>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE, covering COMCAST Innovation Day, brought to you by COMCAST. >> Hey welcome back here ready Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at the COMCAST Silicon Valley Innovation Center. You know there's innovation centers all over Silicon Valley we hadn't been to the COMCAST one until we came to this event, it's very very cool, I think it's like five storeys in this building, where they're developing a lot of new technologies, partnering with technologies, but today the focus is on customer experience, brought together a panel of people to talk about some of the issues, and we're excited to have a representative from a company that's really out on the edge of defining customer experience, and measuring customer experience, joined by Ganesh Subramanian. He is the senior director of product marketing for Gainsight. Ganesh, great to see you. >> Great, happy to be here. >> Yeah, so I'm a huge Nick Mehta fan, I've interviewed him before I've been following Gainsight for a long time and you know, it really struck me the first time that, that Nick said you know CRM is you know, basically order management. It's not customer relationship management, you know customer relationships are complicated, and they're multi-faceted and there's lots of touch points and you guys really try to build a solution to help customers manage, actually do manage that relationship so they have a great experience with their customer. >> Yeah that's totally right, and not to say that CRM isn't an important ingredient when you make that cake, but there's a lot of other touchpoints right? How are people interacting with your digital products? What is that customer journey across sales, services, support? How does all of that come together? So what Gainsight does is really provide the customer cloud to bring all of those solutions together so that businesses can really operate in a more customer-centric way. >> So you, you said an interesting thing earlier in the conversation about customer success being measured just by revenue, again kind of the CRMy kind of approach to worth versus measuring success and measuring lifetime value and measuring so many other things that can define a great relationship. What are some of those things that people should be thinking about? What are some of those other metrics out there beyond you know, did I get a, you know, a net increase value of my contract? >> Yeah absolutely you know one way we think about it at Gainsight is the two-by-two of customer experience and customer outcomes. So, you can think about experience just as how happy are people on a day-to-day basis interacting with you, your products, your organization, your team? The flipside's also true though. You can have the happiest customer, that isn't getting what they want out of their product or service. In a B2B context we think about it as tangible ROI or outcomes. So at Gainsight we're ultimately trying to make sure our clients are delivering on both of those vectors. They want happy, successful clients, ultimately that's going to lead to the recurring revenue cycle: retention, growth, adoption and advocacy. >> So where does that kind of tie together? 'Cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that think those are in conflict right? That if I bend over backwards and I provide this great experience and these great services and all these things that this is going to negatively impact my profitability, it's going to negatively impact my transactional value. How should they be measuring those things? How should they be balancing, 'cause 'cause, you know, you can sell dollars for 90 cents, have a really happy customer, not going to be in business very long. >> Yeah I think that's kind of the secret sauce right? True innovation, what we talked about today at COMCAST, a lot about, how do you take that next step forward? How do you improve your products and services in ways that make customers, customers for life? Right, and if you make the right investments, you actually find out that maybe it's, it's minor change, maybe it's process change in your call center or call service, maybe it's implementing AI in an appropriate way, so that you're able to deliver more value with less time, or maybe it's transformative, maybe it's something that's a new service you're offering all together, that's making customers get outsized or unrealized returns on their investment. Well, it doesn't matter what that investment was, if it's going to long term drive your company to higher valuations and greater competitive differentiation. So we don't think about customer experience on kind of below the line, what's going to get me the incremental ROI, we really think about it as a fundamental differentiator for your business. >> Right. Now you're in charge of, of kickin' off new products. >> That's right. >> And you know one of the things I think is really interesting about the COMCAST voice, which has had a lot of conversation today, is I still get emails from COMCAST telling me how I should use it! Right 'cause it's a different behavior, it's a different experience that I'm not necessarily used to. As you look forward, you know introducing new products, what are some of the, the kind of trends that you're keepin an eye on, what do you think is going to kind of change and impact some of the things you guys are bringing to market? What are some of the new things we should be thinking about in customer experience? >> Yeah absolutely. So one thing at Gainsight, one thing we've learned leading the customer success movement is that to be customer-centric is more than a given function, or a given team, customer success managers kind of took the mantle in B2B and started leading the charge, leading the way towards being more customer-centric but that team on their own can't do everything. Nor do they want to, or can they, right? So, one big change and one big innovation that we're leading the front on is how do you bring all those different teams together? Which is why we launched the Gainsight customer cloud. So what we're doing is we're bringing disparate data together, that used to be silohed in functional specific software, bring that into a single source of truth, to truly provide an actionable customer 360, one that provides meaning to different teams with the right context, and then drive action off of that. So whether it's an automated email to get, improve product adoption in the COMCAST example, or maybe it's some kind of escalation effort, where you need a cross-functional team to get together on the same page, to improve a red customer, or maybe it's something that's in the product itself, by just making the product easier to use or a little bit more intuitive, the, all of your end users will end up benefiting from that. What Gainsight's tryna do is to try figure out, how can we break down these walls across these different teams, make it easier for people to collaborate to improve the customer experience. >> So Ganesh I got to tease you right, 'cause everyone's eyes just rolled out when you said 360 view of the customer right, we've been talking about this forever. >> Yeah. >> So what's different, you know, what's different today? Not specifically for what you're tryna do with your product and share that too, but more generally, that, that we're getting closer to that vision. >> Yeah. >> That we're actually getting closer to delivering on, on the promise of a 360 view, and information from that view that will enable us to take positive action? >> I love that question, and I think whenever you hear the word 360 view or digital transformation, you're going to get a couple eye-rolls in the crowd right? And, I actually totally believe that, that, you know, to date I think we've done things in too much of a waterfall methodology. Let's spend three years, get a unified idea across all our disparate data sources, and then we're going to be customer-centric. I think we've learned our lessons over the course of time that, hey you know, the end result doesn't really materialize in the time frame and ROI you expected, so why don't we start with the other end of the spectrum? What are the gaps that customers are perceiving? If it's just, let me, go back to that example of product ease of use. Are we identifying that as a major gap? Then how do we go solve that? How do we reverse engineer that process? And by the way that doesn't just fall on the product team to make the product easier, services need to onboard customers more effectively, you need documentation so that they can access and understand the key aspects of your product in a more concrete way. So all of that needs to come together. So I think the biggest difference between what we used to talk about, with 360s and digital transformation, to where we are today, is really the context and the outcome you're trying to deliver, and then reverse engineer the 360 that's most meaningful to you. So to make that a little bit more clear, what does that mean at the grassroots level? If you're a services team member you're working on projects. Does a 360 view about the next opportunity from a financial or commercial perspective really matter to you? How far down in that 360 view do you have to scroll before you start seeing information that's relevant? So at Gainsight what we're trying to do is use a many-to-many relationship mapping so that if you're a services team member, or a sales member, the view you're accessing is curated to what you need to actually do. >> Right. >> And that'll drive adoption of the digital transformation efforts within your organization. >> Right. Which then obviously opens up the opportunity for automation and AI and ML to, as you said, context is so important to make sure the right information is getting to the right person at the right time for the context of the job that I have and building that customer relationship. >> That's right. Yeah we think about AI all the time how's that going to improve the customer experience? It starts with that data foundation and understanding hey what should we own and what should we leverage? And being very conscious about what you're about to do, and then second, thinking about those point problems and, again, reverse engineering how can we staff augment, or make the experience better, maybe make the lives of our employees a little bit better, when they're engaging with customers. Ultimately it's got to be in service of people. >> Right. Well Ganesh thanks for sharing your story. Again I think what you guys are doing, and Nick and Gainsight is so important in terms of redefining this beyond order management, and to actually customer relationship management. >> So, >> That's right. >> Thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Awesome. >> My pleasure. >> All - >> All right. >> Thank you. >> He's Ganesh I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at the COMCAST Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

>> Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick, here with theCube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. It's a very cool space, I think it's grown up over a number of years as they've originated with some acquired companies, and now they got a huge setup here, and we had a big day today talking about customer experience, and really, if you look at the Comcast Voice Remote, and there's a lot of stuff going on that's maybe under the covers, you don't really give Comcast credit for, but they're actually doing a lot. And we're excited to, kind of dive into it a little bit deeper with our next guest, she's Annie Weskesser, she's a CMO of Uniphore. Annie, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here today. >> Absolutely. So what is Uniphore, for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> So Uniphore is a global leader in conversational service automation, and our vision is to bridge the gap between human and machine, through voice AI and automation. >> That's a mouth full. >> Yes. >> Conversational... >> Service. >> Service. >> Yes. >> So, people talk, and so you guys are heavily involved in voice. So what are the applications where people are using your voice? >> Yep, well primarily our focus is call centers. >> Okay. >> So large enterprises who have massive call centers, where we want to go in and help them with AI and automation, to help better listen to their customers, help better listen to the customers voice, and solve the problems in a faster manner. >> So I don't have to repeat my account number six different times to six different agents. >> Exactly, right. >> Or caught an in IVR cycle, or perhaps the chat that you were talking to doesn't-- The person on the phone, you have to repeat your story. This is something where the AI and automation will actually assist the agent to become a superhero. >> So, it's pretty interesting cause you know there's a lot of conversation about AI and ML, but really you know where it's going to have its impact is applied AI. >> Yes. And you said the company started out really more just on a pure voice, but now you're applying more and more kind of AI in the back end. So what kind of opportunities do you have now beyond just simply being able to do voice conversion?. >> To the first part of your question, the company started at IIT Madras back in 2008. And originally the focus of the company was really centered on voice, voice being the lowest common denominator and in Indie where the languages are 260 you know, potential languages to understand and maybe 25 at the top. We set out really to focus on voice and then realize that customer service was a large market and somewhere we can have a big impact. >> Right, right. So you reckon as you said a 100 different languages. >> A 100 different languages through our platform which is pretty incredible when you think about it. All of the different people calling in to customer service potentially or maybe through a chatbot or a voicebot to get their issues solved. >> And then you integrate in whatever the core system is that the customer services agent are using. >> Yes. >> So what are the types of tips and tricks that the call agent gets by using your guys service? >> So think about it as a platform where the customer can help they agents be more affective agents. So one of the things that call centers struggle with is something called after call work, where agents may spend two to three minutes after a call, summarizing the call. One of the things that our technology does and this is primarily for one of our customers who's a health care client. They said "Wouldn't it be great if we can automate that completely". So we've taken the after call work for one customer client, taken that two to three minutes down to 10 seconds, where that work that the agent would have done is completely summarized and the agent validates it, can correct it if needed and its completely done. So that not only saves the agent time to either pick up more calls and help other customers or it can get them of the phone in a quicker manner to save the call center more money. >> So that's doing more than just simply providing a transcript of the call which is something a different track than actually listening into to provide suggestions is actually taking it to the next level in terms of what categorizing, what type of call, the outcome etc. >> it's actually quite interesting because often times less than 1% of calls are listened to somewhere between 1 and 10% of calls are listened to in calls centers. So we can listen to a 100% of those calls in addition we offer something called that's more along the line of like a live agent coach to where the agent can concentrate on the conversation with the customer which is the primary thing listening to the customer. And our technology will serve you up coaching mechanism in terms of getting to faster resolution for the customer and getting them better insights to be almost a superhero of a agent. >> Right, and I would imagine the accuracy in terms of recording what happened in the call to go back and do the analytics and have a text base search you can do all types of analysis on those calls which was data that was probably just lost before right into (mumbles) >> You're exactly right. I think the accuracy is clearly a lot lower than if you were to have the AI and automation and Machine learning technology there. >> So the other conversation in the sit down that we had earlier today was really about driving a customer centric culture in your own company, not only just enabling it but really building it inside. I wonder if you could share some of the things that you guys have done to help make sure that everybody stays focused on the objective, which is the customer. >> Yip, I think it really starts at the top it starts with the leader of the organization. So we have a CEO whose extremely focused on customer centricity and in fact its our number one core value within the organization. So you see everyone from the CEO down to the rest of the organization completely focused on the customer and their needs. >> What about when the customer doesn't know what they need? What about you know, you bringing a new technology and your inviting a slightly different process or a slightly different change and your saying "Hey, this is actually a better way to keep text and transactions and we actually have a really coach that can help", you know, kind of guy to people. How do you help move customers to a place they don't necessarily know they want to go? >> Yeah, I mean you find that a lot, right. Its not necessarily the technology that we're providing for today but its having the innovation and having the foresight to create a platform that will be future proof. So that's critical, you know, I think that there are a lot of customers who might not know what they need today but that's our job to help them innovate and push the envelope on all things AI and automation. >> Right, I'm just curious to in terms of the impact of your technology on kind of the tracking software for those call center agents, right. So this is a group of people that have to process a lot of calls, you know everything is track to the minute and you know its funny I had a demo with Westworld and you know when Westworld's funny cause we started treating machines like machines and they wanted to be treated like people sometimes I wonder on some of these technologies You know is it enabling them to have more time to be more thoughtful, is it enabling them to have more time to get the better outcomes or is it sometimes perceived as 'oh my gosh you just trying to jam' you know, 'four more calls on in my hour by taking care of my two more minutes that I used to spend wrapping up the call". Do you think about those things and the end customer? >> The time is really the premium, right. So the number one focus is giving people time back and whether that's the customer who's calling in and you want to solve an issue and get them faster resolution or whether that's the agent that wants to free up more time in having the conversation with the customer, solving their problem and then getting of the phone I think that's the most effective way of doing it. >> Final question in terms of voice and the evolution of voice. `Cause I don't think people are really completely tuned in certainly not people old like we are. What are some of the conversations when people finally get, you know, kind of the enabler that voice communications opens up that's not necessarily available with texts or not necessarily available with other types of channels? >> Yeah, I mean I see it most easily in my children they expect everything to be voice enabled and so everything from the Comcast remote that they pick up in our living room everywhere they go when they see a remote they expect everything to be voice enabled. So that's really the future and I think a lot of customer service will be listening to your customers voice however, they want to communicate with you, whatever channel they want to communicate on. >> Great, really cool story Annie and thanks for taking the few minutes and sharing it with us. >> Yeah, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, she's Annie, I'm Jeff your watching theCube with the Comcast CX Experience Innovation day here at the Sillicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching see you next time.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering Comcast Innovation Day. (smooth music) Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. Very cool facility right off the runway from Moffett. They got a ton of cool toys downstairs which I get to go play with, which I'm looking forward to, but today the conversation was all about CX, customer experience, and you know, Comcast is there. A lot of people like to watch their TVs, interacting with their cable systems for a long, long time, but there's a whole range of new and innovative things that are coming out from Comcast, and we're excited to have an engineer who's kind of down in the bowels here in the engine room building all this stuff. So like to welcome Mike Fine. He's a cable software architect for Comcast. Mike, great to see you. >> Likewise. >> So you had a really cool demo earlier, which is not a demo, right? I think this thing is-- >> Production. >> Now in production, it's called the X1 Eye Control. I think most people know what X1 is. What's X1 Eye Control? >> Yeah. X1 Eye Control is a web application that integrates with off-the-shelf accessibility hardware, so that could be a Tobii eye gaze rig, it could be something called a sip-and-puff, which let's users use their inhalation and exhalation to control the application, or any other off-the-shelf accessibility hardware that can mimic a mouse to a piece of software. >> Too, it's-- >> Yeah. The goal of the project was pretty simple. It was to let people with ALS and other conditions control their TVs independently. >> That's amazing, and you showed a great video. The gentleman on the video is using I think an eye gaze method, but you said you've got integrations to a number of different, you know, kind of ADA-approved interface devices. >> That's right, the journey that this project has taken has been interesting. We started with just the ALS use case, which was the eye gaze, but it turned out that one of our early users had control over his voice, which is somewhat unusual for ALS patients, and so he asked whether he could control it with his voice, so we did that work through he had Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was nice, so we did that work, and then of course given that we have the voice remote we decided could we make voice work for everybody, which we did, so now the application is on par with a physical remote, and then we even went further and let people type in voice commands, so in case somebody who's perhaps mute or had a speech impediment, or some sort of speech pathology issue that prevented them from using a voice, they could do that as well. >> It's really interesting, I mean you guys have so many kind of interface points to an ecosystem broader than simply what's available at Comcast, whether it's on the front end, as you said, with some of these interfaces with ADA devices, or on the backend if I want to watch my Netflix or I want to watch YouTube, or I want to watch, you know, a different service. You guys have really taken, you know, kind of an open, integrated approach to all these, one might argue, competitive threats to really bring it in as the customer wants to experience. Why did you do that, what's kind of the philosophy driving that? >> Yeah, well, the first thought that comes to mind is that none of it's possible without the right cloud APIs, so somebody very visionary years ago made the decision that everything you can do on your TV or on the mobile app you can do through the cloud, and so a project like this couldn't happen unless it was possible for a piece of software that somebody invented well after the fact to cause a TV to change channels unless there was that underpinning, so like any other piece of software it's a bit of an iceberg. There's a lot of stuff underneath that you don't realize as a user-- >> Right. >> But it's there and that's what makes it possible. >> Right, I'm just curious about some of the challenges in terms of moving UI and UX forward into places that people are not familiar with. And I've joked about it on a number of these interviews that, you know, I still get an email, not only from Comcast, but from Google and from Alexa, suggesting to me ways in which I might use voice. You know, as you sit back from a technologist what are some of the challenges you guys, you know, kind of anticipate, what are some of the ones you didn't anticipate, and how do you help us old people, you know, find new ways to interact with the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean there's a lot of us here that spend our days solving that exact problem, right? Part of it is is notifying you of interesting things through SMS or through mobile push, or the messages on the TV, so your team is playing in a game that you want to see, a movie that you've declared interest in has become cheaper, become free, or maybe even buyable if you wanted to do that. Obviously there's lots of AI and ML in terms of putting recommendations in front of you based on your viewing habits, based on broader trends across, you know, because you watch this, other people watch this, so we know this is probably a good solution for you as well, but yeah, we're all, there's a large number of us trying to optimize what we call "time to joy," from the time you pick up your remote to think about what you want to watch to the time you're actually watching something you want to watch; make that as seamless as possible. >> Preston said you guys get like a billion voice commands, what was the period of time? >> A month. >> A month. >> A month, yeah. (chuckles) >> So obviously a big, giant new dataset for you guys now to have at your disposal. >> What are some of the things that you're learning from that inbound, what can you do with it, how do you, you know, now use this direct touch with the customer to, again, kind of recycle and have another iteration on improved experience? >> Right, so voice is a lot like a text chat, like a bot interface in that it's an experience where users are telling you exactly what they want to do, so if a user sits in front of a traditional web application or mobile application and has trouble finding what they want to do, they can't figure out what button to press, what screen to go to, you have no idea, right? You can't infer that they're having a problem, but with voice or somebody interacting with a bot, they type exactly what they mean, or they say exactly what they mean, so we can mine those voice commands and find the popular ones that we don't at that point have implemented, and if we can iterate on that cycle fast enough we can quickly introduce new voice commands that our users are literally asking for as quickly as possible. >> Right. What about the stuff that customers are not asking for, because right? There's one line of thought, which is the customer knows best, but the customer doesn't know-- >> That's right. >> What they don't know. So how do you guys continue to look for more kind of cutting edge stuff that isn't necessarily coming back through a feedback loop? >> Right, yeah, so it's an interesting question. So we're trying to add other non-TV use cases into the mix, right, so controlling your IoT devices at home, controlling your security, seeing your cameras through the Set-Top Box, and so on. So you know, until those use cases exist nobody's asking for them, and so you do have to be a bit visionary in terms of what you want to put out there as voice commands. You know, luckily we have people who, well, we're all customers of the platform generally, so we know what it means to be a user, but you know, we have people that talk with users and have a general sense of what they want to do, and then we figure out what the right commands are. >> Right, not voice specifically, but let's unpack a little bit deeper into the impact of IoT. You know, Nest probably was the first kind of broadly accepted kind of IoT device in the home, and now you got Ring, which everybody loves to take pictures of people stealing their boxes from the front porch, but that puts you guys with the internet connectivity in a very different place than simply providing a football game or the entertainment. So as you think of your role changing in the house, specifically with now these connected devices, how do you think about new opportunities, new challenges that being the person in the middle of that is different than just sending a TV signal? >> Yeah, there's a lot of talk about trying to be the home OS. Certainly we are in a unique position being in the home, both in terms of the router and the internet, but also, you know, often frankly you know when your system's setup a human being came in and helps you understand how to best position the physical devices in your house, and so on, that other companies don't have, right? Those vendors just don't have that builtin advantage. Clearly security has become a big thing for us. Home automation, I sit very close to that group. They're doing amazing things with automating rules like, you know, "Tell me when my door's been open too long," and these sort of things, and so more and more the use cases start to converge, that, for example, when you say, "Good morning," we have this idea of scenes, all right. So when your morning starts you not only want to tune the TV, but you also want to crank up the lights and unlock the door and open the windows, or whatever, and when you go to bed, so the actions that are involved in those use cases span not just TV and not just internet, but all of it. >> Right, it's just funny because I don't think Comcast would be the first name that people would say when they're talking about voice technology and the transformational impact of voice technology, right? They're probably going to say Siri was the first and Alexa's probably the most popular, and you know-- >> Right. >> Google's got Lord knows how many inputs they have, but you guys are really sitting at a central place, and I might argue it's one of the more used voice applications-- >> Absolutely. >> Out there, so from kind of a technology leadership perspective you guys have a bunch of really unique assets in terms of where you are, what you control, what you're sitting on in terms of that internet. You know, how does that really help you and the team think about Comcast as an innovation company, Comcast as a cool tech company, not necessarily Comcast as what used to be just a cable company? >> Right, right. Well you know, as somebody in the valley with friends in the valley it's always interesting to try to differentiate reality from the view that many people have. You know, this is definitely much more than your dad's cable company. It's a consumer and electronic company as much as anything else. We very much position ourselves with all the, you know, with the FAANG companies, et cetera, so you know, when we talked about CX it's no longer the case that whatever's passable for a stodgy cable company passes as CX anymore. Now you're being compared to a set of customers, companies that are providing fantastic user experiences for their customers, and you're being held to that standard, so you know, there's a lot of pressure on us, which is great; we like that. We want to produce fantastic products, and yeah, I don't know if I have a great answer in terms of how to move forward in terms of melding it all together, but we have a lot of smart people in the hallways making that happen. (chuckles) >> So last question is really the impact of AI, because you know, we cover a lot of tech events and a lot of talk about AI, but you know, I think those of us around know that really where AI shines is applied AI in specific applications for specific U cases. So how are you guys, you know, kind of implementing AI, where are some of the opportunities that you see that you can do in the future that you couldn't do the past, whether it be just with much better datasets, whether it be with much faster connectivity and much better compute so that you can ultimately deliver a better customer experience using some of these really modern tools? >> Right, so some of the work is just making what you already do or experience better, so for example showing you recommendations, right? Just make that algorithm better, and so there's a great deal of effort, as you might expect, at a company like this on that problem, but there's also work being done to just take any interactivity between you and the system out of the picture completely. We talked a little bit about this earlier, that, for example, we're working on technology that when you turn your TV on in the morning it should probably tune to the channel that you normally tune to in the morning. That's a pretty simple problem, in a sense, but you know, if I watch your viewing patterns and I see that you turn on a particular news show in the morning, why should you have to pick up the remote and change it from what you watched the night before to that channel? It should just happen. We talked about the Smart Resume stuff, that's obviously a fantastic use case for end users, so there's, you know, it's not surprising it's being used all over the technology set. It's in the home automation world. You know, it's in A/B testing, so trying to figure out the right cohorts to try different things in front of, so it's everywhere as you would expect. >> Right, right, it's pretty amazing. I mean there's just so many things going on, you know, kind of under the covers, some that we can see, some that we can't see where you guys are really kind of progressing, you know kind of the leading edge, cutting edge customer experience with something that people interact with every single day. >> That's right. >> Yeah, cool stuff. Well Mike, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the Eye Control; really a cool story, and look forward to more publicity around that because that's a really important piece of technology. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. >> All right. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation Date to you by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back it ready? Geoffrey here with the Cube were in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runways here. Moffett feels really cool place, a lot of fun toys and gadgets that I have not got to play with yet, but I got to do before I leave. But the conversation today is really about customer experience. We had a small panel this morning of experts talking about customer experience. What does that mean? How do we do a better job at it? And we're excited. Have an expert brought in just for this conversation. She's a net Franz, the founder and CEO of C X Journey, and it's great to see you. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Absolutely been a fun morning. >>What did you think? >>What were some of your impressions of the conversation this morning? You know >>what? It's always great to sit in a room with so many people who have been living and breathing this customer experience journey. And so it was great to hear what Comcast is doing. It was great to hear from some of the other folks in the room. What are some of the latest trends in terms of data and technology and where customer experiences headed? Yeah, it was awesome. >>So customer experiences, it's >>a little bit over. It's almost kind of digital transformation a little bit. Everyone's like experience, experience, experience. And that's a big, complicated topic. How do you help customers really kind of break it down, make it into something manageable, make it into something they can actually approach and have some success with >>us? So I spent a lot of my time working with clients who are brand new to this field, right? I had a former boss who said that they can't even spell C X. Right. So yes, so So yes. So I go in there and I really listen and understand what their pain points are and what they need help with and then get them started on that journey. Basically, soup did not see X strategy work. We typically start out making sure that the right foundation is in place in terms of the executives that they're all a line that they're all committed to this work. The culture. We've got the right culture in place. We've got, you know, some feedback from employees and from customers of what's going well and what's not. And then from there we dive right into a phase that I call understanding. And that's listening to customers listening to employees developing personas so that we can really understand who customers are and who are employees really are, and then also journey mapping to really walk in their shoes to understand the experience that they're having today and then design. Use that to design a better experience for tomorrow. So there's a lot of work that happens up front to make you know the things that we talked about in there this morning. >>Right? Happen. What's the biggest gap? Because everyone >>always talks about being customer centric. And I'm sure if you talk to any sea, of course, were customer centric and you know, we see it would like would like Amazon Andy Jassy and that team is just crazy hyper customer centric and they executed with specific behavior. So what's the part that's usually missing that they think their customer centric, but they're really not? >>Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head with the word execute, right? So there's a stat out there that's been out there for forever, and we know it. Every single company, every single business interviews or surveys us to death, right? So they have all this great feedback, but they do nothing with it. They just don't execute. They just don't act on it. And they've got such rich feedback and and and customers want to tell them, Hey, you're doing this well behaved. This is not going so well. So please fix it because we want to continue doing business with you. And so, yeah, it's about execution. I think that's one problem. The other problem is that they focus on the metrics and not on actually doing something with the feedback >>temporary experience. Do they just ignore it? Do they not have the systems to capture it? Are they are they kind of analysis? Paralysis? He just said they have all this great data, and I'm not doing anything about it. Why >>there it is that, too Analysis, paralysis. Let's just beat the numbers to death and and what's the What's the quote about beating the number until the beating the data until the talks >>kind of thing. You know, I don't know that something. I know I'm just mess that, >>but But yeah, they don't have the system in place to actually. Then take what they learn and go do something with it. And I think a big part of it. We talked about this in the room this morning, too. Was around having that commitment from the top, having the CEO say, Listen, we're doing this and we're going to when we listen to, our customers were going toe act on what we hear, So But they don't They don't have the infrastructure in place to actually go and then do it >>right. It's pretty interesting. You have, Ah, a deck that you shared in advance Eight Principles of customer centric city. Yes. And of the aid three are people people before products people before profits people before metrics. That sounds great, but it sounds contrary to everything we hear these days about measure, measure, measure, measure, measure. Right? It's human resource is it almost feels like we're kind of back to these kind of time. Motion studies in tryingto optimize people as if they're a machine as opposed to being a person. >>Yeah, well, it's It's not, because we have to. The way that we could think about is we have to put the human into this. That's what customer experience is all about, right? It's about putting the human in the experience. And it's interesting that you bring up that back because when I opened that talk, I'm show a comm your commercial from Acura, and it's if you've never seen it. It's called the test. If you can google it and find the video and it's really about. If we don't view them as dummies, something amazing happens. That's the tagline, right? And so it's really about people. The experience is all about people. Our business is all about people. That's why we're in business, right? It's all about the customer. It's for the customer. And who's gonna deliver that? Our employees? And so we've got to put the people first, and then the numbers will come >>right. Another one that you had in there, I just have to touch on was forget the golden rule, which which I always thought the golden rules of us. You know, he has the gold makes a >>rule. You're talking about a different golden, which is really treat. Treat others >>not the way you think they want, that you want to be treated but treat people the way that they want to be treated in such a small It's the pylons, but it's so important. >>It's so important. And I love this example that I share. Thio just recently read a book by Hal Rosenbluth called The Customer Comes Second, right, and to most people, that seems counterintuitive, but he's really referring to The employee comes more first, which I love, and I'm the example that he gives us. He's left handed and he goes into a restaurant. He frequents this restaurant all the time, and until I read this story, I never even thought about this. And now that I go to restaurants, I think about this all the time. The silverware is always on the right hand side, but he's left handed, so this restaurant that he frequents the waitress. He always seemed to have the same waitress she caught on, and so when when he would come into the restaurant, she would set the silvery down on the left hand side. for him that's treating people the way that they want to be treated. And that's what customer experience is all about, >>right? One of the topics that he talked about in the session this morning was, um, the reputation that service experiences really defined by the sum of all your interactions. And it's really important to kind of keep a ah view of that that it's not just an interaction with many, many interactions over a period of time that sounds so hard to manage. And then there's also this kind of the last experience, which is probably overweighted based on the whole. >>How do people >>keep that in mind? How did they How did they, you know, make sure that they're thinking that kind of holistically about the customer engagement across a number of fronts within the company. >>Well, you've got to think >>about it as think about it as a journey, not just touch points, not just a bunch of little touch points, because if you think about just the last experience or just a touch point, then you're thinking about transactions. You're not thinking about a relationship, and what we're trying to get at is customer relationships and not just transactional, you know, it's it's they're in, they're out, they're gone, right? So what? We want relationships. We want them to be customers for life. And and that's the only way that we're gonna do it is if we focus on the journey, >>right? What about the challenge of that which was special suddenly becomes the norm. And we talked a lot about, you know, kind of consumers ations of i t. Because as soon as I get great results on a Google search or, you know, I find exactly what I need on Amazon in two clicks and then to take that into whatever my be to be your B to C application as when Now those expectations are not being driven by what I promised to deliver. But they're being driven by all these third party app said. I have a no control up and they're probably developing at a faster pace of innovation that I can keep up housing people, you know, kind of absorb that deal with it and try to take some lessons from that in the delivery of their own application >>essay. You you brought up two things there which I want to address the 1st 1 to which was about the delighting customers. But to answer your question is really about focusing on your customers and your customers needs on. And that's why I talk a lot about customer understanding, right? It's it's about listening to your customers. It's about developing personas and really understanding who they are, what their pain points are, what their problems are, what needs. Are they trying to solve our problems? Are they trying to solve on and then walking in their shoes through journey, mapping? And that understanding allows us to design an experience for our customers, right for our customers. If we don't solve a problem up for our customers, they will go elsewhere and they'll get their problems solved elsewhere, right? So I think that's really important. The first part of your question was, our point was around delighting our customers, and you're absolutely right. We don't have to delight customers at every touch point. I know that's counter to what a lot of people might say or think, but to your point, once we delighted every touch point, now it becomes the new norm. It's an expectation that has now been set and now delight, Where does it stop? You know, Delight is here, and then it's here. And then it's here. And so So it's It's a whole different. So my thinking on that is that most businesses cannot delight at every touch point, and they certainly don't. Um, I think we need to meet expectations and the and the only way that we can do that is to listen and understand and and and then act on what we hear. And, um, most businesses are still very primitive, even when it comes to that, >>right? Okay. Give you the last word. What's what's the kind of the most consistent, easy to fix stumble that most customers are doing when you when you get engaged and you walk in, what's that one thing that you know with 90% confidence factor that when you walk in, this is gonna be, you know, one of these three or four little things that they should stop doing or that they should do just just just get off the baseline? >>Yeah, I think it's You know what I think it >>za combination of sort of speed and responsiveness. I'll give an example. I won't mean the company, but But I thought, man, in this day and age, this shouldn't be happening, right? It was a company that I contacted. I was supposed to set up an account and they said I couldn't for it just wasn't working. I tried different browsers, just wasn't working. So I sent them and eat. First. I tried to call, but I got stuck in Ivy are hell. And then I sent an email and my the email that I got back was an auto responder. That's I will reply within five business days. >>Five business days, Thio like, really, where? Why don't you just ask me to send a fax, right? You know, So So that's the kind >>of stuff that seriously I I want to solve that e mails like really in 2019. We're still responding in five business days. That's just that's just ludicrous. I think that's one of the and it's such it doesn't cost anything to respond in a timely manner and to respond at all right now. Here it is. It's been I haven't heard from them yet, so it's been like seven days now, so >>there's that just tweet tweet at the CEO going to, hopefully the >>CEO tweets and maybe doesn't tweet. >>I know, right? Yeah, well, in >>that you know nothing about opportunity for you because this is not an easy it's not an easy thing to do is it's hard to stay up with people's expectations and to drive new and innovative products when they don't necessarily even know how to engage with those things. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, The field is wide open because, like I said, there's still so many companies that are still just trying to get the basics right. So >>Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Thanks for participating. Absolutely, She's in that. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time.

(futuristic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runway here at Moffett Field. Really interesting place, a lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience, and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Kristy Schaffler, the director of customer experience for Comcast California regions. Kristy, great to see you. >> Thank you! Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees, and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Where does that mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? >> So, you know, honestly, it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduced the best practices for a net promoter system overall, it was an easy grasp, I think, for employees to start looking at how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. >> Right, well its funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, and not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem, and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, and in fact, a lot of times, the bad news doesn't get up. >> Exactly. >> So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily even addressable. >> Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations, and so what they do is they input an issue where they're struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input, then that actually goes up into the region, we take a look at it and say "We can't really do anything with it here, but we can bump it up to the next level." That eventually gets to a point, especially in the case of employee tools, for example, where is has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So, when you tell them, "Hey, there's something broken here", they have to come back and respond within two weeks. They have to be able to get back with that employee to say "Here is what we're going to do about that" or maybe put on a map to say that we're going to eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually inputted. So, its a direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. >> So it goes directly-- is it a special type of ticket, if you will? >> Exactly. >> That I want a post knowing that this is a-- I've decided its a high enough priority that I'm going to take the risk, and take the personal risk or professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command? >> Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said "Give be your number one barrier that's holding you back?" . So they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue. Then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it, it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue, and its like Hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue, want it resolved, and so as soon as they put that in, they assign it to the area that responsible, and that is a direction communication, because as soon as they comment, anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So, its a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. >> So, is there any fanfare when there some big one that gets voted by the broader group that "Oh my gosh, this was a really big deal."? >> So recently, we had something that came up with our Xfinity Home, and so, as you probably know, we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app. And one of our technicians said "Hey guys, I'm hearing this from the customer.". So what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion, and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person, they actually did a software update on it, And then our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience out of our corporate headquarters said "Hey guys, congratulations, that's fantastic! This got fixed!". Then that communication went directly back to the person who input it, so it's just a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer, comes up through the employee. The employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally, but they know to get it to the right people. >> Right. So you've talked a lot earlier today about employee tools, and so, you know, as you clearly there's something that you think is a great investment, how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? >> Exactly. We actually had an elevation that was associated with that, where the employee was using a tool in the home, and when he was trying to check the health of the system, they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off. And so, again, they took it back to the owner of that tool, and they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool, so that meant that the customer was able to get better service, because of their tools aren't working, that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers. >> Right. >> And so, it's key that we take care of them. >> So, just curious, to kind of wrap it up, what has the focus on the NPS, both the score as well as the process, you know, kind of, what's happened from then? Not only the, you know, the direct result in terms of changing in the score and execution details, but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus? >> Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year, so that's very exciting, and we're celebrating that, and we're not there yet, so we still have a ways to go. But the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered. They're feeling like that they can bring back issues, but something that they share with everybody, they feel like they have a sense of "I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed". So, we have an employee survey. It's actually called the ENPS, so actually, we send that out every other month, and ask for employees, you know, "How do you feel about the workplace?", "Are you motivated?". We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say "Let us know where you need help", and we're coming back in and helping. So, I'm excited about it. >> Great, alright Kristy, well we need to have another followup conversation about NPS another time-- >> Definitely! >> --I need to get educated, but thanks for spending a few minutes, and inviting us to attend today's event. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Alright, she's Kristy, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back, get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today, it was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience base. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests, and really excited about our next guest, 'cause he's an anthropologist, he's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist, Brian, you've got it all going on, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Course, this is a really great conversation, so, I'm happy to be here. >> So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience, the expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about, where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work, change, all the time, and what was magical and almost impossible, like talking on a cell phone in your car, suddenly becomes expected and the norm, so how do you think of this, as you look at these big, sweeping changes that we're going through? >> Well today's conversation I think has been sort of, a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences, and that way you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you, and what was so important is that we're here at a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be, from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint, right? >> I want to jump into the voice capability specifically, because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote, I think if you don't have it you don't know it's there, and the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services, to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way, so changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. >> So, it's come up, and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface, and in many ways, voice was the next frontier, that's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and Ok Google, we're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural, what makes it so complex is all of the back end, I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies, and then the back end to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff, that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy, much faster. That's game changing, right, but that isn't just something that Comcast looked, for example, to just Alexa, or anything specifically, it looked, and also, especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best-in-class experiences in every area, to pick those parts and build something altogether new that becomes the new standard, and I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about, Jeff, earlier, was kids, there was a time when they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this, but I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control, and I had to record video from afar of just watching her talk into her toy remote, "Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club," and just sitting there, with all the patience in the world, nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen. And it's just a new standard. The other thing, though, is that we're not done, we now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation, so personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. >> Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have qwerty keyboards, right, which were specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using arm typewriters anymore, and we still have qwerty keyboards, so changing people's behavior is not easy, and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using, kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email, maybe, or even, they talked about here at Comcast, where instead of just saying NCAA Football, it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests, maybe you should just say Stanford football, so there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. >> Yes and no, if you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation, iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value, and if you look at the evolution of the remote control, I mean just go back 50 years, it has gotten progressively worse over time, in fact on average, today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, and if you think about iteration in that regard, we've completely started to fail in the user interface, I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks, so I think if anything, voice is going to change the game for the better. >> Yeah, I was in the business for a long time, and now I know what killed the VCR, right, was the flashing 12, nobody could ever get their flashing 12, and for all the young people, look it up on the internet, you'll figure out what a VCR and a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called Generation C, what is Generation C, why should we be paying attention? >> Look, I think voice is a good example of Generation C, so anybody who uses, you mentioned qwerty, right, I don't know that I've actually even used qwerty in a sentence in a really long time, but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day, so it doesn't mean that I don't get it, it means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed, because of my relationship, my personal relationship, so for example, in consumerization of technology and IT, my personal relationship has changed with technology, and so what I had found in my research over the years was especially when it comes to customer experience, if you study a customer journey, and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created, you can see specifically that people who live a mobile-first lifestyle, regardless of age, will make decisions the same way, they're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered, I call 'em accidental narcissists, they, time, convenience are really important, they want personalization, their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past, and so I gave it a name, which is Generation C, because it wasn't one, where C stood for connected, it wasn't one bound by age, or traditional demographics, education, income, it was defined by shared interests, behaviors, and shared outcomes, and it was a game changer for all things, if you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is, and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment, then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer, right? >> But it's so bizarre, again, how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline, and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google, which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data, and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software, suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, pick some random retailer or some other random website, when in fact, that is special, but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies stay out in front of that, at least chase close behind, 'cause it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. >> I'm sorry, I totally spaced out 'cause my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. >> Well I didn't even get to the attention economy question yet. >> It's, you're competing at a much different level today, and I think that's what so disruptive for companies, is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success, I have to say that success is the worse teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get, is that the customers change, I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right, because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you, and to give it to you and take you where you need to go, where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open Lyft in certain markets, and the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds, because it knows it adds a competitive advantage over everybody else, because it's important, because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that "Well, I understand that this isn't Uber, "and therefore I shouldn't expect "to have things done at a much more efficient "and personal manner." You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do, so while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity, but you got to break that executive mindset to say, "How can we take "best-in-class experiences across the board, "and how can we apply it to what we do?" >> Yeah, again, an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today, where there was a question about ROI, and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience, so how should people start to adjust their thinking, because the thing on, return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact, kind of one to one benefit, where really, return on experience implies a much broader, kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring, it's a very, a much better way to measure your investment. >> Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation, it's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be, a lot of this is, you don't know what you don't know, and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say, what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance, what's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something, and so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was, let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do, the word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment, and so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience, and all of those things are emotional, so if you can design for emotional outcomes, where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way, but you have to first do it with intention. >> Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for joining today, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation date. You want to You by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back already. Jeffrey here with the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's right in Sunnyvale, not too far from Moffitt. And they had a special day today, really all about customer experience and invited. Ah, lot of industry people around to dig into the issues and find out What is it that's all about customer experience. We're excited to have our next guest. He's ripped Gerber, the chief marketing and innovation officer from Velocity Rip. Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me here. >>Absolutely. Shade. It's over. People aren't familiar with velocity. Give us the give us the overview. >>A terrific velocity builds mobile and cloud applications 100% on Salesforce. To extend the customer experience into deep into industries such as communications, media, health insurance, government, energy and utilities, we extend the power of the cloud that power of sales force to help these companies compete to transform on to win and improve their customer experiences. >>So what's the tie with Comcast >>tied with Comcast? Well, Comcast is certainly a very innovative media company and of itself in a big sales force customer and some things that they're doing and that we learned about today and some of the technologies that we saw very exciting in terms of how they're integrating you knew content displays and products new ai ai technologies wth the assisted your voice activation modules that we saw others very exciting. So you're a Comcast, like many of us here in Silicon Valley, Certainly are on ah, on some amazing journeys with taking these enabling technologies in making our lives as consumers and customers. And business is so much better, >>right? So you talked about, you know, digital transformation. And he called them the Big Four for your customers, you know, Social Cloud, Mobile and Analytics. How are you seeing those things, Matt? Back? The digital transformation. It's such a big, chewy term. How do you help people kind of zero in on specific, actionable things and initiatives that they can start to see success? >>Right, Right. So we're about a decade in in terms of those transformation technologies that I listed earlier today in our panel, Social Cloud Mobile and Analytics, and we were about 10 years into these, and so many might say we're in a post digital world now and entering what we call a customer engagement world. I mean, so you take these technologies which are amazing in of themselves. You combine them together. Ah, and then you start creating the kinds of experiences that new companies that are cropping up disrupting industries and existing organizations are taking to do things better, faster, less expensive. So one of things that we talked about today is there's a lot of legacy technology. A stack. Let's take C R M, for example, where you have very old technologies that are there that are keeping companies back that are holding back those experiences because of the way that the on premise software has been customized. And it's kind of sticking their and new companies like Salesforce, which is, in fact, a new company. If you think in Silicon Valley, timelines have come in and created this amazing experience level on top that and that we work with Salesforce. It extended even further in those industries to create these these amazing technologies. Ah, pulling up the data from the legacy systems bringing in Social Mobile analytics. Aye aye, and creating an experience that is seamless, almost invisible to you as a consumer or as a business. And so that's when we talk about digital transformation. It's not just the digital part of it. It's the transformation of the entire technology stack inside of an organization of the processes that they're following, sometimes the teams and the people. And it's sometimes the entire industry and of itself, >>right? But is it is it hard to get a B to B vendor to think about delivering their product in the form of inexperience? Right. We hear it all the time, obviously, and and B to C, and everyone's trying to sell experiences and everybody wants experiences, and Gen X wants experiences. But if you think of a sales force application and delivering kind of CR and capability to some sales person on the line, how did they rethink that delivery in the form of an experience for that user? >>Sure, many of the existing ah metrics or benchmarks that you might have as a consumer Ah, business is air now being held to a CZ well, so Comcast is a terrific example where there's a B to see as well as it be to be sales organization on divisions and whether it's the contracting process that you might have with Comcast as a business or the sign up process you might have as a consumer, your expectations are growing exponentially in terms of seamless, fast, intuitive, personal. In those technologies that we work with, the velocity and salesforce together help enable that kind of experiences for companies. Media companies like Comcast, >>for example, right? The other piece of it, we talked about a lot in the in the room before we got out here is driving it internally with your own employees and really driving kind of, ah, customer centric culture and attitude and two degree experience within your own culture so that those people are then able to deliver that to your customer. How are you doing that at velocity? What are some of the priorities that you set in this area? Right >>velocities Five years old, we are one of the fastest ah growing clout, cos actually, in the world today, one of the reasons for that key driver is our core values. We say where values lead company, our 1st 2 values out of our seven, our customers first. And people are the core. And so you can't take. You can't do what we're doing Ah, and grow how we're growing and serve the customers with the results that they're getting the way that we're doing without those two customer first, customer centric strategy. Ah, and emphasis. But then people are People are at the very core of that, and they combine to basically deliver the kinds of results that we're delivering. Whether it's building innovative technologies, helping our customers with Salesforce implement those technologies and helping the leadership of those of those customers that we have you measure, benchmark and demonstrate. Ah, to they're consistencies the results that they're getting from those investments. >>Awesome. Well, thanks for Ah, for joining us today and you're at the event and taking a few minutes on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, he's rip. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Q worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. See you next time. Thanks for watching

>> Of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube, covering Comcast innovation day brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Buffet. And they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only Innovation Center in the country but it's one here in our backyard. And we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by and we're going to share some of that with you. And we're excited for our very first guest he's Preston Smalley, the VP of product management of Comcast, Preston great to meet you. >> Good to meet you too, Jeff. >> So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience. And you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. >> No, we are I mean I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers, where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? >> Yes, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit not enough conversation is the voice. And I've got the voice remote at home. And it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be and I don't really know what the licensing and arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO or if it's on HBO on demand or HBO live. So to be able to have kind of a single point of reference to just push that button and say, "Stanford football," and have it show up, it's amazing. >> No, it really is and I think you know, the voice remote has been one of those big hits where you know, people always love their TV remote but, you know, a number years back we started exploring, could we put a voice you know, search capability directly into that remote. And I think what's great is people they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month, >> Billion? >> A billion, one b. Through the remote and I think it's just become a part of their life. Right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my WiFi password? or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. >> So curious on the development side was like about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome? And what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? >> Sure. I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and you know, there's there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start in organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some at the beginning things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies, you get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. >> Right and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. >> That's right. >> And it can flip it can switch back and forth on the fly. >> That's right, yeah, so we support both those languages, including a combo a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently, we've also introduced Canadian French and so we license our technology to Rogers and video Tron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. >> That's great, So a long time ago we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think well app ordering but there was all this like second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impact. So I'm curious if there's some, you know, kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think, you know, what are some of the surprises that have come out of that? >> Well, that's a good, good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for you now have, you now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps but we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying and into the remote, whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. >> Right. >> And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. >> Now ,it's interesting. You talk about meeting people where they are and you know, one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that but you know they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu is one that you picked out or with Netflix or this historical ones, you guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast, as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. >> Yeah, sure. So obviously, we've had strength in the, in the TV space, and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year, we call Xfinity flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they want to buy some more content from us right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised, you know, you take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States we're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service and so by just making it easy and just one click away we found that people are they're opting to do that. >> Right, I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road >> Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way we're helping them >> Right, right >> They're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior, right? And so we're helping them with that. >> Well, it's really interesting, you know, kind of the you know, kind of TV versus computer you speeding the TV's kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you just kind of watching where the computer was more two way and then there was dual screen kind of activity, but you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your pc or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, you know whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about, you know, kind of the role of the internet in homes today, has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home probably the biggest one is nested, connected thermostats and connected door bells and ring and you know, we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again, right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way you guys think about delivering internet into the home? >> Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company, moving from, if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that WiFi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there we know that for power users we're seeing today, 20 connected devices on the home network. And I know my house, I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. >> Right. >> And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother in law gives me a call saying, "Hey, Preston, yeah, this thing's not working in my house." It's got to be really easy and straightforward. >> Right and then just in terms of just being a backhauler and the internet traffic that you guys are hearing because all those connected device or your kids devices, they all want 4k streaming, they're watching movies, you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen, no, no, no, you know, I'm watching it in the room. How does that kind of change the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth cause 4K is a lot more, go to NAB, you're just going to soon be 8K's and 12K's and all kinds of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over a year. >> Absolutely, I mean, there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it, which is in, in the last 18 years, Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, you know, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there, you know, 4K takes, you know, more than your 1080p then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's just, it's requiring more bandwidth, so we're happy to provide that. You know, we now offer one gig internet across all of our homes, we reached 56 million homes, I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity WiFi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is, you know, I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go in the internet is important. And so, you know, being able to put limits, whether it's bed time limits on their devices or we've recently introduced in our testing app base limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. >> Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the innovations center. >> We are for sure. >> All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes we could talk all day but we'll have to leave it there. >> All right, thanks Jeff. >> Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (distinct music)