live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida I'm Lisa Martin with two men a man of the cube and we are on the floor in five 9s booth at Enterprise Connect 2019 were excited to be joined by another guest from 5-9 we've got Darryl Addington the director of portfolio marketing Darryl it's great to have you so nice to be here yeah man this has been great for us we've gotten a lot of conversations over the last few days a lot from your execs customers partners this space enterprise communication and collaboration it's really hot it really is yes so much opportunity there give us a little bit of a picture about what you're seeing in the global market from a trend perspective to where your team says all right let's really work with our customers right there on the problems at five nine shit's off yeah so it's really an interesting as you said it's a very hot space right now everybody has to contact center that has any sort of customer service and so moving from where they're what they're currently using the day into the cloud is what's happening in mass and the market is a whole on contact centers as a whole has really said ok you know the cloud does look like it's got the right capabilities for me and as they age out of those older systems they're moving into the cloud so it's very exciting and there's a lot of new capabilities there as well my team really focuses on what the customers are trying to do in the contact center you know what types of problems they're trying to solve today in order to meet the needs of their customers and then we work to put together materials and things like that to help articulate you know what makes us different what makes us unique or how we can uniquely solve some of the issues that contact centers are facing today Darryl I love that I love it love you can bring us in a little bit more in those customers so you know the queues been covering the cloud for quite a long time yeah and speed and agility are some of the top things that we hear when we're talking about cloud and generally I know that is you know translates to the contact center but what else what are some of those key concerns that you're meeting with the customers and what are you hearing from them today yeah so I think one of the big things that people don't maybe don't realize when they're ready to move in in the cloud or they're starting to move into the cloud is that the updates and the the innovation that is that capable of that you're capable of having when you're in the cloud is increased pretty drastically so there's two ways that that happens so one thing is that we're a multi-tenant cloud offering you know you know what that is and so when we push code out to our customers we do it to all of our customers all at the same time so there's no upgrade path that they have to go on or extra work that they have to do our professional services teams we just get that to them so I have new capabilities at their fingertips all the time that they can take advantage that's one big area it's such a great point even you know you give most customers and to talk to them as Microsoft as their example you know the the Microsoft of previous years where I have Patch Tuesday and am I in the latest patch and what's going on and everything if I'm running office 365 if I'm living on Microsoft Azure I'm not asking what version or how did I get that latest security patch in there because they take care of it yeah that absolutely all goes away the other thing that's happened it's really interesting is that in an on-premises world you get the software you buy the perpetual license of course you load it onto servers and then somebody integrates it all together so that the agent can see where the customer information is and the contact center and some of the WFL features in a cloud environment that's all happening based on the vendor and it has a kind of a surprising result as part of that and that surprising result is that it doesn't break as often it's not as fragile as it was when it got all stitched together by a specialized team of people that by the way have moved on to the next project they're not there to support it anymore but because we have hundreds of customers that are using those integrations on our platform you know and they're using it every single month each one of the integrations we have to obviously make sure that it's functioning all the time and that lets them this is the surprising part let's say you iterate in the contact center in a way that the contact center hasn't really been able to do up until they had the cloud you can make changes every couple of weeks if you want to and actually you know you'll have David on I think a little bit later from Carfax and that's one of the things that he talks about so hopefully you can ask them some questions about how they've changed their since they came on board with would love to know that because as we as we talk about the centrioles of cloud for context and our contact center as a service the obvious operational and cost benefits of the club but also I know 5/9 has about five billion minutes of reported customer conversations and Rowan Tolliver CEO per year yes thank you will be coming on later today this thing you know I was gonna say prehistorically maybe previously there's a ton of dark data in there but there's so much insight there yes that that you know the problem is the consumer behavior is changing everything we expect omni-channel experience rate we're demanding that contact center still has the original problem of meeting the customer demands and resolving a problem but now there's so much more complexity because of omni-channel and all of these different things so talk to us about how you guys at five minute open customers to really ensure that the cloud is going to maximize say their opportunity to dial up AI right so it's interesting i mean AI has got so much potential in this marketplace and and and rollin we'll talk about that this afternoon you know it's an exciting time because well first of all AI is a whole bunch of different types of technologies you know kind of at the core of it is machine learning of course which allows you to create these different types of models for doing things that human beings have been good at and you know in the cases of Google what we've seen is that they're dictation has improved drastically over previous generations of recognition and things like that so that's very exciting because you can so dictation in particular lots of things you can do with dictation that's part of that dark data story that we've been talking about you can pull the words out of the voice that are sitting there and use those effectively but there's another layer there which is natural language understanding once you have the words what are the words mean and that's I think where five nine I'll be able to provide a significant value again based on that dark data because if you think about the way a customer is going to interact with a business they're not going to use the words that you use when you're communicating on your mobile phone to Siri right you're gonna you're gonna be talking about whatever it is that you're doing inside of that business and so if it's pharmaceuticals a whole different set of vocabulary that you're going to use communicating with an agent around around pharmaceuticals and the same for every single industry right and so that's where that really starts to come into play is those systems that machine learning system has to have all those specific not just industry level words but business level words right if I'm calling Amazon and I'm talking about you know a specific capability I have an Amazon that's gonna be a different set of words versus you know if I'm if I'm calling my cable company because there's specific products and so anyway so all of that is gonna lead I think into a future where we're able to provide some very interesting and compelling yeah I driven solutions for contact centers all right so Darryl lately and I've had a chance to we see the show floor we've attended some of the keynotes one of the things we rarely get to do though is actually go to some of the breakout sessions you led one of those yesterday participated in one yesterday maybe bring us inside you know sure how was the attendance any good questions from the audience and what was some of the key takeaways you know attendance was good it was it was a good session so we were talking about the intelligent cloud contact center so one of the things that contact centers are trying to think about is how do I create a system or a platform and a process within my contact center where I can better serve customers and so we've coined this term or we have this term the intelligent cloud contact sentence what we deliver with five nine genius which is the five nine platform for delivering services out into contact centers and essentially affecting just running through it really quickly the intelligent cloud contact center is integrated into all the systems as we talked about previously so CRM and WFO capabilities out of the cloud you just turn it on and configure it and you can use it of course you can customize it if you need to for your specific business processes as well second element is around agent empowerment and agent so the agent is the really that human touch point between the customer and the business and that usually when the agent gets involved it's this kind of critical moment right so the agent needs to know either in their head but there's a lot of information and that can extend your training time or right in front of them on their desktop you know all the information about that customer so that they can help the customer continue their journey whatever that happens to be and hopefully drive it to conclusion right so that's the second element and then the third element is is really about reliability so has to be a reliable system because you're offering it as a cloud service if it's not available you can't use it if you can't use it you then you can't run your contact center and you're you know you're you're not gonna you're not gonna provide great service to your customers and really drive up that customer experience so that's the third element of the intelligent cloud contact center and seem to get good feedback from the crowd yeah how to add a number of interesting questions back on that anything particular question catcher that you know might be a common thing that users would be asking you know I am NOT the none of them are coming to mind at the moment they I remember them as being interesting I flagged them as such and we had an interesting conversation after this session but but I don't actually remember it's always at these shows it's a blur of you know there's a lot of activities there's been good buzz any any other just kind of key takeaways you've had is we're you know get into the third day of the show and some of the interactions well I think every single business is at a different place and so well it's fun to talk about AI and it's very interesting I'm excited about it I think depending on where a business is right now in their particular path and their particular journey there's still a lot of things that you can do that don't require AI to transform what you're doing in the contact center and that intelligent cloud contact center I think is one of the ways that a business can really do that and that is to get that data all in a location get it in front of the agents let that agent be able to know what's going on with that customer at that moment and be able to communicate with the customer and then do that with confidence that you can iterate and then improve your business so one of the things I didn't talk about that yet so I'll do it now is metrics and being able to know what's happening in your contact center and that's obviously a fully integrated part of that what are some of those key metrics so we think of Net Promoter Score customer lifetime value or predicting customer lifetime value what are some of those key metrics that 5:9 is helping your customers to achieve through the intelligent kind of first call resolution is of course I'm you know a critical one that a lot of contact center is used to trying to determine what you know how well your your your serving your customers I think one of the key things that's relatively new for the contact center industry is giving the stats to the agent so that the agents know how they're performing all throughout the day we all like to know how we're doing right we want feedback on a regular basis and when you don't provide those to an agent or if you just have a really simple wall board that's up that the agents are looking at then you know then all they have to go on is that weekly call with their supervisor where the supervisor goes well actually on Tuesday at 10:00 you forgot to introduce the brand correctly and on Wednesday at 11:00 you didn't greet the customer in the appropriate way and you didn't end the call with the appropriate greeting based on the fact that they were called so that's no fun for an agent right it's it's basically a mistake driven set of feedback that you get but if you give them the stats in front and the performance dashboard that we provide does that then they can see exactly how they're doing all through the course of the day and you know that helps them to do better people will autocorrect almost instantly when they get feedback on how they're doing and it makes you feel better because then with the gamification aspect of it it kind you know you're ratcheting up you know how you're doing you're starting to compete maybe with your peers a little better at least you're feeling good and then at the end of the week the supervisor can come back and say hey great job this week let's let's talk about some deeper skills that you can work on with you to you know improve your close rate on sales for example rather than yeah I love that because I cringe a little bit of gamification but knowing this kind of environment right if it's something that I can proactively look at it myself I can engage on I take ownership myself so right you can have more constructive engagement and work on you know strengths when you're going with your management that's what it's really all about it's all about making it fun it's not about having a you know a silly game on the side it's all about am I doing the things that the company wants me to do and then there's some nice fringe benefits that can be out of it too you know monetary awards or things that you can buy tickets to sporting events things like that it's all part of the so we talk so much about customer experience CX big theme of the show every conversation that we've had but I'm just kind of wondering and hearing you talk about how five nine five nine is enabling the agent experience when you're talking with customers do they see customer experience an agent experience as separate issues to deal with or are you really saying they are one in the same and here's how we're going to enable you through the agent empowerment to deliver that awesome CX yeah it's a it's a really great question because you're absolutely right if the agent is you know like we just talked about a second ago getting negative feedback every week about what they didn't do right well how is that gonna you know how is that going to motivate them to be excited about talking to the customer you know whereas if you've got an environment where the agent doesn't have to so part of the problem with the old desktops for the agents is this they're just too complicated right so if I'm on the phone and I'll just do it like a parody of it and I'm trying to talk to you guys you know but I'm constant trading on you know what I'm digging through different screens and it's just really hard to connect with the customer so if you create that environment where it's easy to understand what the customer data is intuitive you know almost so it doesn't require much training but then also you don't have to focus on it and you're giving constant feedback on how you're doing in your performance all throughout the day and your supervisor sessions at the end of every week are on a positive note doing great job let's see how we can increase your close rate now you've got an agent who's enjoying their job which is cool because then of course if they're enjoying their job then when they get that call from a customer they're interacting with customers and they're empowered to make decisions right and to have the right content to deliver that through the right channel to you know not make that the last exchange that that business has with a customer but to actually retain them as you said retention is huge that agent empowerment and being able to make decisions I can imagine can be an absolute game changer yeah I know absolutely and a lot of call centers would like to become they would like to transform and be able to help the business in those key areas whether it's retaining customers or whether it's cross-selling and upselling different capabilities and if you have the right tools it's much much easier to enable the agents to do that all right so Darryl we've been talking with your team this week about many of the announcements at the show what have you been involved in what's the ones that been exciting you the most to be able to get in front of customers and about well so one of the one of the things we've been talking about over and over is the agent desktop and the information that the agent has and so we renamed our platform at there as part of this show and so we've renamed it to five nine genius the intelligent cloud contact center as I've mentioned previously and we think that name gives us some interesting ways to talk about really the power that we're bringing to bear with the our cloud contact center because it's integrated because the desktop is intuitive because it pulls information from all the appropriate data sources including customer intent in a self-service channel and it's still bringing that to the agent it really does empower a different way in a different method of communicating with customers that businesses can use to improve their customer experience Darryl thank you so much for joining suing me on the Cuba separated sharing about what you're doing and how that voice of the customer is really impacting everything that 5/9 does we appreciate your time yeah thanks so much thanks for having me first a minute man I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]