 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5.9. Hello from Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and theCUBE is here for day two of Enterprise Connect 2019. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time John Hernandez, the CEO of Celigent. John, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks for having me. So give our viewers a little bit of an overview. I love the name Celigent as a marketer. I just think it's fantastic, I get the context. Tell us a little bit about Celigent. You guys have been around for a long time. What is it that you do and your relation to enterprise communication? Absolutely, so at the heart of it, the company started as a CRM company. And then in 2005, when Salesforce was just dominating the CRM space, the company decided to pivot to marketing. And so the data has been the core of the platform since the beginning of the company. That allows us to have so much intelligence of not only what we're marketing to the individuals, because at the end of the day, it's a marketing cloud application, is we also have all the transactions, every hotel that's been booked, every grocery that's been purchased in the database. So we have so much insight on that consumer. We can then serve up important AI capabilities like what's the right offer? What's the right time? What's the right day? And what's the right channel? My daughter's on Instagram. I'm a text guy, you're an email guy. That makes it all come to life. I'm trying to drive products and services to consumers. Yeah, John, I love that because you're right. It's a different people. You need to communicate different ways. We've been talking at this show with a contact center people. It's like Omni Channel. Well, voice is still super important in the contact center. You have any general trends you can share with us as to what's the best way that, what's working, what's totally failing? As a middle-aged contact center guy myself, I've been in Call Center since 95 in development of them. So know the space really well. So some people have been asking us, what's a marketing cloud company doing at Enterprise Connect? The reality is marketing sales and service are starting to converge in all companies. The marketing department can't be in a silo anymore of driving offers to consumers without the inside sales people or the service people knowing what's going on. So we're here working with folks like Five Nines, joint customer success where we're driving campaigns and offers to consumers. And when they come to the web page or they call the call center or they send an email to the company, Five Nines is catching that stuff coming in. But now we give them context. I'll give you an example. Build.com is a joint customer of Five Nines and ourselves. Five Nines does the call center. We do, so they do the service and sales departments. We do the marketing. So we're pushing out offers that are personalized. If it's a contractor, they get a different view. If it's a consumer doing a bathroom remodel, they get a different view. And so it's all personalized now. Now when they come to Build.com, Five Nines catches it. And guess what? We can apply AI on top of it to help the humans because we look at it and say, hey, is it a contractor looking at a bathtub? That's probably a bathroom remodel. Let's get that to our highest end sales person. They can wear that. If it's a consumer looking for a faucet replacement just satisfy that on e-commerce, right? So beautiful handshake between Five Nines and us. And that relevance is absolutely essential as we are all consumers every day. So easy to buy things from wherever we are, right? But we also want to make sure that what we're getting because retargeting is so popular, we're getting ads all the time. And it has to be relevant. So one of the things about relevance that kind of piqued my interest that you said is a theme that Stu and I heard yesterday. And that is that the contact center and marketing are often not communicating. They think of how is the contact center, how do they have the content to be able to deliver it to your daughter on Instagram? You through texts, Stu through phone. What are you seeing from a trends perspective about marketing and really as an enabler of the contact center? Yeah, yeah. You know, sales and services always been closely connected, but marketing's always been off on the side. And what we're seeing a growing trend is this whole convergence of consumer experience, the whole CX experience, right? Everybody's talking about it, but the reality is tough to do. And so what we see happening is the CMO or the marketing department is typically leading the charge on the strategy, but it's the sales, service, and IT departments that are buying the tech. So making sure those things are coming together to drive that relevancy is so important. Another example between us here is a company called Cool Blue. Cool Blue is an online electronics reseller to consumers. And they saw a massive problem with returns. So we looked at the data with them, said, you know, the source of the problem seems to be that consumer doesn't know what to do with that product you just sold them. So we put into an email campaign and a text campaign an embedded video that allows them to just, when that product arrives to the home, they get an email with that video, drop 30% on reduction of returns. Massive ROI for that customer. Well, now you got call center agents sitting idle, right, waiting to take calls, but they're not coming now for returns. So I guess what they did, we worked again with the call center guys and the inside sales team, put a campaign on the website, identifying things that you would be interested in and created upsells. The biggest one that was a success, mobile plans. So we have the ability to say, hey, put in your phone number and your name, and we guarantee we'll call you in 30 seconds, put it into their outbound dialer in five nines. Boom, they call 28% conversion of mobile plans. Yeah, I love that when you talk about, you know, how do we reduce the load on the workload? But then, oh, what do I do with the workforce? Do I have to retrain them? Do I have to move them? One of the big themes that the show here is like, oh, okay, AI is coming. You know, okay, cloud is here, but AI is coming. Doesn't mean that we're getting rid of people, but it might change some of those environments. Believe there's some AI in your platform. Tell us a little bit about how that fits into Seligin. Absolutely, it's called Seligin Cortex, and it does four things extremely well. So instead of going wide and broad, like a Watson type thing, where you have a lot of services to tune in, it is purpose built out of the box to do four key things. What's the right offer to present? What's the right time, day, and channel of choice? So that you're getting that relevance in there. Now, when the customer calls the call center, sends an email, or calls the sales department, making sure that that offer comes up on the agent desktop, so they know, hey, this is what John was just offered, and that's what he's calling about. Don't talk to him about anything else. Close the deal, right? That's the beauty of it. And to the consumer, it's relevant in the time that matters. That's so critical. Time is, real-time communications is key, and we expect that as the consumers are more and more and more empowered. We have everything, and we're demanding of, I want to be able to transact this or find out information on whatever channel that I want, and I want the conversation to be continued. I don't want to have to start over from scratch. Isn't that the worst? It is the worst. It is, Sue and I were talking yesterday about one of my recent ISP calls, and it was like Groundhog Day. And the first thing I think of, I'm going to go to Twitter and escalate, or I'm going to churn. So I want to get your opinion. I love when you talk about customers with actual business outcomes and metrics that you guys, and especially with your partnership with 5.9R, are delivering. Talk to us about the importance of bringing in customers in terms of development of the technology, the AI, and the partnership with 5.9. Where are those customers at your decision-making table? Absolutely. So we get the wisdom of the crowds, right? When we're trying to know where the market's going. What's the next digital channel that we haven't even thought of yet, right? And it comes from the marketers and inside sales VPs and the service folks. And so we have a board of advisors of clients. We also have partners like 5.9. We have marketing agencies, and all of that wisdom comes in to help us in our roadmap. So we have a backlog of things we want to do. They help us prioritize to make sure we're staying on top of the market trends. And the CX topic of the integration here is one of those things that emerge from our customers. So John, one of the things we've been poking at is I want to learn from the crowd, but I'm worried about that. I don't want my competitor getting advantage based on I did something a little better. How do you manage that dynamic of, there's privacy, there's competitive advantages. In most cases, it usually rings true all the time. First of all, everybody's under NDA, but that's only as good as the signature on it in some cases. But you make sure and have different organizations that are in different verticals. So there isn't really a lot of commonality. So you get differences of opinion, which is a good thing. But then you're not getting a telecom provider telling a retail shop that's not going to have a similar thing so that you don't get that overlap. But typically the customers we see are very open and forthcoming because they want to advance their platform to be reflective of their customer base. And they have to to stay competitive. Totally. One of the themes that came up today a little bit in the keynote panel was talking about internal adoption of tools. That's obviously essential for a company to be able to be successful and to have a stellar contact center. What are some of the, as you have been around with Seligent for a long time, Seligent has for a long time, what are some of the trends that you're seeing in terms of customers embracing, we have to move quickly, we have to figure out what digital transformation means to us because we've got to make sure that our internal teams who are going to have the data to make the right decisions on the offers understand and embrace this technology. Yes, totally. And so you think about the call center, right? Inside sales service, voice is the foundation technology and it's never going away. I don't care what anybody says, but it doesn't mean you can ignore the email and the chat and all the other things. Same in the marketing world, email has been the foundation of marketing for a long time, but the digital channels are exploding. And again, my daughter's on Instagram. She's not reading email. So you got to be relevant in that moment. So internally we have a diverse workforce that come from the call center world, from the MarTech world, different generations. So that way we have the different wisdom of how to use our own tools. Our own platform communicates with all our partners and our customers to make sure we're keeping them up to date with newsletters and information. Yeah, John, one of the things that's been really interesting to watch the maturation the last few years is the changing role of the CMO. And especially how digital is impacting them. So I've talked to some CMOs that are like, well, I'm choosing which apps all my field using and how they're involved. The role between the CMO and the CIO goes through back and forth. A couple of years ago one of the big analyst firms was like, oh, the CIO's out of a job and the lines of business are going to run everything. Well, I think CIOs are still going to have a job for a while. But I'd love to get your viewpoint on CMOs, digital engagement with IT and... So what we're seeing more and more of a trend now is the CMO and the marketing department is kind of starting the CX strategy, right? They look at the whole customer life cycle and how we're going to take that on. But they're quickly realizing they can't pull it off without sales, service and IT. And in most cases, the buy is actually coming from IT for the tech stack. The business consulting's going to the market tiers and you've got to create that ecosystem of making sure that everybody has relevance in the buy decision and all of their objectives are being met against their key metrics. Yeah, the other thing, just the role of data. I mean, we've been to chief data officer events. How does this play in kind of broader data initiatives inside of customers? Yeah, totally. It is all about relevance at the time and moment of need, right? You only have that one moment. And what we see is consumers, put your consumer hat on. If you have a great experience with your bank and then you go to your insurance company, you have a bad experience, you're expecting that same experience, otherwise you're going to defect and go somewhere else. That happens everywhere, all the time. So the data is critical to understand how things are going. So we have an integration where in the call center, we can get the NPS score, the net promoter score. So was it an angry customer where they upset? Did they not like it and return something? That's a low score. Take them out of the marketing campaigns. The worst thing you can do is try and sell them something when they're angry. In the past, you had to hunt for that data to try and manually pull them out. Now it's a fully automated. The AI on top of that and the integration with it, it's so simple you can pull them out. And when the NPS score goes back up, put them back in. But don't sell them something, send them a knowledge article, engage with them before you try and start selling them again, right? Because churn is so easy to do, as you mentioned before. We have so many choices for whatever. But of course, don't market to me if I'm not happy about this and the NPS score is low. So imagine net negative churn, NPS as you talked about are some of the key metrics that you talk about the kind of changing role of the CMO. Marketing is now such a science. Talk to us about how Seligin and 5N can help really dramatically reduce that churn and really drive up the dial on customer lifetime value. Totally. It all comes down to the data at our disposal and using it in the appropriate time, right? So for instance, if we're marketing something to them, like a grocery chain marketing to people, delivery services, things like that, all the things in the grocery store, if they call the call center instead of doing e-commerce to try and buy it, they need to know what this customer normally buys. So in the databases, every transaction they've ever made in that grocery store, put it up on the screen for the agent so the agent can help them through that. Or if they had a wrong delivery to the wrong address, give them the right address at their disposal, don't have them search for things, bring it to their forefront of making sure it happens. And even more important is real-time engagement. So keeping on that retail, the grocery store, as you're walking through the aisles there, it's very easy to see where you're in the grocery store through mobile triangulation, through sensors in the store, and make real-time offers. High margin products, sell that product to that consumer, send them a coupon and a text or a mobile app push. Those types of things are very simple tools that between their technology, Five Nines and us, we create that CX experience, which is phenomenal. Awesome, John. Well, phenomenal job joining Stu and me on theCUBE. We thank you so much for your time and talking to us about Seligin and what you're doing at Five Nines and how you're really enabling that phenomenal CX. Beautiful, I love it. Thanks for the invite. Of course Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.