 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, Florida, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, Stu Miniman joining me. We are at Enterprise Connect 2019, day three, graciously hosted by 5ix9ine. We've had great conversations with 5ix9ine folks, customers, partners, and we're very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE with the first time live. This is CEO of 5ix9ine, Rowan Trollett Rowan. Thank you so much for joining Stu and me today. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. Great to be here. And for hosting us, I was telling you before we went live, we've had a great three days of talking to your customers, your partners. This contact center is hot. It's electric. It's electric. I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to Contact Center Connect or Central or something. It's really all the innovation. I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that, wow, there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right. And not just us, but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now. The rise of the empowered consumer is incredible how this consumer behavior- That's the driver. Absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice. Yeah, we call it the experience economy. It's like, you know, we're all, and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers. And when we deal with brands, we want to have a great experience all around. Like not just when we're buying or when we're using or, but you know, from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get. And we're really, really focused on that. So that's the driver. And you know, enterprises have realized and businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do. So it's emerging as this extraordinarily important part of every business. Yeah, Rowan, one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learned this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that we're using it behind them because it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer. And if I do need to call them what that experience would be like. That's right. So we think a lot about customer love. What does it take to get a customer to love your business? And it doesn't only take having a great product. It takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center. It's where all the action happens, right? It's right at that frontline. It's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you? How do they greet you? What is it like? Does the person know who you are? Do they give you that delightful experience? And you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just greats on us. Great, great. And 5.9 is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses. One of the things we heard too in terms of Omni channel and you know as these empowered consumers we want a company to communicate with us as you were saying before and know us on whatever channel that we want. But one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool but that really companies of any industry thing. I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone. So I just was surprised to learn that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that were surprising too Ro and it's voices sexy, voices back. It's we have to have the humans and the empathy. So there's some sort of old school things that are coming back and researching is critical. Yeah well you know on the Omni channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about, I keep this really simple for people. Think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting. Sometimes I would call you, sometimes I would text you, sometimes I might send you an email. They're all different. Not one or the other is better or worse. They're just different. If I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not going to call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone. I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car and I'm going to call you on the phone. The call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed. So that's really the, that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers. The fancy word for that is Omni channel. You know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver that out of the box, right? And we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can, we partner with that and do that very effectively. Yeah, Rowan, one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening. One of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment? I have my on premises, I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle. You know, we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling, you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more. I know cloud's one of the main reasons you know for five nine success in one of the regions that came over. We're a market leader in cloud. You know that's how we started. We're born in the cloud so we don't have any on premises technology. You know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this. You know we're all about the agents log into our website at five nine dot com. They get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight. There's nothing to deploy. There's no closets of equipment anywhere. It's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution. The idea back to your point that you know there's some things that are too big for the cloud. That's total BS, I just have to say it. That's not true. What I would agree with though is that we're on a journey. You know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud, right? And so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make. And you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're going to tell. And it's not a lie. It's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer. And we're essentially, we're through the evangelism phase here. There's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses. It is, you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year. Then that's doubled in the last two years. So it's the fastest growing segment of our business is large scale contact centers running 100% on the cloud and they are loving it. And another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI. We've, that's been a theme. I know that AI came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience. Yeah, well I'll tell you a little story. I was call center agent my first job. We were talking about that earlier. And you know I took a lot of calls and 8,000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about. You've heard them all. You're never going to be surprised by an inbound sort of caller or message or whatever. You've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going. But the big challenge in the context. So if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions. After you take 8,000 calls you're fast. You're efficient. You can deliver that great experience. The big problem in the contact center mostly a labor driven operation. There's very high turnover. Contact center reps once they've taken out these 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center. We think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem. To deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents. Let them focus on the empathy. We say let the machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart. Because it's really important that you have that human touch in that experience. That's what people crave in life. It's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or on IVR. As far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IVRs. Nobody likes talking to a computer. You want to talk to a human. So our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient. How we can arm them with real time interactions and that's all about leveraging data. Because the data in this case is voice. So voice is the new data. It's the biggest source of dark data in the enterprise. Customer voice, actual voice like wave files. What's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time, take that customer voice, convert it into text, real time, with high accuracy, better than humans can do. And we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next. That sort of superpower rep who's taken 8,000 calls. How do you make every rep like that? We are sort of heading down a path to enable that. The very first step though is you have to get to the cloud. Because this technology cannot be done on premises. So you can dance around that all you want, but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on premises with the legacy approach. You have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we started. Well that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week at the show and something we heard a lot from your team. Something that's happening just across industries. Love to hear a little bit about, you know, just future growth where you, you know, 5.9 had a very strong product, great customer experience to begin with, but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting to move down the AI path, data becomes more and more important part of the story. What should we be looking at for 5.9 kind of the next 12 to 18 months? Yeah, well I think 5.9's got the best experience for our customers. And you know, where we're heading, the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before. So that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best in class experience, right? That predictive, you never wait, you get someone, whether it's text, whether it's email, whether it's chat, you get a great answer, you get a human touch, but you also get the answer you want. And whether that's inbound or outbound, if it's outbound, it's really important that it is not only predictive, but that it's anticipating what your needs are. Because I like to say, if I have to call support, like that's already a problem. Why am I calling you? You know, with IoT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data, part of what you should be doing, every business should be doing, is anticipating what their customers are going to need and sharing that information across their company and the contact center is really where that all comes together. To be able to say, look, we know this customer's already having a problem with this. Like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them. We should be calling them to figure out how we can make that experience better. So really honing and optimizing and anticipating your user's needs is sort of the other side of this. So it's both the inbound case I talked about, but also that outbound case and that proactive engagement that I think every end user really would like in an effective way. Five nine has about five billion recorded conversations, customer conversations a year. Five billion minutes a year. Five billion minutes, thank you. A year, tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dark data and becoming predictive. Talk to us about that as a competitive advantage. Yeah, the very first step is lighting that data up. We're lighting it up now with Machine Learning. We signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech to text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data. So very, very secure. Obviously our name is Five Nine. We're known as the trusted brand in this industry. Five Nines of reliability is what we're all about. So this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step, it's really okay, take that voice data which is not very useful. Like you can have agent, spot check or supervisors listening on calls. That doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier. The more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text. Let's then take that text and it becomes computable. You can summarize it. We can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it, to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls, they can quickly scan down and see what's happened. Also to be predictive. Hey, we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time. We can actually go predict what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set. So there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer, from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data. So we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business. Yeah, Ron, one of the interesting things is if you look around this show floor, you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps in blurring the lines between some of the environments. We had Carfax on, good customer of yours started out with the contact center agents but they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound, not our traditional contact center. You're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but some of those lines blur quite a bit so. What is it called to a contact center that the lines of that are blurring? The traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years or 30 years ago was like rows of cubes, people on headsets, like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers, it's nurse practitioners, it's doctors, it's other experts that are interacting with their customers, it's education consultants and specialists, these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today. I think about 10 years ago, I'll give you an example of this transition, 10 years ago my wife's step was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do because it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it, she didn't give up, she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk. So fast forward to a year ago and we've moved, we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing, consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go all right, all right, I'll get it done. So what do I do? I think about, well last time I did this, I got a rack, how am I gonna get a rack? I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go onto their websites and I do a little bit of self-service like discovery and learning about their products. I'm an empowered consumer at this point, right? I find three different companies, I call one of them because like this is a big purchase, I don't want this huge thing to show up, steal, blah, blah, blah at my house if it's the wrong thing, I get ahold of someone, I talk to them, I have a good experience. I hang up, I called one other one just to kind of compare it, I compared the two, then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep. So 10 years ago, let me give you the punchline here, 10 years ago, one trip to brick and mortar, zero calls to the call center, 10 years later now, zero trips to brick and mortar, two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale. That's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they'll look very different than how they look today. That's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact center agent is, I wouldn't have thought of it as, you're right, these are nurse practitioners, it's so diverse. Speaking of diversity, I know that 5ix9ine has several thousand customers globally. One of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because- Woman Founded Company? Woman Founded Company, not a tech company, talk to us about how 5ix9ine helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid? Yes, we did George Clooney a solid. So in the case of Estee Lauder, they were a, they're a huge company, 11 billion dollars in sales. They're an amalgamation of 40 different brands, very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies, they did not integrate any of them. So you call any one of these places, it was all different contact centers. They didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had. We had to sort of make that a part of the discovery process and global. They're in all over the world. They're in Asia Pacific, they're in France and Europe, they're here. They had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases. They had independent technology contracts in almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot. So we engaged with them and basically provided, we helped them write the RFP, we helped work through that process, we got them on board with our software, nothing to deploy, nothing to install, right? Just have your agents log in, we did a training and we were able to onboard well over 1,000 agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many, many different businesses. And some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like have fewer contracts or a better system but it was also to tie that system back into the business. So they have some products that they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever. Gift bags and they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on. They don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I would use, maybe you would go to the VIPs but I'll call the regular contact center. They want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure they get the right specialist at the right time to that customer. And that, well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the onboardings, George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills, being able to route things in a complex way, understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event. That event has some VIPs at the event. We've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill, this is the right person for it to go to. They're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time. So we saw it in action, it was obviously great and what made us feel good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted. Wow, all that contacts, Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me this afternoon. And also for 5.9, for graciously hosting theCUBE the last three days, we've had a great time, great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year. Me too, stay tuned. Stay tuned for Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.