Rowan Trollope, Five9 | Enterprise Connect 2019

Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by Five9.

Hello from Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with The Cube, Steve Miniman joining me. We are at Enterprise Connect 2019, day 3, graciously hosted by Five9. We've had great conversations with Five9 folks, customers, partners, and we're very pleased to welcome back to The Cube, but the first time live, the CEO of Five9, Rowan Trollope. Rowan, thank you so much for joining Stu and me today.

Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. Great to be here.

And for hosting us. I was telling you before we went live, we've had a great 3 days of talking to your customers, your partners. This contact center is hot.

It's electric. It's electric. I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to Contact Center Connect or Central or something. It's really all the innovation. I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that, wow, there's so much innovation happening in the contact center. And they're 100% right. Not just us, but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now.

The rise of the empowered consumer.

Yeah.

It's incredible how this consumer behavior—

That's the driver.

Absolutely. And every company has to react because we have, as consumers, so much choice.

Yeah. We call it the experience economy. It's like, you know, we're all— and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers. And when we deal with brands, we want to have a great experience all around. Like, not just when we're, you know, buying or when we're using or— but, you know, from the very first from the first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get. And we're really, really focused on that. So that's the driver. And, you know, enterprises have realized and businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer, that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do. So it's emerging as this, like, as this extraordinarily important part of every business.

Yeah, Rowan, one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learned this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them, 'cause it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer. And if I do need to call them, what that experience would be like.

That's right, we are, so we think a lot about customer love. What does it take to get a customer to love your business? And it doesn't only take having a great product, it takes having a great experience with your brand. And nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center. It's where all the action happens, right? It's right at that front line. It's from the moment you hear the ring when you call that company, or what the website looks like, and how you get answers to your questions, and how do they engage with you? How do they greet you? What is it like? Do you— does the person know who you are? Do they give you that delightful experience? And you know, the thing is, we all know what great looks like, and therefore we see when it's not great, and it just grates on us, you know, grate, grate. And Five9 is fundamentally solving that problem a problem for our businesses.

One of the things we heard too in terms of omnichannel and, you know, as these empowered consumers, we want a company to communicate with us, as you were saying before, and know us on whatever channel that we want. But one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that really companies of any industry are saying, I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone. So I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet. But then other things that were surprising too, Rowan, is voice is sexy, voice is back. It's we have to have the humans and the empathy. So there's some, some sort of old school things that are coming back and resurfacing as critical.

Yeah. Well, you know, on the omnichannel things, that's sort of a very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want, in the best way possible. And if we think about I keep this really simple for people. Think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting. Sometimes I would call you, sometimes I would text you, sometimes I might send you an email. They're all different. Not one or the other is better or worse, they're just different. If I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like, you know, I'm not going to call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone. I might send you a couple texts, but then I walk out, I jump in the car, what am I going to do? I'm going to call you on the phone. The call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want, whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed. So that's really the, that's where we're driving towards, and that's what our product offers. The fancy word for that is omnichannel. You know, you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as, you know, you would like. And we're able to deliver that out of the box, right? And we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and, you know, whoever the backend is that you're using. So we can, we partner with that and do that very effectively.

Yeah, Rowan, one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening. One of the panels though, I was actually a little surprised to hear, they're like, oh, how do we call kind of the hybrid environment? I have my on-premises, I have my cloud deployments, and hybrids in the middle. We're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry. And sometimes they're like, oh, well, there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of it's very large, And part of me looks at it, it's like, well, I look at the largest technology companies in the world, they're the cloud companies and they're scaling, you know, and they're enabling companies to scale even more. I know cloud's one of the main reasons, you know, for Five9's success.

Yeah.

And one of the reasons you came over.

We're a market leader in cloud, you know, that's how we started, we're born in the cloud, so we don't have any on-premises technology. You know, think about a call center today that has phones on the desk, and wires and this, you know, we're all about the agents log into our website at Five9.com, they get an incredible experience, and they plug in their headset to their computer. And so it's super lightweight. There's nothing to deploy. There's no closets of equipment anywhere. It's all very seamless and lightweight. And that's what customers really love about the solution. The idea, back to your point, that, you know, there's some things are too big for the cloud, that's total BS. I just have to say it. That's not true. You know, what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey. You know, we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud, right? And so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make. And you know, that frankly, if all you have is a legacy on-premises set of technology, then that's the story you're going to tell. And it's not a lie, it's true that for some companies, but what's true for most companies, almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer. And we're essentially— we're through the evangelism phase here. There's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses. It is. You know, we've got over 40 customers now paying us over $1 million a year. Then that's doubled in the last 2 years. So it's the fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running 100% on the cloud, and they are loving it.

And another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI. We've— that's been a theme. I know that AI came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning. But talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you a little story. I was a call center agent, my first job. We were talking about that earlier. And, you know, I took a lot of calls. 8,000 calls actually, in a call center that I took. After you take 8,000 calls, your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about. You've heard them all. You're never going to be surprised by an inbound sort of caller or message or whatever. You've seen it all. And frankly, by the time the customer says 2 or 3 words, you already know where they're going. But the big challenge in the context, so if you got me on the phones, I would know the answers to your questions. After you take 8,000 calls, you're fast. You're efficient. You can deliver that great experience. The big problem in the contact center, it's mostly a labor-driven operation. There's very high turnover. Contact center reps, once they've taken out these 8,000 calls, the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center. We think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem, to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents. Let them focus on the empathy. We say let the machine bring the mastery. And let the human bring the heart. Because it's really important that you have that human touch in that experience, right? That drives— that's what people crave in life. They don't— it's like, I don't want to talk to a bot, whether it's on text or on IVR. As far as I'm concerned, this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IVRs. Nobody likes talking to a computer. You want to talk to a human. So our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient, how we can arm them with real-time interactions. And that's all about leveraging data. Right? Because the data in this case is voice. So voice is the new data. It's the biggest source of dark data in the enterprise. Customer voice, actual voice like WAV files. What's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time, take that customer voice, convert it into text real time with high accuracy, better than humans can do. And we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next. Right, that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8,000 calls. How do you make every rep like that? We are sort of heading down a path to enable that. The very first step, though, is you have to get to the cloud. 'Cause this technology cannot be done on-premises. So, you know, you can dance around that all you want, but the reality is, you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach. You have to be in the cloud, and that's where we are, and that's where we started.

Well, that data-driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week at the show, and something we heard a lot from your team. Something that's happening just across industries. Love to hear a little bit about, you know, just future growth where, you know, Five9 had a very strong product, great customer experience to begin with, but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting to move down the AI path, data becomes more and more important part of the story. What should we be looking at for Five9 kind of the next, you know, 12 to 18 months?

Yeah, well, I think Five9's got the best experience for our customers. And, you know, where we're heading, the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center, to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before. So that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best in class experience, right? That predictive, you never wait, you get someone, whether it's text, whether it's email, whether it's chat, you get a great answer, you get a human touch. But you also get the answer you want. And whether that's inbound or outbound, if it's outbound, it's really important that it is not only predictive, but that it's anticipating what your needs are. 'Cause I like to say, if I have to call support, like, that's already a problem. Why am I calling you? You know, with IoT and with instrumentation going on, and with the ability to gather data, part of what you should be doing, every business should be doing, is anticipating what their customers are gonna need. And sharing that information across their company. And the contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say, look, we know this customer's already having a problem with this. Like, let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them. We should be calling them to figure out how we can make that experience better. So really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users' needs is sort of the other side of this. So it's both the inbound case I talked about, but also that outbound case and that proactive engagement that I think every, end user really would like in an effective way.

Five9 has about 5 billion recorded conversations, customer conversations a year.

5 billion minutes a year.

5 billion minutes, thank you, a year. Tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dark data and becoming predictive. Talk to us about that as a competitive advantage.

Yeah, the very first step is lighting that data up. We're lighting it up now with machine learning. We signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way, in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data. So very, very secure. Obviously, our name is Five9. We're known as the trusted brand in this industry. Five9s of reliability is what we're all about. So this is, for our customers, is when it comes to the next step, it's really, okay, take that voice data, which is not very useful. Like, you could have agents spot-check or supervisors listen in on calls, but that doesn't scale, as I pointed out earlier. The more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text. Let's then take that text and it becomes computable. You can summarize it. We can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it, to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls, you can— they can quickly scan down and see what's happened. Also, to be predictive. Yeah, we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time. We can actually go predict what they might you know, what the challenge might be, or— and you can do that across your whole dataset. So there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer, from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data. So we're turning voice into the next digital channel, and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business.

Yeah, Rowan, one of the interesting things is if you look around this show floor, You've got a lot of partnerships, but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments. We had Carfax on, good customer of yours, started out with the contact center agents, but they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound, not a traditional contact center. You're partnering with Marketing Cloud and Unified Communications, but some of those lines blur quite a bit.

So what is a call to a contact center that the lines on that are blurring? The traditional thing you would imagine, like what I was working in 20 years or 30 years ago was like, you know, rows of cubes, people on headsets. Like, that's mostly what people think about. But increasingly, some of our largest customers, it's nurse practitioners, it's doctors, it's other experts that are interacting with their customers. It's education consultants and specialists. These are all customers of ours that are using our platform today. You know, I think about 10 years ago, I'll give you an example of this transition. 10 years ago, I, um, my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy, as she likes to do, because it was messy. And I sort of successfully ignored this for about 2 years, and then eventually had to do something about it. She didn't give up. She's very persistent. And so I ran down to Home Depot, and I got some, like, rack things that I could bring home, and I organized all my junk. So fast forward to a year ago, and we've moved. We now live in San Francisco, and Steph's on me again about the same thing. Consistent. And I ignore her for a while, and I go, "Alright, alright, alright, I'll get it done." So what do I do? I think about, well, last time I did this, I got a rack. How am I gonna get a rack? I went on my phone, and I searched garage organizing systems, and I find a few companies, and I go onto their websites, and I do a little bit of self-service, like discovery and learning about their products. I'm an empowered consumer at this point, right? I find 3 different companies. I call one of them because, like, this is a big purchase. I don't want this huge thing to show up, steal, blah, blah, blah, at my house if it's the wrong thing. I get ahold of someone. I talk to them. I have a good experience. I hang up. I call one other one just to kind of compare it. I compared the 2. Then I ordered it, and it showed up at my doorstep. So 10 years ago, let me give you the punchline here. 10 years ago, one trip to brick and mortar Zero calls to the call center. 10 years later, now, zero trips to brick and mortar, two calls to a call center. And those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale. That's the experience economy in action. And that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future, and they'll look very different than how they look today.

That's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact center agent is. I wouldn't have thought of it. As you're right, these are nurse practitioners. It's so diverse. Speaking of diversity, I know that Five9 has several thousand customers globally. One of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estée Lauder, which I thought was so interesting because—

Woman-founded company.

Woman-founded company, not a tech company. Talk to us about how Five9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid.

Yes, we did George Clooney a solid. So In the case of Estée Lauder, they were a— they're a huge company, $11 billion in sales. They're an amalgamation of 40 different brands, very high-end skincare products. And so they had a big challenge, which was they bought 40 companies, they did not integrate any of them. So you call any one of these places, it was all different contact centers. They didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had. We had to sort of make that a part of the discovery process. And global. They're in all over the world. They're in Asia Pacific, they're in France and Europe, they're here. They had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases. They had independent technology contracts in almost every single one of those cases. And I don't even know how many systems that were coming together, but it was a lot. So we engaged with them and basically provided— we helped them write the RFP, we helped work through that process, we got them on board with our software. Nothing to deploy, nothing to install, right? Just have your agents log in. We did a training and we were able to onboard, you know, well over 1,000 agents onto the platform. and those were folks who were engaged across many, many different businesses. And some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like have fewer contracts or a better system, but it was also to tie that system back into the business. So, you know, they have some products that they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever, gift bags. And, you know, they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products. So they encourage them to call in, to order more or to find out more about their products and so on. They don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I, you know, would use. Maybe you would go to the VIPs, but I'll just call the regular contact center. They want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure they get the right specialist at the right time to that customer. And that, well, I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the onboardings, George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that. And so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time. And that's about knowing the skills, you know, being able to route things in a complex way, understanding, oh, this is a contact coming from an event. That event has some, you know, some VIPs at the event. We've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill. This is the right person for it to go to. They're really good at dealing with VIPs, and you can get it to the right person at the right time. So we saw it in action. It was obviously great, and what made us feel good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted.

Wow, all that context. Rowan, thank you so much for joining Stu and me this afternoon. Thank you, Lisa. And also for Five9 for graciously hosting TheCUBE the last 3 days. We've had a great time. Thanks for being here. Great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year.

Me too. Stay tuned.

Stay tuned. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching TheCUBE.