 From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hi, and welcome to The Cube Virtual and our coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020. We are The Cube Virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today my guest is Shauna Wolverton, Executive Vice President of Product at Zendesk. And she's coming to us from Oakland, California. Shauna, welcome to The Cube. Thanks so much for having me. It is lovely to be here. How's the weather over there in Oakland? We just suddenly went from summer to winter, which after the weather we've had is no complaints. Ah, right. Well, as a resident of Melbourne, where we have four seasons in one day, I am very familiar with rapid weather changes. So hopefully it's not too cold for you and you get a little bit of nicer weather just before you go fully into winter. Absolutely. Now, Zendesk and Amazon have a pretty close relationship, is my understanding. And we know that Amazon is famous for its customer-centric attitude. Wonderful thing about customers, of course, is that they're never really happy with everything that we have. So how does Zendesk fit in with that relationship with Amazon and how's your approach to customers? Yeah, I mean, the relationship we have with Amazon really excites me. We really have gone all in on our move to the cloud there, our sole provider. And we run all of our services on AWS. And in addition, we have some great partnerships with Amazon Connect, which allows us to provide great telephony and call center services to our customers. We have a great partnership around EventBridge and as well as AppConnect. So I think there is a fantastic relationship that we have where we're able to deliver, not just our basic services, but to really take advantage of a lot of the services that Amazon and AWS provide so that we can sort of accelerate our own roadmap and deliver great new features to our customers. Now, a lot of people have gone through a pretty similar adoption of the cloud at the moment. Unfortunate reason for doing so, but it certainly has driven the adoption very, very quickly. Xenders, of course, as you say, has been doing this for quite some time. So what have you noticed that stayed the same so from last year to this year? What were you already doing that you're now noticing everyone else's discovering? Actually, this is pretty good. Well, I think the rumors of the call center and the telephone as a channel, they're demise and greatly exaggerating. I think for as much as we're all excited about chat and messaging and all of the different ways that we can connect with our customers, there's something about having a phone number and allowing people to pick up the phone and talk to a human that refuses to go out of style. And so I think our partnership with Amazon Connect has been hugely powerful. And even recently, when a lot of this sort of acceleration has picked up, we saw a customer who had a power failure, a kind of massive failure of their own phone system be able to come to us, get connect up and running incredibly quickly and start taking thousands of calls a day. And that kind of sort of quick time to value, fast start ability for our customers just is hugely important now, but really, that's always been true. Right, yeah. I mean, when people want to call you and they want to talk to you, then they're not really happy if they can't get through to that. And particularly right now, being able to make that human to human connection, for me, I know that that's been a really important part of getting through this. I work remotely most of the time. So actually speaking to humans as we're doing now is a really refreshing change from just seeing everything on a text screen. Yeah, so it's interesting that the phone has actually been so resilient, even though we hear from a lot of young people say, oh, we never answered the phone when someone calls. But a lot of people are actually calling into businesses when they want to make contact or when they don't see things on the website. So how does Zendesk help to integrate with what people are doing in their online and digital channels through to what they're doing with phone system? Yeah, but I think fundamentally, people want their questions answered. One of my favorite studies that we did was around our benchmark study and we talked to millennials. And they said, the first place they go to get help is to their phone. But when you push it a little deeper, it was clear that they actually didn't know that the phone was for making a phone call. I think it was just all of the other help centers. The first way that a lot of people today are looking for answers is, I wanna Google it. And for that, you need a really great help center that has all that information out there. And then you want to have communities where people can talk to each other and get help. And then more and more, we're seeing the rise of messaging as a channel, both through the social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as native messaging, kind of ongoing conversations. You ordered your dinner, it hasn't arrived. It's so great to be able to go into those applications and just message to the business and figure out what's going on and get that sort of instantaneous response as well. Right, and you shared some stats with us regarding how much has moved across to some of these phone-based messaging channels. So, I'd say tickets coming in has risen about 50% and compared to some gains on live chats. So, people are really embracing the idea of being able to message, not just individual talking to your friends in the group chat, but actually using that to engage with the companies that they would normally use websites or phone. It's like, text chat is a thing. Yeah, I mean, it was funny to me. I think we're still in the US not quite as far along as a lot of our international friends. When traveling was a thing that we did, you know, I was always, like it was cool to see that there were billboards and ads that had WhatsApp phone numbers on them as a real way that businesses were wanting to engage. I mean, you think about wanting to be where your customers are. And today, so many of us do have, you know, WhatsApp and WeChat and Line and Vibra and they're all in our pocket and being able to provide all of those to businesses is a new way to engage. I think we're finding is hugely powerful. Right, so with all of these dynamic changes that have been happening and it sounds like it's actually just sort of riding the wave of what customers were already doing, we're just doing it just that little bit more. But have you noticed any other larger changes, possibly ones that aren't related to a pandemic, just general shifts that have been happening that you've seen in your customer base? Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think so much of what we're seeing is that people in general want answers quickly. And whether it's, you know, phone call is great and like I said, people are not gonna stop calling but I think people wanna make sure, less than like, I need a human to have a conversation. I want the answer quickly. And that's where we're really focused in both thinking about how we provide tools around automating some of getting those answers, using AI and ML so that people can come to us, ask questions and we can get them the best answer very quickly without having to engage a person. I think this idea of quick resolution is clearly becoming one of the most important things in customer sentiment. I think we know that more and more this idea of how quickly I can get my questions resolved or how easy it is for me to do business with you is a huge differentiator in how people make buying choices. And that automations long been an attractive idea. I mean, I'm old enough to remember expert systems and having a go at doing this kind of heavily automated way of resolving, particularly common issues. And I mean, we're familiar with call center chat scripts where there's here are the top three issues and or it will be in the IVR where it's like we're currently experiencing this particular problem. So that resolves your question quite quickly. But there's been a big rise in things like chatbots and the use of AI. How far advanced is that? Because I still remember some of the early forays into that were a little bit flaky and that could actually exacerbate the poor customer experience. I'm already having a problem and now your chatbots getting in the way. Have they gotten a lot better? Are they up to the challenge? Yeah, I mean, I think what's really critical when you're thinking about automation in the conversations you're having with customers, it's two things. One, don't try to hide that you're a computer, right? No, no, my name is Chad. I am a human. You're not- I am the Chad bought, yes. You're not telling anyone. So I think being really clear. And then, I think surfacing how to very easily opt out of those flows. I think, you know, automation is great, but it's not a way, you shouldn't think of it as a way to frustrate your users, to keep them tied up until you can get to them. It really is, give them some quick options and if those don't solve their problems, really make sure that you've got an escape valve, right? We were putting out a new sort of flow builder product at Zendesk and we have all of the different words that someone could say that are like, smashing the zero button that mean, please transfer me to a person, right? You're driving me crazy. Let me connect you to an agent. So we're really making sure that it's easy for customers to provide the solution where their customers can get the help they need rather than- I really like that. That's something I think that gets a little bit lost in the focus on computers and on automation is that the reason we do this is to help the humans. So when we have these AI systems, it's not actually to replace the human interaction, it's to make it better. It's to mean that we can then get to that genuine connection. Computers are fabulous when they work. It's when they don't, when they frustrate things that bothers us. And that's generally why we're calling is that something has already gone wrong and we're a bit frustrated. So adding more frustration doesn't sound like a good approach. It sounds like Zendesk's really got that dialed in very, very well. Is it something that you've always had? Is it something that you've refined over time? And can you teach it to a bunch of other companies? We would love to teach it to other people. No, I think we have always thought about how the machines can help the humans. And I think one, it's how can they help the customers, of course. But the other side that I don't think people talk about quite as much is how can we use computers to help agents? So you're talking to a person and how can we take sort of the best answers that they've given to other customers and surface those when a new agent is coming on board? How do we suggest the different kinds of workflows that they might wanna use to solve this problem in a more dynamic way? So I really like to think of the computers never as a replacement, but really as a sort of hidden superpower that organizations have to make every agent one of their best agents. Right, yes. It is a kind of external cyborg thing. I mean, I can't remember anything these days. I constantly write lists and they all live in computers. But they are, that's the kind of society that we live with today. And I think we should remember to embrace that side of things that a lot of life has actually gotten a lot better through the use of these computing systems. It's not all terrible. And I think more companies could probably learn from Zendesk and the approach that you've taken to center the humans, both the customers and your internal staff, the call center and the people who are providing this service. No one enjoys it when things are breaking and things have gone wrong. Being able to resolve that quickly makes a better experience for everybody. Yeah, I mean, I think we find over and over again, sometimes if you can handle an issue that's gone wrong, well, you can actually induce more loyalty than if someone never contacted you at all. So if you can really take advantage of the times you have, unfortunately, maybe messed up and make those customers happy, you really do put so much in the sort of loyalty piggy bank for later. It's really great. So for some of the companies that have maybe struggled with this a little bit and particularly under very trying conditions, is there some advice that you could give to them as there's some places that they should start to investigate this when they want to improve the way that they handle customer service, perhaps with things like Zendesk? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what we're focused on right now is this channel that's coming. Like I said, we think a lot about social messaging, but also in native messaging and how you can have a sort of ongoing long-term conversation for a long-time customer service, the sort of Holy Grove was chat and you could have an agent online and a human online and you could solve their problem and then move on, right? And sometimes though those things take a little longer to solve or you might have a big issue and a whole bunch of people who have an issue and maybe not enough agents to solve them. And so with messaging, we've really changed the dynamic. So chat was this completely synchronous, almost like a phone call kind of experience and with messaging, you're able to live in this sort of duality where we can have a conversation if we're both here, but just like with your friends, right? Sometimes you throw a message out to a friend, you put it in your pocket, you pick it up and you can pick up the conversation right where you left off. So bringing that paradigm into your customer support experience really allows you to take some of that fear out of handling the volume that might come from chat to be able to sort of have these ongoing sort of back and forth conversations over time. And also, and give that persistence so that we're always both in the same place when we share up a game together. Embracing what the technology does well and avoiding what it doesn't do well. That sounds like a plan. Yeah. Shauna, this has been fabulous. It is always very edifying for me to hear when companies are doing well and centering the humans to make the technology improve all of our lives. It has been wonderful to have you here on theCUBE. Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun. Great. And thank you for joining in and watching us here at theCUBE virtual and our special coverage of AWS Reinvent 2020. Do come back and look for more coverage of Reinvent 2020 right here on theCUBE next time. I've been your host, Justin Warren and we'll see you again soon.