both for the customer and for the business. And, you know, I relate this back to my first experience in business, and I remember, and I was in support, and we were on the 12th floor. We had a whole floor of people And I remember our boss came down one day and they said something really interesting. They said, "Every time you guys pick up the phone, we lose money." I mean, if you can believe that. Now it sounds crazy, but that's what happened. And I remember I felt kind of bad about that. I was like, "Wow, I don't want to answer the phone, but it's ringing all the time. So what am I going to do?" Well, the answer was we hired someone, not me, but the team hired someone to hide the phone number, which is sort of logical if you're told that when you pick up the phone, you're going to lose money. What do you want to do? Get less phone calls. Well, how are you going to do that? Well, if the company's customers can't find— guess what? Tons of customers did this. The other thing we did was we implemented an IVR. Let's try and give them self-service so they— but really the motivation was—

You were hiding the customer experience. We were running away from the customer experience.

Now the irony was, and this is in hindsight I see this, that right on the floor above me was— it wasn't the 13th, it was the 14th floor. It was a sales floor. And they were doing everything they could to proactively reach out and contact customers who didn't wanna really hear from the salespeople. So you had this situation where you had a floor of people, my floor, which were sort of running away from customers, and a floor of people that were trying to run towards customers, and like we're both missing them. It was insane. And what's now transpired in business is that people get this and go, wow, if I can deliver a great experience It actually increases loyalty. It increases the amount of services that my customer will get. They get more value. I get more value. We want to run towards customers. We want to reduce the distance between a business and their customer to zero. We want that to be like this kind of connection. We want our businesses, you know, their customers to love them. And the way that you get that love actually often comes through the contact center. So it's becoming much more strategic.

Connecting and engaging with customers.

It has to be powered by machine learning. Like, you can't do this, okay, just by going— I mean, you could do it by hiring lots and lots of humans, but it's really expensive, okay? It does not scale. So the only answer to this problem, which we know how to solve, is to leverage technology, and it starts in the cloud.

Great, great stuff. We'll see you at Enterprise Connect. TheCUBE will be there, and great Great to see you. Thanks for coming in.

Great to see you, John.

This is theCUBE Conversation, specialCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto. Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9, solving the contact problem, bringing it and modernizing it, running towards customers, customer engagement. I got a big panel coming up, Enterprise Connect. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.