 and I'm a long time industry analyst. I was at IDC for a number of years and ran the company's largest and most profitable business. I focused on a lot of areas, infrastructure, software. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Peter Burris and once again theCUBE is here at Oracle Modern Customer Experience, having a great series of conversations about the evolution of marketing, the role the technology's playing, and especially important, the centerpiece that data now has within a overall orientation towards customer experience. Now one of the key features of that notion of customer experience is what's going on with service. And this is a great session because we've got a representative from Oracle, but also a customer as well. And welcome to Steve Fioretti, who's a VP of Product Management, Oracle Service Cloud, and Heather Miksch, who's the vice president of field and product operations at Carbon. Thank you. Welcome to the team. Thank you Peter. So Steve, why don't we start with you? Sure. Oracle is here talking about how the cloud can help transform field and service operations. Right. How is it transforming it? What are the trends? Well there's a lot of interesting trends that are affecting customer service You talked about marketing, and a lot of people say customer service is the new marketing. A lot of interactions that people have with the company is in the customer service group, and that really affects their impact on the brand. And there's a lot of things going on in the industry that are affecting customer service. There's new dynamic channels emerging. For example, people want to use Facebook Messenger or WeChat or WhatsApp as customer service channels to interact with their brand. It's much beyond just email, phone, chat, things like that. So new channels are emerging and companies have to think about how do I integrate that into my customer service organization. Automation is really coming to the fore. So in our personal lives we use Siri and other interactions we have with Alexa. So those are coming into businesses to automate those perhaps more simple customer service processes. And the internet of things is really taking off where connected devices are allowing organizations to deliver predictive and proactive service. And on the automation front, they're even extending to where organizations are taking robotics and making robots agents in a retail store, for example. Are you talking about me? Wow, it's Pepper. Hi, Pepper. I didn't know you were here. That's awesome. So Pepper, I'll ask you a question. What makes you a great customer service agent? I'm smart, I'm connected, and I'm cool. And most importantly, I'm effective. And we replaced John Furrier with Pepper. Excellent. So going to the next question about the, as we use robotics, as we use many of these things, we have to remember that these are not magic. There really is no intelligence in a classical sense in them. They are still being driven to perform functions, take action based on the availability of data that is coming off of customers. So talk a little bit about the role that data, data integration, and some of these new tools, AI or adaptive intelligence, as you're calling it, are playing in ensuring that we can enhance customer experience with new devices and these new channels. You're absolutely right. I mean, it's all about making the experience with a device like Pepper personalized and effective and data knowing what a consumer wants, what their preference is, and perhaps anticipating their preferences before, they even know that they're past buying history and taking all that first party data and third party data, combining that with artificial intelligence to deliver those personalized smart experiences is what's really happening. You heard a lot at this conference about Oracle's adaptive intelligence initiative and in the context of service, we're going to be building applications for things like account health, predictive field service. So, you can predict ahead of time that a machine may need service or break. And our customer here, Heather from Carbon is going to talk a lot about what they're doing with smarts and how they resonate with Carbon. Well, so Carbon is we manufacture an industrial 3D printer and we have a process we call digital light synthesis which allows us to make photopolymer materials that are robust enough to use in final production. So our goal is to take customers from their design of their part straight into production using the 3D printer as the means of production. And the reason why this is so exciting to Carbon is our printer is actually an IoT device. It operates over the internet and it operates through a browser. As a result, all types of data from machine data from the printer are flowing into our databases as well as operational data. How long is the print taking? What type of resonance the customer using? How often are they printing? Are they running into problems with their print? We've also built in a feedback system for the user directly in the user interface that flows directly through our channels into our databases and it actually opens tickets in our Oracle Service Cloud for agents to contact the customers. The way we use this in a very practical standpoint to give you one example is for machine failures. The idea that we can monitor our printers in the field and we can see if a part is having problems and might fail and we can actually proactively reach out to the customer and say, we'd like to be there in a couple of weeks, change out this part, it's not affecting your machine yet, it's not affecting your prints and the customer is now able, instead of having unplanned downtime, which can be very difficult for a production environment, they now have planned downtime. This technology is nothing new. The example I like to use is in the nuclear power industry, you don't wait until you have a core meltdown and then call your service engineer. Like it's been around for a while. But what's new is actually taking this technology and putting it in capital equipment or putting it in devices like Pepper. I mean, she's also an IoT device or even putting it into some of our wearables or just other consumer products as well. And once you actually have this data coming through to the manufacturer of the device, it's really almost limitless what you can do with it. And just in our short time of carbon actually working on this problem, we have about 70% of our hardware failures are actually predictive so that we're able to go out and repair the printer before the customer even realizes they have a problem. And some of the problems we can actually fix before the customer knows anything and we can fix them remotely from our offices in Redwood City. And it's interesting, the Cube this week was also at the National Association of Broadcasters or the NAB show and we actually had an astronaut present over the Cube. Well, one of the things that's interesting is there are 3D printers now on, up on the space station so that you can print things a long ways away. And that's one of the advantages, one of the great use cases of 3D printers is that you can actually assemble or you can create and assemble things in very, very unfriendly environments. So being able to schedule and being able to plan that is absolutely essential. Yes, yes. And you can see so for us, for 3D printers, some of the use cases that our customers are coming to us with is they are companies, their own capital equipment manufacturers that have hundreds of thousands of spare parts. And they don't want to have to keep these inventories of massive spare parts. They want to have a design sent directly to a printer maybe it's located in another country, closer to the point of use for that part, print out the part and get it to the user faster. The idea is to actually move, one of the ideas is to move manufacturing closer to the point of use so that we're not spending all this time shipping products across the entire world when we can actually be producing them much closer to the user. So that's a gesture when we think about, again, the role of integration, the role of data, the idea of the service cloud, that there will be circumstances in which the part is printed. And the capital equipment lessor or the person who sold it is on site to then put it in place and assemble it. So now we're talking about multiple people operating very, very quickly with a lot of new technology. And we now see why these types of devices and the need for that data sharing is so crucial. So how is Oracle, in Oracle's vision of how service is going to be performed in the future facilitating these types of interactions? So, I mean, what we have to do is think about the technologies that are powering devices like robots that are providing technologies that are powering virtual assistance to automate customer interactions, to deliver technologies that help customers serve themselves. Another example is more and more people, particularly younger generation, they don't want a phone, you have a phone in home, they don't want to call you, they don't want to have anything to do with the phone. So that's why things like messaging, self-service, going to a website and finding their own answer are critical. So enabling and anticipating the data, the technologies, the way, the channels that people want to use are all going to allow brands like Carbon and others to deliver great customer service. How are you using the Oracle Service Cloud then to facilitate many of these changes in your organization? So right now what we have is, we actually have a database we use for our big machine data. So all the big machine data comes through, all the data coming off of our printers, and then we've integrated that database into Oracle Service Cloud. So then instead of a customer having to phone up if they have a problem, we actually have on our user interface, a little button, it just says request help, that's all they need to do, and it's within the print job that they've been working on. All of that data about their print job, who the user is, what the company is, which printer they were using, how long was the print? Any specific information they want to say about the print, like why they're having trouble with it, it flows through into Oracle Service Cloud. And within the Oracle Service Cloud environment, we can open up our big machine database within that same environment. We can look at the actual print job, and then we have an escalation tool we use for our engineering team. If we need to escalate, we can do that out of Service Cloud as well. And the idea is that there's very little manual entry of any other information. All of that is just flowing through and everybody within the organization, whether it's the people that are first in front of the customer, or whether it's our engineers have access to the exact same data. But it's a system also then, through the escalation process, saying, well, we really got to get someone at the hardware level or someone here or someone at the design level. So you're flowing it to the right person. Yes, yes, absolutely. And the other fabulous thing about having these internet connected devices is even when we do need to send somebody out on site to make a hardware fix, because of the diagnostic data we have from the device, we have until now 100% success rate in having the right part on hand, which is if you've ever had much experience with capital equipment repairs or even a repair of your dishwasher. Sometimes if people don't have the right parts, we always have the right parts. It's too bad you couldn't print the part with the printer when it's down. So that's an interesting thing. We actually do have some parts within our printer that are printed on our printers. So it's, yeah, it's pretty fun. Can I talk about one other short example of another customer that actually, Heather's met here at the show, Denon and Moran. So they make all sorts of audio equipment, high-end audio equipment, and they've got a new brand of speakers, wireless speakers called Hios. And when they first started selling those to consumers, they noticed these are connected as well. They noticed that a number of them were having a chip problem remotely. People were calling in. So they went out and they pinged, if you will, because they're connected all of their consumer deployments and they could tell that a small percentage of them were going to fail. They actually shipped speakers to those consumers before they even knew they had a problem. And they arranged to pick up the old ones. And you can imagine the value of the customer loyalty and customer sap that that had. So that proactive, predictive customer surface example in the consumer world and in the business world is really makes service that much. So customer service increasingly is taking some degree of responsibility for ensuring that things operate within the threshold as opposed to fixing things after they've broken. Yes, absolutely, yes. So how does that tie back into marketing and sales? So at Carbon, what is the way these feedback that are being used to also inform marketing and selling? So the interesting thing is that because we're also gathering operational data, we actually use the data coming off our printers for much more than just a service organization. In fact, our entire company is becoming more and more dependent on this printer data. So for instance, our product group, when they're looking at bringing out a new feature, they're actually looking at the data of the actual prints and the features that the customers are currently using and deciding, do we need to augment this feature? Do we need to bring out another tool for our customers to use? And then looking at the printer data to make those decisions and to prioritize what projects to work on. Cause as you can imagine, we've just got a ton of projects that we'd like to work on and we need to make some priorities. The other thing that we're looking at is changing customer dynamics. Like we have all of our customers are broken down into different industries and we monitor the different printing behaviors across industries. And we've been surprised. Like there's certain industries that have grown faster than we would have expected. And because we've got this data that we look at every single day, we're looking at our customers print data, we can actually make much faster corrections to either marketing campaigns or sales strategies or things like that, rather than waiting for a monthly roll up or a quarterly roll up or something like that. Yeah. So who's the steward of data within carbon? Who is the steward of data? We actually have a director of business operations. His name is Chris Hutton. He actually works a lot with Oracle. He recently spoke at the Modern Finance Experience with software cats. And I would say that if anyone's a steward of the data, he's probably the grand puba of this data, but many of us have access to it. I mean, I can go into some of these databases and pull all the data I need. We don't really restrict it. But he's making sure that every, he's making sure that the data works for everybody in the organization. Yeah, I'd say to some degree, yes. We also have our software engineers making sure the printer data is not there. I think I would like the title, Steward of Data. Yeah. I think that's, I think I just found my new title. It won't be long. Somebody's going to call. Exactly. One other quick example of how that feedback's happening between a customer service experience and let's say marketing is back to my Denon and Moran's example. They had another set of speakers and they can tell, they often, the consumer will label the speaker based upon, you know, this is the living room, this is the bedroom. And they had some failures on another brand of speakers and they noticed a commonality. They were all labeled bathroom. And basically, they realized that their speakers, some of these speakers couldn't handle the humidity that was happening in the bathroom, drove that back into product development, built a new series of speakers quickly for a bathroom that were more waterproof or moisture resistant and created a new product extension that actually sells quite well. So there's just a simple example of how that data flowed back into product development and marketing. So Heather, you're not feeling like a fish out of water here at a customer experience show. No, no, of course not. No, I don't know this kind of stuff. What's exciting you about listening to mainly marketers but a lot of customers experience too. You know, people that are in service, they get excited. And fundamentally, there's all kinds of reasons for going to business and increasing revenue and cutting costs and all those things. But fundamentally, people are in service to help other people. Like that's what gets us up in the morning. That's what makes us jump out of bed. So the idea that there's all these companies doing these super cool things where you can really proactively be helping people instead of waiting till they're already in trouble, that's like you've just burst through a barrier that's existed for millennia. The fact that we can actually start predicting problems. But we also talked a lot here on theCUBE this week about the role that talent's going to play. And while I've never been in a hardcore customer service job, I know that people who have gone in often got demoralized because they were always being yelled at because there was a problem. And I don't believe it's attracting a new class person because they can actually be participating in anticipating and solving problems. Yes, yes. Well, and it does take a certain type to be a customer, to be in front of customers all the time. We always say the number one rule is you have to hire happy people to be put in that position. So how about, actually that was a very insightful question because we were on a panel yesterday with an analyst, Dennis Pombrian from the Beagle Research and he talked about, well, a couple of dynamics. One is agents, the profile of the agents that you hire is changing because all the simple things are being solved online through self-service. And now that agent has to be a more gifted, even arguably, he called it a controller, a more aggressive agent that's going to be a problem solver, able to collaborate with others, so more empowered. And that's one thing, so I thought your question was really insightful, that the nature of that agent is changing. And another thing that smart companies do is they empower those agents, not just with technology, but they give them the ability to, you know, the brand of hotels, high-end hotels, I won't use the brand, but their agents are given a couple thousand dollars a day and empowered to use that to fix any issue. Somebody shows up in the room's booked, they don't drag them out of the hotel. They actually find them, maybe they upgrade the room or they get them a meal if they have a problem, so empowering them also makes the agent feel much better about. That's, okay, great. All right, so, Steve Fioretti, VP Product Management Oracle Service Cobb, Heather Mitch, the Vice President of Field and Product Operations at Carbon, and Pepper from SoftBank. Thank you all for being a part of theCUBE here at the old, modern customer experience and talking about the role that service is now playing in driving customer experience and the role that the cloud is playing in improving customer service. Great, awesome. We'll be back with a wrap up in a few minutes, and in fact, John will magically reappear. And so, give us a few minutes and we'll be back with more from theCUBE.