 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit 2019. Brought to you by PagerDuty. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in downtown San Francisco at the west in St. Francis. I think we've just about busted the seams of this beautiful old motel. Thousand people, fourth conference. We're excited to be here. And the big announcement today is around, you know, PagerDuty getting closer to the revenue, getting closer to the customer, getting beyond just break fix and incident response. And a huge partner, big announcement of that was Zendesk. So we're happy to have today from Zendesk, Luke Benke, the VP of product. Luke, great to see you. Yeah, hey Jeff, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So before we get into the announcements and some of the stuff with PagerDuty, give us kind of an update on Zendesk. We're all happy to see a Zendesk email in our inbox. That means someone's working on our, working on my customer service issue. But you guys are a lot more than that. We are, yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah, so Zendesk started in, you know, as a great solution for customer support and solving customer support issues. And we've really expanded recently to think more about the overall customer experience. And so that means, you know, launching more channels where customers can reach out beyond just emails and tickets to live chat and messaging and really rich experiences to communicate with your customers. But it also means, you know, getting into the sales automation world and kind of helping sales and success work together on the whole customer experience and the customer lifecycle. And underneath all of it, our new Sunshine Platform, Zendesk Sunshine, it's a CRM platform that allows you to bring in a ton of information about the customer, you know, the products that customer owns, you know, how they've, how you've done business with them across all the different systems you have, right, that you do business with. Some, most companies we talk to have hundreds of different systems that store a little bit of information about the customer. The elusive 360 degree. I mean, the single view of the customer. You know, I talked to a customer recently that said, oh, I have 12 CRMs. Like, are you going to be my 13th? And we said, no, you got to bring the right bits of information into Zendesk in order to make the right kind of actions that you want to take on behalf of that customer, whether it's routing them to the right agent at the right time, whether that's making sure this is a VIP customer that has a hot deal with your sales team and you want to alert the sales rep if there's an incident that's affecting that customer open right now, or maybe you want to have a bot experience that really solves a lot of the customer pain with knowing who that customer is, what products they own, et cetera, right? So that's really been what we've been trying to do with Sunshine, is move beyond just customer support into a full blown CRM solution. The one place where a lot of your customer information can live to deliver that experience. Okay, so then we've got PagerDuty. So PagerDuty's keeping track of more incidents, not necessarily customer problems per se, but system incidents and website incidents and all these things. How does that system of record interface with your system of record to get a one plus one makes three? That's it. So if PagerDuty is the source of truth where your DevOps team and your developers and your product team are when there's an incident and I've been part of this, unfortunately, if we have an incident at Zendesk I'm in there as well, kind of understanding what's happening. But what's really missing there is that customer context and who's affected. And even as good as our monitoring might be, sometimes customers tell us they're having problems or the extent of the problems they're having before we've fully been able to dig into it, right? And so taking those two systems, the incident management portal and the customer record and the customer communications portal and bringing those two together, it's better for the DevOps teams, they can learn like maybe we're getting some insight from the field about exactly who's affected. And it's great for the customer support team because they don't have to sit there tapping the engineer on the shoulder, like have you fixed it yet? What's the latest, right? They can write within Zendesk with the new integration that the PagerDuty Zendesk integration that we announced today, write within Zendesk, reps can see, support reps can see exactly what's happening in pretty close to real time with that incident so that they can keep customers proactively up to date. Before the customer reaches out, I have a problem. They can say, hey, here's the latest, we're working on it, we estimate a fix in this amount of time, okay now we've launched a fix, we should start to see things coming back up, right? Really that's a one plus one equals three sort of situation. This is two-way communication, it's a two-way writing. I'm just curious, how does it get mapped? How does this particular Zendesk issue that I just sent in a note that I'm having a problem get mapped to this particular incident that's being tracked in PagerDuty? We got a power outage at a distribution center someplace. How do I know those two are related? So it's a two-way integration, right? So it's installed both into the PagerDuty console as well as into Zendesk support where your agents are and so you can create, really it's all about the incident number and so you can create that out of PagerDuty and then start attaching tickets as they come in to that incident or a customer support rep could create an incident in PagerDuty right through Zendesk and so you're really working off of that same information about that incident number and then you're able to start attaching customers and tickets and other information that your customer support rep has to that incident number and then you're all working off the same playbook and you're all understanding in real time if the developers are updating what's happening, the latest on it you can sort of see that right in Zendesk and it's all based on that incident. So that's got to be a completely different set of data and or kind of power that the customer service agent has with this whole new kind of data set of potential if not root causes at least known symptoms. Yeah, exactly, that's right. I mean, part of our job on the product team at Zendesk is to sit with real customers and watch them shadow agents, watch them do their job every day and even sometimes I log in and actually field tickets myself for Zendesk and it's an incredible experience to sit there, you log in and customers just start reaching out to you and they want answers, they want information and we deliver a lot of automation and products like that but still it's up to that customer support rep to quickly get back to that customer and so to have some data right in front of them, oh, it looks like this customer uses a certain product, that product is affected by this outage to be able to immediately have that customer support rep kind of alerted, there is an outage, it might be affecting this customer, here's the latest information I can give that customer, that's just less back and forth and round trips that they have to do to solve that customer's problem. As customers ourselves, we don't want that, we don't want to have to sit and wait or do they even know my ticket's open, do they have an update for me, I've been waiting 20 minutes, to cut that down to give that agent's context, it's huge, it really helps them do their job. And of course the holy grail is to not be reactive to wait for the ticket but to get predictive and even prescriptive. That's it. Where is that kind of in terms of your roadmap, how close are we to adding things where we can get ahead, you can get ahead, the clients can get ahead of, we see this coming down the road, let's get ahead and nip it in the bud before it even becomes a problem. Yeah, I mean, we all are accustomed to whatever the last great experience we had with a company that suddenly just becomes what we expect next and I think a big trend we're seeing in the last year or two is really customers want to get more proactive and so we launched the Zendes Sunshine platform which is all about bringing more of that data in and the vision there then is really being able which a lot of our customers are doing today, they're able to say I know which customers are using a certain product and when that product has an issue send a proactive ticket. Before they even reach out to you, we're aware of an issue, you might be seeing these symptoms, here's some troubleshooting advice and here's our latest update and we'll keep this ticket up to date, we'll keep this conversation up to date as we learn more. Customers are already doing that with Zendes but you're exactly right, that is more and more customers are trying to get there because it's becoming expected. Customers don't want to have to log in and find that something's down and then try to troubleshoot, unplug, figure out maybe it's me, maybe it's them, they want to know okay, I get it, I can now plan around that, maybe I'll go have my agents go work on a different updating some knowledge content or maybe put them on a different channel for a little bit or move people around depending on what's happening in the business. The other thing that came up in the keynote that I think is pretty interesting and I don't know that people are thinking about is that there's more people that need to know what's going on than just the people tasked with fixing the problem, whether it's account reps, whether it's senior executives, whether it's the PR team. Depending on the incident, there's a lot of people that aren't directly involved in fixing the incident that still need that information and that seems like a super valuable asset to go beyond the ticket to a much broader kind of communication of the issue. As we started to work with PagerDuty on expanding this integration with Zendesk and PagerDuty, we were talking to their team and we both have the same mantra, which is that the customer experience, it's a team sport. It's not just the developers who are trying to fix the problem on behalf of the customers and it's not just your frontline customer support reps who are fielding all those inquiries, right? It's everybody's job and as you said, the sales rep wants to know what's happening with my top accounts, do I need to get in touch with them? Do I need to put in a phone call? Do I need to alert other teams? Maybe we should stop the marketing campaign that we were about to send because the last thing you want is a buy more stuff email when the site is down. So let's really start to think about this as a team sport and I think this integration is a really great, how customer support and product and DevOps and engineering can kind of work together to deliver a better customer experience. It's so kind of multifaceted. So many things that need to happen based on that really single service call, that single transaction. Awesome. Well, Luke, thanks for sharing the story and it's great to hear that Zendesk is still doing well. I like Zendesk emails, like fix it, fix it, fix it. Now the next thing that we'll do is that we'll start to solve your problem before you even have to get a Zendesk email. So we'll be working on your behalf even when you're not getting that email. Okay, well, Luke, thanks again and appreciate it. Appreciate it. Great to see you. All right, Luke, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. See you next time.