(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is here with me, and we are on day three of our coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. This is a show that talks all about enterprise communication and collaboration. We're with Five9, who's been our gracious host this whole week talking about the intelligent contact center. We're all consumers at one point or another. We all buy a lot of things, and we're excited to bring to theCUBE for the first time, a gentleman from CARFAX, I'm sure you know, David Muttiah, the Salesforce Manager. David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> The only thing you didn't bring is your CARFAX fox. >> I did, that's exactly right, we did not bring the car fox, but next time, I'll make sure to bring the fox along. >> If I give you my address, can I get one? You certainly can. >> Awesome. Alright, so David, this is your first time here. You are a longtime customer of Five9, which we talk about. >> That's right. >> But I know you and Stu had a chance to chat earlier. >> Sure. >> Talk to us and our audience about CARFAX. What is-- People know it as I'm going to go there, I'm going to get the value of my car. >> Right. I want to be able to use this in my purchases and transactions. >> Right. >> The role of digital transformation and data to CARFAX's business. >> Sure. Right. And I think at the core, CARFAX is a data company, that's what we're known for, and most consumers know us for what we do, which is in the CARFAX history or the CARFAX reports, so, most people probably interact with us when they get ready to purchase a car, or they're about to sell one of their cars, so, they typically will want a CARFAX report, and so, that's been the experience, and that's what we're known for, and that's what we're recognized for, but over the last few years, we've also kind of moved into some other spaces. One area is the search capability on looking for a used car, so, today you can go online and search for used cars through various channels, but if you come to CARFAX.com, you can search for a car, the traditional method, which is you would typically go look for a car by the criteria, the color, the make, model, and a distance from your geographic area, but then also we now start layering CARFAX data on top of that. So, now you can search the cars based on I'm looking for a car with no accidents, I'm looking for a car with one owner, or I want a car that's got a lot of good history on it based on service and maintenance, So, you can do your searches based on those criterias at CARFAX.com, so, that's something now we're starting to grow and do more of. The other is talking about the value of your car. So, most people really want to know how much is my car worth, especially when you go to trade in, or you're trying to sell it, and so, you want to get a better sense of what that is. So, what we have started to do is based on the history of the car, based on what's in our database, and what's in our data, you can now, we start valuing the car, we start putting a value for the car and what it's worth, so that you as a consumer, when you get ready to trade in or sell, you have some confidence around the value of what your car is. This is also why you want to maintain your car and take good care of it, because the maintenance aspect really goes into what the car is valued at. >> Yeah, David, I love this. First of all, thank you, I've used CARFAX in the past. It helped me when I bought a used car for my wife, and it helped me in my negotiation quite a bit, and we love this trend is data. Actually, putting it in the hand of the consumer. >> Right. >> It's no longer this, I need to go in, and I don't have all the information, and >> Right, exactly. >> The traditional car salesman has the upper hand. Here, come on, I'm a good consumer. I know how to research this stuff and with your tools I've got the upper hand again. >> Exactly. >> I can go on in and negotiate, so. >> Right, and our goal, really, is to empower consumers to make better decisions and have confidence in the decisions they make around buying and selling their car. And so, we want to be able to help them in that process, but we also help dealers, automobile dealers, throughout the United States. They use us in the same way, as to run and manage their business. So, we help them to do that, in providing the data that we have to empower them to be able to do their business. >> Yeah, when we look at some of the big themes we've seen this show. >> Sure >> First of all, customer experience CX is at the center of what everyone is talking about. And when I talk about, in the contact center even, is that shifting role between inbound and outbound, >> Sure. >> Is how do I leverage my resources? Maybe bring us inside a little bit what it's like inside a CARFAX. >> Sure. >> Those items. >> Yeah, and I think you know CARFAX, when you look at it from a contact center standpoint, you know we've got two sides of the business. One is the traditional call center type of environment, where we are assisting our customers. They can call in and we're available to them to answer any questions that they have. And so, we have Agents available that are on call, to answer any questions around the data that CARFAX provides to our customers. The other side is on the Sales side, you know, we're still going out and talking about our business, trying to let people know what we do. Not just on the CARFAX Report, but on the CARFAX search capabilities, as well as, on the evaluation of the car. So, we're trying to get people more informed about how we're doing that. So, we have a Sales Team that really goes out and is empowered to do that. And so, we're using the contact center in that space as well, to be able to reach customers, to kind of really talk to the value of what CARFAX brings. >> So on the Sales side, on the contact center side, three, four years ago you guys said, We have some significant opportunities here. You've been one of the greatest examples, I think, I've heard all week about the power that the consumer has with all this data. When you said, "Alright, we need to dial this up a level. "There's a lot more opportunity to grow the business." When you came to Five9, what were some of the key challenges that you looked to them to help you resolve? >> You know, I think at the time we had on-prem solution that was working well for us. And think what we had done was internally, we had switched to Salesforce.com, which as a CRM, that was a cloud based solution. So, we had moved into the cloud. We were quit happy with what we were getting from a cloud solution, from a CRM standpoint. So, we said let's step back now that we want to migrate, our really, contact center into that area. Let's take a look at who's the players in this space. And we kind of did our due diligence and evaluation. And we ended up and landed on Five9 as kind of our go-to solution. And since then, we have really integrated Five9 into our sales force instance. And that's been the goal, is to be able to integrate the two systems and it's worked out really well for us. And I think one of the things that we look at from-- at CARFAX is we want, our employees, the interaction to kind of be a user friendly interaction. So, Salesforce is our primary CRM. And so, we want anything that our employees do to be primarily focused on Salesforce. And so, the contact center solution needs to be integrated in and we don't necessarily want a contact center that's kind of a stand alone. So, we have it integrated so, the experience for the agent or the employee is really seamless between a CRM and a contact center. They're kind of one and the same for us. >> Yeah, that's great. We just had Zisan of the analyst talking about how anyone that has a CRM, Five9 is something that can help them. What if you can go in that your sales people that are using it. There's a lot of other options besides Contact Center. Look here some of the UC solutions out there. And Salesforce has lots of modules they'd be happy to upgrade you, >> Exactly. Yep. too, for those environments. So, what was it about the Five9 that you said, hey, it works in our contact center, let's start moving it to some of our other people? >> Sure. I think, you know, one of the things is >> if we look at how we work, we really want a lot of the information that we're gathering from our sales rep's to be really input into Salesforce. And so, we wanted a contact center that integrated in a way that we could capture everything that we're doing with our customers and the interactions that we're having to be solely in Salesforce. And so, that's one of the big pieces, is we didn't necessarily want a contact center that captured information outside and then tried to marry the two. We really want it, the experience, to be one and the same, so that the-- For us as we start interacting with our customers we're able to input everything into our CRM. As well as, from a contact center standpoint, if we have customers that are reaching out to us, we're able to serve up information within our CRM, for the agent, so they can interact in a more meaningful way, and provide our customers information in a much more quicker, and easier manner than we have in the past. >> We talk about CX a lot, an agent experience. One of the things I'm curious to learn is adoption. That's a theme that's come up, as well. It's great to hold all the technologies, but if at the end of the day, as consumers, we want things simple, well so do employees, right? >> Sure. >> Talk to us about the adoption that you've been able to drive, since you've brought in the Five9 contact center, integrating it with your CRM, the impact on the contact center folks, as well as the sales folks. >> Right, I think one of the keys to any kind of adoption efforts is really having stake hold or buy in. And so, if we look at our leadership at CARFAX, they were truly bought in on Salesforce and a solution like Five9. So, they were behind us from a technology standpoint to say look we want these tools integrated. We want our employees to have a seamless experience. So, we were able to get our sales leadership, our contact center leadership, truly bought in on the experience. They had a lot of say and a voice and make selection. So, when we went and do the due diligence, they were part of the process of selecting Five9. They, too, looked at them as a solution. And they were able to give us feedback on what they're needs were. So, we really took into consideration a lot of the things that they looked for. And so, when we launched the two and integrated it, and we went live. We had a lot of buy-in. They had already gone out to their teams, talked about what they were going to get. So, the agents and sales reps, themselves, were familiar with what was coming, what was to be expected. So, in some sense there was a little bit of excitement within the company of what's to come. So, we had users already approaching us saying, hey, when are we going to get this, cause we're ready to kind of transform and move over to this new solution? So, that was, it was a good experience. And I think that's key to any kind of adoption, is really having your leadership kind of have buy-in and backing, cause they're the ones that kind of empower the employees to kind of truly adopt and use these tools. >> Yeah, David, one of the things we've been trying to parse this week in that buzzword of omnichannel and the ebb and resurgence of voice has been something that's been a theme of this conference, used to be called VoiceCon. >> Right. >> So, from your perspective, your different groups, what are the channels, what are you seeing, and maybe for yourself and any of your peers that your hearing? What are some of those big trends? >> I think one of the things we're seeing, is obviously, omnichannel is kind of a buzzword that's talked about in the industry. We're still primarily phone based and it's partly because of the nature of our business. We're serving customers that are calling in with highly technical question. And we do have chat as an avenue. And we can obviously talk to our customers, through chat, as a means, but we're also finding is that sometimes when you get into these high level technical questions, chat is not necessarily the place to have that. Chat has a place in our business. But I think it's also, you have to be mindful about the amount of time your going to take to be able to respond to these things. And so, what we're starting to offer chat as an option, but in most cases what we're doing is flipping from chat over to the phone and continuing that conversation with our customers, cause that seems to be a a more seamless and better interaction. And then in most cases we can answer these questions via phone quicker than through chat. And for the customer themselves it's a better user experience to do that. And so, we have kind of tended to be self-voice, primarily. We're are certainly looking of kind of omnichannels, of where that industry is evolving. That's something we'll continue to look at, and see if we can bring in, and so more with that, but we're still very much phone-based. And that's what our customers want. And we're want to kind of continue to serve them through those channels. >> So, your really following the journey of your specific customers, >> Exactly. to determine where should we be meeting them that going to best and fastest serve their needs. >> Exactly, right, and I think the industry changes, and if our customers start saying to us, hey, I want more ways to reach you that are alternative to voice, and we'll certainly look at that and provide that as a solution. >> Alright, so, David, as you work with Five9 and your other vendors, if you had a magic wand, what could they be doing to make you job easier, help your customer experience anymore? >> Sure, I think, as a whole, they're doing a today. I think one of the things we are talking to Five9 and other folks in the spaces. We have today, as a company, we're using Five9 for the contact center folks that are integrated with our CRM, but we also have folks at our corporate office that are non-contact center folks. Maybe they interact with our CRM more, but they're not necessarily making outbound calls or taking inbound calls, but each of them has a phone at their desk. And so, we want to combine and bridge the two systems. So, that's something we're looking at and talking to, to see what we can do to be able to bring some of our corporate office folks, and have them seamlessly integrate with our contact center folk, so that conversations can be passed back and forth between the two systems and make it a little bit more easier than what we have today. >> For other businesses that are the precipice of where CARFAX was a few years ago, what are your lessons learned and recommendations for successfully navigating this process? >> I think one of the things is to always take a step back and look at your kind of processes and say this is what we've done up to this point, Is that what you want to continue to do? And then look at ways you can continue to improve. You certainly want to reach out to your employees and your agents, cause they're kind of the true source of knowledge for this. They can give you some valuable insight into how their day-to-day interactions are, and how we can improve and make some changes there. So, you really want to take a step back and take a look at how you can improve those things. Of course, the other aspect is, looking at tools that truly work in the environments that you are in. So, for us, it was Salesforce. And we really wanted a partner that truly integrated with Salesforce. And we wanted to make sure the integration was seamless, 'cause the last thing you really want is a system that is kind of-- A CRM is one aspect and the contact center is separate, and having it work seamlessly was our number one criteria. So, come up with some things that you cannot do without. And so, come up with some things that you can, you say, look, these are core to our business needs and we're not going to divert from that, and we want to be able to find a solution that works in those parameters. >> Great advice, David. Thank you so much for sharing what CARFAX is doing with Five9 and what's next for you guys. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. It was great to be here. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)