 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Ehrlich, for theCUBE. We're now joined by our guest, Jonathan Rendy. He is the SVP and general manager of products at PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program today. That's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Natalie. Well, Summit 2021, an exciting time for PagerDuty. What are you looking forward to most? Well, finally, I'm looking forward to at some point, hopefully not having to wear my mask in public anymore. I know that's the right thing to do still, and I am doing that, but it seems like things are starting to get back to normal. And because of that, what we're finding is a lot of our customers and clients' business practices, especially in certain industries, like hospitality and entertainment, they're coming back as well. And to pre-COVID levels and their same level of usage and everything, obviously that got a little bit dampened during the pandemic. So I'm just looking forward to business as normal and probably the biggest is talking to my colleagues in three dimensions in person versus two dimensions on a Zoom. Right, right. And yeah, I mean, it seems like unfortunately, not this time we get to see each other in person, but looks like customer service is a big focus at the Summit. Why is it so important right now for companies to provide a seamless customer and digital experience? Well, we've learned a lot in the last 12 to 15 months. And one of those is that our historical audiences, developers, IT ops folks who have been on the front lines, and for the, you know, a big part, they've been distributed already. Customer service teams have always been on the front lines whenever there's a customer experience problem. And they're no longer working in the office across cubes, being able to communicate their remote now as well. And so with a couple of really interesting things have happened, one, with the rise of digital services, the use, the demand on them, heck my own parents are now ordering groceries online, which they never did before. And with the increase with many of our clients and customers, the customer success organizations have to deliver a whole new level of customer experience for that digital experience versus just the brick and mortar, you know, in on-premise type of experience. And it's created a whole new set of needs around collaboration, communication. And we've seen that customer service teams are a critical component working with development and IT, part of kind of like a three legged stool that has to work together really well for great customer experience now in the digital age. Right, well, you mentioned this big push for digital, and especially in light of the pandemic and what other ways did the pandemic impact customer service? So first, you know, like maybe building on what I was just saying, just the collaboration aspect, most customer service teams have historically that I get an opportunity to work with. They have to work for better, for worse in reactive mode. You know, cases get opened up, something isn't working, a customer is unhappy, there's a customer satisfaction issue. And so they're pulled in. And those individuals, they're lacking all the context that they need. And oftentimes they're in a world where they have to pull in other individuals. And, you know, I think gone are the days where they can pass that customer case off to just another individual and then another individual and another individual. That's incredibly frustrating from a customer business experience. And so this notion of eliminating handoffs and empowering that individual to be able to reach out to the people that they need and handle that case kind of from beginning to end and communicate directly, bidirectionally with engineering teams when they're fixing, you know, an issue with the electronic shopping cart, you know, digital shopping cart, that's critical. They need to have that flow of information because they're a member of the team so that they can proactively communicate with their clients and give them updates of what's happening. Last year you announced a customer service solution. What are you announcing this week? So a couple of big things. We've recently just made available kind of like a complete in-context experience. Our pager duty for customer service app for Zendesk and upcoming with Salesforce. It's really all about an agent not having to switch out of their help desk, their contact center environment. They can get all the information they need in their world without having to move to other applications. They can instantly know if there's a really important issue in the back office with the systems, with the digital services that they need to be aware of. So we have a whole new set of pager duty for customer service products that we've made available. And then also a couple of different options for our customers and how they can consume that. We have a professional version and a business version. And really the difference between the two is if you want your customer service agents to really have full case ownership to be able to be empowered to do everything, pull in the folks that they want to, they can do that in the business version of our package. And how and why should DevOps and customer service work together in your opinion? So historically, I've always felt that, many times engineering teams will identify because of monitoring and many other technologies that they're using, they'll understand that there is something that could be customer impacting and they'll work that diligently. Unfortunately, it's been more of a kind of a stakeholder relationship only with customer service. Yes, they need to know about it. But what we've really worked towards is making sure that customer service is not just the stakeholder, they're an active participant because issues can be identified from customers on the front end or proactively by items, issues that are identified in the back office. So being able to be right in the center of the customer world is super, super critical. Right, and when you look at the next year and even the next five years, what are you most excited about? I think it's really empowering, helping our customers, our community, customer service agents on the frontline do more, have more power at their fingertips. I know over and over again, I think greater value is delivered to customers through those individuals that are contacted not always in the best of times. And there's some amazing statistics out there such that it takes 10 good experiences to make up for a bad experience if you're a customer, right? So there's a big impact to this or if there's a particular pricing or product issue that a customer service issue is way more important, way more impactful, will lead somebody to use an alternative service versus the product itself or the pricing of it. It's the service element that's most important. Given all of that, when somebody does, in their time of need, have a customer service issue when they do have a positive experience three quarters of the time, they're super open to sharing that with others. And so if I look at some of that, again, what I'm excited about looking forward is how can we empower those agents to be able from cradle to grave, take a case that comes in, proactively communicate with their customers to provide a great experience, to address some of those statistics and we're really focused on automating that process. It's another truism is that, while every business wants their customers to exponentially grow, you can't grow your customer service organization exponentially, you can't hire an infinite number of bodies. And so technology plays a really important role in that and having paid your duty for customer service as an integrated part of your sales force or your Zendesk or your fresh desk implementation will help those teams scale little quality of life for those agents is important. And we believe that we can really help in that area of minimize stress disruptions and help them provide better service to their customers. Yeah, well, we touched on a lot of areas in terms of customer service, but another key feature of your role at Patriot Duty is in product. So if you could outline some of the key products at Patriot Duty and perhaps some insight on what you have in the pipeline. Yeah, so outside of just customer service, one of the huge parts of our community are those in IT ops and DevOps. And one of the areas of responsibility I have working with the team that I'm super proud of is what we're doing with what was recently announced last September are Rundeck acquisitions. So we're announcing something called Runbook Actions as a part of the Patriot Duty platform. Think of it as a very simple, safe level of automation that every DevOps team can use to better address issues and kind of eliminate a lot of the toil and manual activities when they get pulled into a major event. And so we're releasing this new add-on product very excited about it. It's the first introduction of our Rundeck technology new as a part of the integrated within the Patriot Duty platform. So the reception we've gotten so far in early days has been tremendous and people are really excited, again to eliminate toil, eliminate a lot of manual activities, allow them to fix items faster when seconds really matter. Terrific. Well, really, really appreciate your insights, Jonathan Rendy, SVP and general manager of products at Patriot Duty. Thanks very much for your insights. Thank you, Natalie. Terrific. And that's all for the session of the Patriot Duty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich. Thank you for watching. And we're clear.