 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Manaman of theCUBE and we are on the floor in 5ix9ine's booth at Enterprise Connect 2019. We're excited to be joined by another guest from 5ix9ine. We've got Daryl Addington, the Director of Portfolio Marketing. Daryl, it's great to have you. So nice to be here. 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, yeah. There's 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 to narrow down the problems that 5ix9ine should solve. Yeah, so it's really an interesting, as you said, it's a very hot space right now. Everybody has a contact center that has any sort of customer service, and so moving from what they're currently using today into the cloud is what's happening en masse, and the market is a whole, and contact centers as a whole is really said, okay, 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, 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 what makes us different, what makes us unique, or how we can uniquely solve some of the issues that contact centers are facing today. Darrell, I love that. I'd love for you to bring us in a little bit more in those customers, so the queue's been covering the cloud for quite a long time, and speed and agility are some of the top things that we hear when we're talking about cloud in general. I know that 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 maybe don't realize when they're ready to move into the cloud or they're starting to move into the cloud is that the updates and the innovation 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-tenanted cloud offering, 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 or professional services teams, we just get that to them. So they have new capabilities at their fingertips all the time that they can take advantage of. That's one big area. It's such a great point. Even, you know, give most customers and talk to them as Microsoft as their example. 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 did I get that latest security patch in there? Because they take care of it. Yeah, now that absolutely all goes away. The other thing that's happened that's really interesting is that in an on-premises world, you get the software, you buy the perpetual license of course, you load it on the servers and then somebody integrates it all together so that the agent can see where the customer information is in 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, lets 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 him some questions about how they've changed there since they came on board with Five Nines. I would love to know that because as we talk about the essentials of cloud for contact center, contact center as a service, the obvious operational and cost benefits of the cloud. But also, I know Five Nines has about five billion minutes of recorded customer conversations and Rowan, troll of your CEO, per year. Yes, thank you. We'll be coming on later today saying, you know, I was going to say pre-historically, maybe. Previously, there's a ton of dark data in there, but there's so much insight there that, you know, the problem is the consumer behaviors changing everything we expect. Omni-channel experience, right? 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 Nines are helping 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 Rowan will 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 their 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 do the words mean? And that's, I think, where Five Nines will 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 going to be talking about whatever it is that you're doing inside of that business. And so if it's pharmaceuticals, whole different set of vocabulary that you're going to use communicating with an agent 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 a specific capability, I have an Amazon, that's going to be a different set of words versus if I'm calling my cable company because they're specific products. And so anyway, so all of that is going to lead, I think, into a future where we're able to provide some very interesting and compelling AI driven solutions for contact centers. All right, so Daryl, Lisa and I have 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. How was the attendance? Any good questions from the audience and what was some of the key takeaways? No, attendance was good, 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, 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 Center. It's what we deliver with 5ix9ine Genius, which is the 5ix9ine platform for delivering services out into contact centers. And essentially, if I can just run you 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 So the agent is really that human touch point between the customer and the business. And 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, 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 really about reliability. So it 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 can't run your contact center and you're not going to provide great service to your customers and really drive out 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, had a number of interesting questions back on that. Anything particular, a question catch year year that might be a common thing that users would be asking? You know, none of them are coming to mind at the moment. I remember them as being interesting. I flagged them as such and we had an interesting conversation after the session, but I don't actually remember. It's always at these shows, it's a blur of, you know, meetings, engagement. There's a lot of activity, there's a lot of activity. There's been good buzz. Any other just kind of key takeaways you've had is we're getting to the third day of the show and some of the interactions. Well, I think every single business is at a different place and so while 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 and 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 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. I was going to say, what are some of those key metrics that we think of net promoter score, customer lifetime value, predicting customer lifetime value. What are some of those key metrics that 5.9 is helping your customers to achieve through the Intelligent Contact Center? So first call resolution is of course, a critical one that a lot of contact centers use to try and to determine how well you're 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 agents 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 all they have to go on is that weekly call with their supervisor where the supervisor goes, well actually on Tuesday at 10, you forgot to introduce the brand correctly and on Wednesday at 11, you didn't greet the customer 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 basically a mistake driven set of feedback that you get. But if you give them the stats in front and the performance dashboard that you provide does that, then they can see exactly how they're doing all through the course of the day and that helps them to do better. People will auto correct 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, you're ratcheting up how you're doing, you're starting to compete maybe with your peers a little bit or 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 talk about some deeper skills that you can work on with you to improve your close rate on sales for example rather than yeah. I love that because I cringe a little bit at gamification but knowing this kind of environment, right, if it's something that I can proactively look at it myself, I can engage on it, I take ownership of myself, so right you can have more constructive engagement and work on 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 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, monetary awards or things that you can buy, tickets to sporting events, things like that is all part of the package. So we talked 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 5.9 is enabling the agent experience, when you're talking with customers, do they see customer experience and agent experience as separate issues to deal with or are you really saying they are one and 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 really great question because you're absolutely right. If the agent is, like we just talked about a second ago, getting negative feedback every week about what they didn't do right, well, how is that going to motivate them to be excited about talking to the customer? 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 they're just too complicated, right? So if I'm on the phone and I'll just do like a parody of it, you know, I'm trying to talk to you guys, you know, but I'm constant trading on, you know, 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. Is that agent empowerment and being able to make decisions I can imagine can be an absolute game changer? Yeah, no, 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 up-selling different capabilities. And if you have the right tools, it's much, much easier to enable the agents to do that. All right, so Daryl, we've been talking with your team this week about many of the announcements at the show. What have you been involved in? Which are the ones that have been exciting you the most to be able to get in front of customers and talk about? Well, so one of the things that 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 as part of this show. And so we've renamed it to 5.9 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 our cloud contact center. Because it's integrated, because the desktop's intuitive, because it pulls information from all the appropriate data sources, including customer intent in a self-service channel. And it's delivering that to the agent. It really does empower a different way and a different method of communicating with customers that businesses can use to improve their customer experience. Daryl, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, 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 through Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.