 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Enterprise Connect 2019. Can you hear the buzz behind Stu Miniman and me? It's party time, it's five o'clock, kicking things off, welcoming a couple of guests to our program this afternoon. We've got Blair Pleasant, the president and principal analyst at Confusion and co-founder of BC Strategies. And Michael Rose, the director, brand and corporate communications from 5ix9ine. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you, good afternoon. Welcome to the party. I know, where's the beer and the wine for us? We think it's momentary, momentary. There we go. So Blair, you have been coming to Enterprise Connect about the last 10 years or so. Give us a little bit of an overview about what you're doing at this year's EC. Sure, so I'm going to be doing four different sessions here. So on Wednesday I'm going to be giving a presentation. Well, one is going to be to the channel partners who are selling, you see, telling them about why they should be selling contact center and all the wonders about contact center and customer experience. And I'll also be doing a session on unified communications end user adoption. And I'm going to have a panel of end users who are going to talk about their adoption programs. And then on Thursday I'm doing a session on collaboration, about team collaboration and how to migrate and things to do there. And then I'm participating in the lock note where a bunch of analysts and consultants are going to basically wrap up the show and talk about the key findings and key messages and just get into a really good discussion. So you have a very busy week ahead. I'm curious, Stu and I were chatting earlier today about the evolution of this event over the last 28, 29 years, but also paralleling the massive evolution of communications and collaborations, the rise of the empowered consumer who wants to be able to have a conversation on any channel at any time and have our issues resolved right away. Give us your perspective, because you have a very full week here, but some of the trends that you've seen in the last year that you're looking forward to helping customers understand, you talked about selling UC, sell the contact center as a service. Yeah, so when it comes to unified communications, as I mentioned, one thing that I've been really focused on is the user adoption because companies will buy technology and they'll deploy technology, but they don't necessarily, that doesn't mean that the users are actually going to be using it. So that's one thing that they really have to focus on. And then when we turn to the contact center side, it's all about customer experience. And in fact, Michael and I have been doing a lot of work in this area. And so we've been hearing the term customer experience, you know, CX, but what's also important is employee or agent experience and AX as we're calling it. So getting the agent involved also and making sure that they've got the tools that they need to help them do a really good job. All right, so Michael, you have brand and you did a very nice job bringing us the five, nine mugs. Yes, there's water in them, but this customer service index, can you bring us inside what you're working on, where Blair's been involved and let's get into that? It's basically an annual study that we've been doing now for two years and we plan to continue. And the first part of it looks at what the consumers are saying about why they rate a customer experience the way they do. What's important to them? And more importantly, what turns them off? And as we found when we did the analytics with Blair, is a bad customer engagement, they're likely to leave you and not do business anymore. We were talking earlier about consumers now have voice and choice. They've got voice through social media to complain and they will leave and find another brand to partner with. And so that's sort of a key finding around what is it that people want? And it's basically quick response, know who I am and engage me the way I want to be engaged. So what was interesting is they want a quick response but they're also willing to spend more time on the phone or whatever in an interaction talking to an agent if it means that they're going to get the response that they need and get the information that they need to get their problem solved. So speed is important when it comes to getting an agent on the phone or getting that agent but then they're willing to take the time if it means I'm going to get my problem solved. Do you think that one of the things we chatted about with Ryan Cam, the CMO of 5.9 earlier today is the fact that 5.9 has five billion recorded customer conversations and we were chatting, I think also with Jonathan Rosenberg that it's an expectation, right? We call a contact center for whatever product or service or whatnot that we're having an issue with or we're inquiring about and you hear that. So there's an expectation that it's going to be recorded. How do companies actually glean insight from that data? Because I'll tell you, I never think when I'm on a phone call, I have a problem to resolve and I don't think that they're recording my conversation to help me and all the customers that probably have the same problem. So I thought that was an interesting way of looking at it but it's also interesting that you found that people are willing to spend more time if the value to them is greater. Yep, absolutely. And we're finding that companies are using that data. We hear about big data analytics. So analytics is really the big thing. Looking at the whole picture, getting that holistic view of what's working, what isn't working and then turning that also talk before about the agent experience using this to improve what the agent is doing and how the agent is interacting with the customer. And that's probably a good build to the next part of the study which is the business decision maker. And so we survey them to see are there any parallels in what they're thinking compared to the consumer. And one of the probably the most disappointing findings this year and we're doing a webinar on this next week is the lowest thing they rate is employee satisfaction. So they look at, is it the right product we're selling? Do we have the right tools? But actually looking after the agent or the employee ranks the least on their list of priorities which is quite distressing and sad. But the good news is that they did rate customer satisfaction very highly. So when it came, when we were looking at what's really important to your business and to growing your revenues, customer satisfaction was very important. So we were happy about that. Which has to be directly tied to the agent experience. For example, making sure that an agent is empowered to make a decision but they have to have the information, they have to have the content to be delivered through the right channel. So that's interesting finding that you got. Are you expecting to hear and talk more this week with companies to say this is why employee satisfaction has got to move up the ranks because it is directly tied to customer satisfaction. I've been talking about that for a long time and it's so important. And I think companies are starting to get it and we're also seeing more tools like AI. That's really going to be used to help provide the information to the agents and help them do that better job. One of the things that's always interesting when you have these annual studies is to see what is actually changing over time. I've got background in the telecommunication space. We talk about Omni Channel today. We talked about unified messaging 20 years ago. We talk about AI today. We talked about intelligence and data decades ago. So what's changing? What's staying the same? Any insight that you're getting as we've been moving with this survey over time? Well, voice is still key. As in people want to make a phone call if they need help. And believe it or not, that's across all age groups. It even tops out number one for millennials. Which surprised you. And I know Blair, you did a little test group at home with that. Yeah, I had my 20-somethings. They had some friends over and I asked them, when you have a problem and you need to contact customer service, what do you do? And the first thing they do is try to do self-service. Try to figure it out on their own. Google it, go to YouTube or whatever. But then if they can't find the problem, they will pick up the phone and call a contact center, call customer service. And you would think that 20-somethings wouldn't do that. But they know that if it's something important and they need to get that information right away or solve that problem right away, they pick up the phone. And they also do chat and email. But the study found that chat actually went down this year, which we were kind of surprised about. So the use of email went up, but the use of chat went down. Any thoughts as to why that might be going down? I think it's because companies haven't been providing that good experience. So even though they're offering chat, it's not optimized. So sometimes when you're doing chat, if you're on a website and you're doing chat, you can tell when the agent is talking to like 10 other people at the same time. So it's really frustrating. So I think companies have the technology, but they're not doing it the right way. Yeah, I mean, I know I've had some time, do you get in a chat and I'm like, I'm not talking to a person that's a chat bot. Is this some outsource chat that maybe doesn't have the skill level that I need as opposed to if I pick up the phone, I know most of the time that agent I'm going to get either can answer my question or can escalate to the person that has it. And interestingly too, the one that's right down near the bottom is social media and it hasn't moved for two years. So we're not seeing, now that could be a chicken and the egg. Is it because companies are not offering it? So therefore I don't know I can use it or don't people want to use it? And we had a theory because social media has had a bit of a rocky ride in the last year with data and privacy and everything else. So maybe consumers just don't trust it yet. And there are other channels like email, as you said that we've seen increasing. But if customers are unhappy about something, they're going to go on social media. That's the first thing I do when you were saying that I was surprising it was low because if I had a recent experience with an ISP and wasn't getting five minutes with a robot on the phone, couldn't get all I wanted was a tech to come out to my house to fix something. Then I had to have somebody call me back and verify, have me do the exact same things. I'm like, I've been through this. So I went to Twitter to escalate that. And so that's how I think of that. And I appreciate that they responded. But it's, I guess it's a couple of, a number of interesting things that you guys have brought up today that surprised you. The AX factor being lower millennials actually wanting to talk to a human, that's good. But also the fact that people aren't using social as much as maybe you would have thought or maybe they don't realize they can't or maybe it's to customers not have appropriate effective social listening programs to respond to the volume. So that's the chicken and egg thing Michael was talking about. A lot of companies don't offer social as a channel because they think that customers don't want to use it but customers aren't using it because they don't realize that companies are offering it. So Blair, while we have you, you've got a good perspective on this space. What's differentiating the leaders in the space from some of the laggards in the space? Oh, that's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with, again, the focus on the customer experience. So if you're talking about the vendors, the vendors that are succeeding are the ones that really do look at the customer and not just the technology. So so many companies can do technology. The technology is the easy part. It's doing it right. It's really making that difference and making things simple, making things unified, making it not complex for customers because right now things are just so complex. You have to go to so many different places to make things work. So the more you can make things seamless and simple, I think that's what's really separating the winners from the losers. Maybe we'll make, Michael, maybe you can elaborate on delivering an integrated connected on the channel experience because I think there's still some maturation curve that it's on whereby I might have an expectation as a consumer that I'm going to go through chat or email or another channel. And then if I go through Twitter or social, I'm hoping that this conversation is connected. Where can 5.9 help customers across industries to really integrate and deliver omnichannel? I think the first thing is the cloud because moving to the cloud enables you to move quickly as a business. And as we were saying today, the software updates all the time and it's easy. It's like your phone, you just download and away you go. So it's the cloud first to get to the data. And we talked about that before too. And Ro and our CEO calls it the dark data because no one's using it. And you need to mine that data to get the insight because then the system will start directing the consumer based on what the intelligence is telling them, irrespective of which channel they come through. And you really want an experience where I've done, I'm tweeting away with a company and they say, well, privately email you now because we want to take it offline. And then they'll say, well, no, now we need to call but it's fluid. All the data and all the information is passed through that communication. So it's seamless for me, the consumer, and it's more rewarding for the agent because they can actually get to the core issue for the customer and resolve it. How does the customer, though, and maybe people are, this is a question for you, how does a customer take what's probably traditional silos of customer experiences and culturally evolve as a business to be able to deliver what Michael was talking about? I mentioned that those silos and that kind of cultural disparity might be kind of a challenge for an organization to pivot as quickly as they need to when customer lifetime value was on the line. Yeah, and it's definitely been a challenge for a lot of companies, but they know that they have to get there. So I think even though some of them might be resistant, they realize that to get the results that they need, they really do have to do that. But it's a cultural change. And you asked before about what's separating some of the winners from losers. I think that's a big part of it, is being able to make that change. Blair, as I was getting ready for the show, there's general belief that customers are embracing of the cloud. It's no longer, we're no longer in the evangelization phase, as I've heard people from Five Nines said, but we're in the adoption. I'm curious, Blair, when it comes to AI though, are users ready? Everybody, we talk about these technologies are going to be infused with AI. There's some fear sometimes out there is like the robots or they're going to take my personal data or anything like that. What do you see out there and what should we be aware of and where do we need to go as an industry when it comes to AI? So as far as consumers, they do need to be worried. There are definitely issues about privacy and what's going to happen with the information. But I think users shouldn't really know that there's AI involved. And that's also a debate we have. Like if you're interacting with a bot, if you're doing a chat, do you know if it's a bot or an agent? So some companies make it clear, hi, this is Joe the bot, but other companies don't. So then you have to say, and I've had these experiences, are you a bot? No, I am a real person. Okay, prove to me you're a real person. So it's really interesting. So some companies feel that customers are more open if they're talking to a bot. And in certain industries, like if it's healthcare or finance, people are going to be more open if it's a bot because they don't want to share their personal information with a live person. But if it's a computer, it's like, okay, I can share the information. So we're very much in early days. So we don't really have the experience to draw on yet. So let's talk about this again next year. Well Blair, Michael, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon and sharing spending some time since you have such a busy week there. We appreciate your insights on the event, on enterprise collaboration and communication, and we appreciate your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. 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