live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three 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 connector or central or something it's it 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 and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered 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 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 your enterprises have realized that 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 it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know 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 for 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's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I 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 that really companies of any industry 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 we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of 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 gonna 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 a minute I'm gonna phone Conny 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 omni-channel 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 it 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 Rowen 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 own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know 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 you know it's very large and part of me looks at 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 clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that 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 desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the 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 say to 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 gonna tell and it's not a 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 a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent 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 hey I 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 call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 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 gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three 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 think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 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 the 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 the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS 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 de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart 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 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 8000 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 because 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 were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s 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 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 its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because 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 of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are 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 do 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 and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk 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 our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines 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 can have agent 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 hey 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 what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from 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 Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at 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 the contact center agents but you know 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 you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 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 my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two 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 out all right all right 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 under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three 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 my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten 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 will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre 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 five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care 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 there 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 to 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 and 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 we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand 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 how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are 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 now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings 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 made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]