 Hey everyone welcome to the cubes coverage of pager duty summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin I'm here with one of our alum my Jonathan Rendy joins me the SVP of products at pager duty Jonathan great to have you on the program It's wonderful to be here. Thank you Lisa. It's great to be back at pager duty summit so much news this morning So much buzz and excitement talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about as we are in such a Massively different work environment these days. Yeah, so much has been going on and we've been innovating in so many areas I think you heard in the keynote this morning Automation is such a foundational part of pager duty now and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition from a couple of years ago And we've also extended Pager duty to new audiences So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and IT ops and We've really come to realize that in the front office is so important in one of the the leading departments there that we can Make an impact and extend into With our solution is customer service customer service is Absolutely critical these days as we all know one of the things that was in very short supply the last couple of years is patients Patients when you're a consumer patients when you're a business person And so the the the voice of the customer being able to get things escalated quickly and resolve quickly to those customer service folks is Critical for any organization without that People easily go to Twitter or Reddit and escalate problems Publicly and suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem for the organization. Yeah, you're you're spot on I mean expectations are at an all-time high people's tolerance is at an all-time low and That gets translated I always think to the front door of the organization when there is something that doesn't go right and that's typically the poor customer service agents who have to deal with that kind of feedback and open up cases and deal with it and You know, unfortunately, they're not armed a lot of times with the information that could help them not only be better Reactive but be better proactive and have information to actually turn what could be a bad experience into a really good one You mentioned something really interesting Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning that I was able to watch and you said it takes for every Negative experience that a customer or consumer has it takes seven additional positive Experiences to turn them back around and I thought wow Do we even have the patience or the tolerance to your point to give a business seven more options to turn our Experience around yeah, it's tough and it's it's very very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it The connection between the front office and the back office. There is no real gold standard for that And and so like is there is there a path forward? Is there a way forward? We believe there is and we believe there's a way to help but teams really need to focus on getting information to those folks so that these very negative kind of Situations can become a customer satisfaction can become something where a customer feels like wow, I didn't expect that there was another statistic that We we heard about the other day, which is you know greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers Not from the monitoring products So you know whether it's 50 or 40 or 30 it doesn't really matter The customer is a signal and it's so important to be attentive to that signal What are some that well that you'd rather have that found out before the customer even notices talk to me about some Of the things that pager-duty just announced that are going to help not just the front office back office kind of blurred blurred lines there, but also to ensure that the incident response is Smarter it's faster and it's being able to detect things before the customer even notices yeah, so The the trick the the $64,000 question however you want to phrase it or characterize it is all about getting teams ahead of problems and While I think it's unrealistic to ever like every single customer get ahead of any issue that any customer could see It's so important that the first customer that comes in with an issue Becomes near to the last customer that comes in with an issue meaning that one Everybody knows about that and they know how it's related to existing issues. That's important so that other customers can be preemptively Explained but then given what pager-duty has always done sometimes we know about issues on the back end that Maybe impacting customers that they don't know about yet So a shopping cart may not be working correctly But before somebody hits it if the customer service team knows about that right away They can proactively get ready for communication to their customers to let them know. Hey there might be an issue here We know about it. We're working on it. Please stay tuned or direct them to something else that can help them I can imagine that goes a long way to CSAT scores NPS scores brand reputation reducing churn Big time big time whether it's CSAT or NPS You know everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year of getting that big sale going to wanting to order that and then either not being able to complete the order or Having to wait too long for it to be delivered and then you end up having to go to a brick-and-mortar Outlet to buy it there anyway, so there's so many opportunities and those situations will happen Outages will occur. It's just a matter of when those can be avoided in those bad situations Via the use of other discounts coupons other job, you know customer satisfaction areas You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones Definitely, and I think we all we all have that expectation that that's going to happen When things do when outages do happen because to your point that's those are the things that it's not is it going to happen? It's when and how quickly can we recover from that? So it's we minimize the impact on everybody else a couple of the things that you announced to this morning Incident objects and service cloud talk to me about what that is. It looks like a deeper partnership integration with sales force What are some of the benefits that your customers can expect? Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office and one of one of the biggest known to the world as sales force And so we've been working with the service cloud team there for going on a couple of years now Better integrating our Platform into what they're doing and we've actually built an app that runs inside of service cloud So a customer service agent doesn't need to swivel chair around and look at other products in order to understand What's going on in the back office? It's all built into their experience. That's one number one number two We've upped that relationship and invested more where service cloud sales force has come out with a new Incident capability and so we're integrating directly to that so we can sync up with that system of record from pager duty So wherever the issues are found whether it's in distributed DevOps teams or whether it's in a central team Or whether it's a case agent working on the front end Everything will be kept in sync. So we're really excited about that bidirectional Integration that bidirectional sync is critical. We have you know one of the biggest challenges We've been talking about it since we were back at HP days back in the day Jonathan silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges is there still silos between teams and systems which impacts You know time to identify an incident time to repair that incident and then of course let alone repair the Relationship with the customer on the other end Yeah, yeah, and there's some great examples working with our own customers that we run into where when we can make that golden Connection between the front office and the back office and sync up customer cases with incidents Magic starts to happen. So we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident Doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting They don't realize that there were three and then four and then five case tickets opened up That's really impacting customers and when they see that rise in customer impact They change the priority they get other people involved the urgency changes on that issue Imagine working in a world where that visibility doesn't exist People continue to work at their own pace and who suffers the customer the customer experience Without that visibility so much can suffer and and quickly we also had this expectation I mentioned one of the things that it was in short supply in the pandemic as patients and need to intolerance But another thing is we expect things in real-time real-time access To data real-time access to the customer to a product or service is no longer a nice to have it is business critical for organizations in every industry yeah, yeah and You know that the customer service is such a obviously service-centered activity that It can be you know death by a thousand paper cuts to a customer experience and to the point that you're raising Nobody likes to contact finally someone in as an agent and then get passed to another agent Who gets passed to another agent and have to repeat the problem that you're having so many times What if we could capture all that context together? What if we could empower that agent to be able to manage that case from beginning to end more effectively like What would the reflection be on the customers who are calling in they would feel taken care of they would feel like They were heard they wouldn't feel ignored so to speak so all of that is a part of our solution that we're Partnering not only with Salesforce But also with Zendesk and others to deliver talk about the automation in CS ops and some of them main benefits Obviously you mentioned this a minute ago But the ability to empower those agents to have that context is night and day compared to you know the solutions from back in The day yeah automation is so fundamental and foundational to everything we do at pager duty And if you look at all the audiences that make use of pager duty today, whether it's developers whether it's IT operations and now customer service agents. It's no surprise that You know everyone has to do more with less everyone's working in a more siloed disconnected manner So the amount of potential toil potential manual steps Having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system Or do research or ask a customer multiple times when it could automatically be captured What their problem is what the environment is and all that information from an agent could be automatically Inserted into the case how valuable is that not only for the case But then the teams on the back end that that helps them diagnose and fix those problems So the amount of automation that we've built and now just announced and made available as a part of Customer service ops just like in dev ops with our automation actions Really important to automating some of those manual toil steps for those agents where again 50 60% of their time is spent doing manual activities. We can get rid of that We can empower them to do more to do more with less to do more with less and do more faster and make such a huge difference there Talk a little bit about the the dev ops CS ops Relationship, you know, one of the one of the things that's kind of ironic is here. We are in 2022 We have so many tools to collaborate and connect yet There's still so many silos and that can either break trust between a customer and a and a vendor or a solution provider or it can really facilitate trust and that was a big theme of The keynote this morning is that trust but talk about the trust that is you paid you to do really things Essential between the dev ops folks and the CS ops folks. Yeah, it's it's it's critical as I kind of mentioned before There really isn't a golden path a golden connection a standard that's been set between CS the customer service organizations and the back office and How I like to characterize it and what I've seen over the years working with customers is Frequently, it's it's almost like when I was a little kid. I lived nearby a Semi-pro baseball team and I could never get tickets and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence And I would look at the game through a little knot hole in the fence and I'd be like, man That would be so great to be in there. Well, that's essentially customer service Sitting there looking at the game happening Constantly like trying to interrupt the teams and saying hey, what about us like and so by making that a seamless Connection by making customer service a part of the solution a part of the team in a non impactful intrusive way Everybody gets what they need. No one's interrupted and now those customer service agents. They're sitting in the stands They're not looking through the little knot hole at the back of the center field. Well, you gotta tell us to never get tickets Can you go to pro games now? No Still waiting Talk to me last question here I asked you before we we started filming if you had a crystal ball or or a magic eight ball So next time at least bring me a magic eight ball What are some of the predictions that you have is you see where we are in now half of calendar 22 almost gone The announcements coming from pager duty today the synergies between pager duty It's what 21,000 plus customers your partners What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? So a couple things one is I Really think the first example we talk about the operations cloud what pager duty is and To me what it really is is it's not just the DevOps audiences and the IT ops and the SRE teams in the back office Back offices that have to deal with interrupted Real-time work, but it's other parts of the organization as well That have to get proactive versus reactive and the first of those The the first step that kind of personifies the operations cloud outside of that back office is customer service But there will be more there will be more whether it's security or other teams So it's the audiences that can participate and engage in like real-time work That's one and then I think in the area of customer service and customer service operations where we are What we've been doing and what we've been so focused on is making sure that Those agents can start to get proactive and start to get to the next step But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them? Proactively in a targeted way talk to their customers and provide that as an automated part of the process today That's very manual so we can empower them with information But a lot of their communication with their customers is manual What if we could automate that and that's our plans and that's what I'm really excited about Can you imagine that the trust built between an empowered Proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end that there's the sky is the limit on that one if I'm a platinum Customer or I'm a silver customer. I'm paying for a certain level of customer service. How great would it be if? Based on the extra that I'm paying I'm actually getting that service proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them that to me is building trust Absolutely, Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining me on the Cube They're great to see you back in person and great to hear some of the things coming down the road for pager duty And we're excited to to see your predictions come true. Thanks for your time. Likewise, Lisa. Thank you very much My pleasure for Jonathan. Wendy. I'm Lisa Martin covering the cube on the ground at pager duty summit 22 stick around I'll be right back with my next guest