 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5.9. Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is here with me and we are on day three of our coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. This is a show that's all about enterprise communication and collaboration. We're with 5.9 who's been our gracious host this whole week talking about the Intelligent Contact Center. We're all consumers at one point or another. We all buy a lot of things and we're excited to bring to theCUBE for the first time a gentleman from Carfax. I'm sure you know, David Mutaya, the Salesforce manager. David, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. The only thing you didn't bring is your Carfax Fox. I did, that's exactly right. We did not bring the Carfax, but next time I'll make sure to bring the Fox along. If you might address, can I get one? You certainly can. Awesome. All right, so David, this is your first time here. You are a longtime customer of 5.9, which we'll talk about. But I know you and Stu had a chance to chat earlier. Talk to us and our audience about Carfax. What is, people know it as, I'm going to go there, I'm going to get the value of my car. I want to be able to use this in my purchases and transactions. The role of digital transformation and data to Carfax's business. And I think, at the core, Carfax is a data company. That's what we're known for. And most consumers know us for what we do, which is in the Carfax history or the Carfax reports. So most people probably interact with us when they get ready to purchase a car or they're about to sell one of their cars. So they typically will run a Carfax report. And so that's been the experience, and that's what we're known for and that's what we're recognized for. But over the last few years, we've also kind of moved into some other spaces. One area is the search capability on looking for a used car. So today you can go online and search for used cars through various channels. But if you come to Carfax.com, you can search for a car, the traditional method, which is you would typically go look for a car by the criteria, the color, the make model, and a distance from your geographic area. But then also we now start layering Carfax data on top of that. So now you can search the cars based on, I'm looking for a car with no accidents. I'm looking for a car with one owner. Or I want a car that's got a lot of good history on it based on service and maintenance. So you can do your searches based on those criterias at Carfax.com. So that's something now we're starting to grow and doing more of. The other is talking about the value of your car. So most people really want to know how much is my car worth, especially when you go to trade-in or you're trying to sell it. And so you want to get a better sense of what that is. So what we have started to do is based on the history of the car, based on what's in our database and what's in our data, you can now, we start valuing the car. We start putting a value for the car and what it's worth. So that you as a consumer, when you get ready to trade-in or sell, you have some confidence around the value of what your car is. This is also why you want to maintain your car and take good care of it. Because the maintenance aspect really goes into what the car is valued at. Yeah, David, I love this. First of all, thank you. I've used Carfax in the past. It helped me when I bought a used car for my wife. Yeah, helped me in my negotiation quite a bit. And we love this trend, is data actually putting it in the hand of the consumer. It's no longer this, I need to go in and I don't have all the information. And the traditional car salesman has the upper hand here. Come on, I'm a good consumer. I know how to research this stuff. And with your tools, I've got the upper hand again. I can go on in and negotiate. And our goal is really to empower consumers to make better decisions and have confidence in the decisions they make around buying and selling their car. And so we want to be able to help them in that process. But we also help dealers, automobile dealers throughout the United States. They use us in the same way as to run and manage their business. So we help them to do that in providing the data that we have to empower them to be able to do their business. Yeah, when we look at some of the big themes we've seen in the show. First of all, customer experience. CX is at the center of whatever one is talking about. And when I talk about in the contact center even, it's that shifting role between inbound and outbound. How do I leverage my resources? Maybe bring us inside a little bit. What it's like inside of Carfax, those items. And I think Carfax, when you look at it from a contact center standpoint, we've got two sides of the business. One is the traditional call center type environment where we are assisting our customers. They can call in and we're available to them to answer any questions that they have. And so we have agents available that are on call to answer any questions around the data that Carfax provides to our customers. The other side is on the sale side. We're still going out and talking about our business, trying to let people know what we do, not just on the Carfax report, but on the Carfax search capabilities, as well as on the valuation of the car. So we're trying to get people more informed about how we're doing that. And so we have a sales team that really goes out and is empowered to do that. And so we're using the contact center in that space as well, to be able to reach customers to kind of really talk to the value of what Carfax brings. So on the sales side, on the contact center side, three, four years ago, you guys said we have some significant opportunities here. You give one of the greatest examples, I think I've heard all week about the power that the consumer has with all this data. When you said, all right, we need to dial this up a level. There's a lot more opportunity to grow the business. When you came to 5.9, what were some of the key challenges that you looked to them to help you resolve? You know, I think at the time, you know, we had an on-prem solution that was working well for us. And I think what we had done was internally, we had switched to Salesforce.com, which as a CRM, that was a cloud-based solution. So we had moved into the cloud. We were quite happy with what we were getting from a cloud solution from a CRM standpoint. So we said, let's step back. Now that we want to migrate our really contact center into that area, let's take a look at who's the players in this space. And we did kind of our due diligence and evaluation. And we ended up and landed on 5.9 as kind of our go-to solution. And since then, we have really integrated 5.9 into our Salesforce instance. And that's been the goal, is to be able to integrate the two systems. And it's worked out really well for us. And I think one of the things that we look at from, at Carfax, is we want our employees, the interaction to be kind of a user-friendly interaction. So Salesforce is our primary CRM. And so we want anything that our employees do to be primarily focused on Salesforce. And so the contact center solution needs to be integrated in. And we don't necessarily want a contact center that's kind of a standalone. So we have it integrated. So the experience for the agent or the employee is really seamless between a CRM and a contact center. They're kind of one and the same for us. Yeah, that's great. We just had a Zia-san, one of the analysts, talking about how anyone that has a CRM, 5.9 is something that could help them. Well, I wonder if you can go in your salespeople that are using it. There's a lot of other options besides contact center. Look here, some of the UC solutions out there. Salesforce, I'm sure, has lots of modules. They'd be happy to upgrade you to two for those environments. So what was it about the 5.9 that you said, hey, it works in our contact center. Let's start moving it to some of our other people. Sure. I think one of the things is if we look at how we work, we really want a lot of the information that we're gathering from our sales reps to be really input into Salesforce. And so we wanted a contact center that integrated in a way that we could capture everything that we're doing with our customers and the interactions that we're having to be solely in Salesforce. And so that's one of the big pieces is we didn't necessarily want a contact center that captured information outside and then tried to marry the two. We really wanted the experience to be one and the same so that for us, as we start interacting with our customers, we're able to input everything into our CRM as well as from a contact center standpoint, if we have customers that are reaching out to us, we're able to serve up information within our CRM for the agent so that they can interact in a more meaningful way and provide our customers information in a much more quicker and easier manner than we have in the past. We talk about CX a lot and agent experience. One of the things I'm curious to learn is adoption. That's been a theme that's come up as well because it's great to hold all these fantastic technologies but if at the end of the day, as consumers we want things simple, well, so do two employees, right? Talk to us about the adoption that you've been able to drive since you brought in the 5.9 contact center, integrating it with your CRM, the impact on the contact center folks as well as the sales folks. I think one of the keys to any kind of adoption efforts is really having stakeholder buy-in. And so if we look at our leadership at Carfax, they were truly bought in on Salesforce and a solution like 5.9. So they were behind us from a technology standpoint to say, look, we do want these tools integrated. We want our employees to have a seamless experience. So we were able to get our sales leadership, our contact center leadership, truly bought in on the experience. They had a lot of say and a voice in selection. So when we went and did the due diligence, they were part of the process of selecting 5.9. They too looked at them as a solution and they were able to give us the feedback on what their needs were. So we really took into consideration a lot of the things that they looked for. And so when we launched the two and when we integrated it, when we went live, we had a lot of buy-in. They had already gone out to their teams, talked about what they were going to get. So the agents and sales reps themselves were familiar with what was coming, what was to be expected. So in some sense, there was a little bit of an excitement within the company of what's to come. So we had users that were already approaching us and saying, hey, when are we going to get this? Cause we're ready to kind of transform and move over to this new solution. So that was a, it was a good experience. And I think that's key to kind of any adoption is really having your leadership kind of have buy-in and backing. Cause they're really the ones that kind of empower the employees to kind of truly adopt and use these tools. Yeah, David, one of the things we've been trying to parse this week is that buzzword of omnichannel and the ebb and the resurgence of voice has been something that's been a theme of this conference that used to be called VoiceCon. So from your perspective, your different groups, what are the channels, what are you seeing? And maybe for yourself and any of your peers that you're hearing, what are some of those big trends? I think one of the things we're seeing is obviously omnichannel is kind of a buzzword that's talked about in the industry. We're still primarily phone-based and it's partly because of the nature of our business. We're serving customers that are calling in with highly technical questions and we do have chat as an avenue and we can obviously talk to our customers through chat as a means but we're also finding it sometimes when you get into these high-level technical questions, chat is not necessarily the place to have that. Chat has a place in our business but I think it's also, you have to be mindful about the amount of time that you're going to take to be able to respond to these things. And so what we're starting to do is we're offering chat as an option but in most cases what we're doing is we're flipping from chat over to the phone and continuing that conversation with our customers because that sends to be a much more of a seamless and better interaction. And in most cases we can answer these questions via phone quicker than through chat and for the customer themselves it's a better user experience to do that and so we have kind of tended to be still voice primarily. We're certainly looking at kind of omnichannels and where that industry is evolving. That's something that we will continue to look at and see if we can bring in and do more with that but we're still very much phone-based and that's what our customers want and we want to kind of continue to serve them through those channels. So you're really following the journey of your specific customers to determine where should we be meeting them that's going to best and faster serve their needs. Right, and I think as the industry changes and if our customers start saying to us, hey I want more ways to reach you that are alternatives to voice and we certainly will look at that and provide that as a solution. All right, so David as you work with Five Nines and your other vendors, if you had a magic wand what could they be doing to make your job easier, help your customer experience anymore? Sure, I think as a whole they're doing a great job today. I think one of the things that we're talking to Five Nines and other folks in the space is we have today as a company, we're using Five Nines for the contact center folks that are integrated with our CRM but we also have folks at our corporate office that are non-contact center folks. You know, maybe they interact with our CRM more but they're not necessarily making outbound calls or taking inbound calls but each of them has a phone at their desk and so we want to be able to try to combine and bridge the two systems. So that's something that we're looking at and talking to to see what can we do to be able to bring some of our corporate office folks and have them seamlessly integrate with our contact center folks so that conversations can be passed back and forth between the two systems and make it a little bit more easier than what we have today. For other businesses that are at the precipice of where Carfax was a few years ago, what are some of your lessons learned and recommendations for successfully navigating this process? I think, you know, one of the things is it's always good to kind of take a step back and look at kind of your processes and say, this is what we've done up to this point. Is that what you want to continue to do? And then look at ways that you can improve. You know, you certainly want to reach out to your employees and your agents because they're kind of the true source of knowledge for this. They can give you some invaluable insight into how their day-to-day interactions are and how we could improve and make some changes there. So you really want to step back and take a look at how you could improve those things. Of course, the other aspect is looking at tools that truly work in the environments that you are in. So for us, it was Salesforce and we really wanted a partner that truly integrated with Salesforce and we wanted to make sure the integration was seamless because the last thing you really want is a system that is kind of, you know, a CRM is one aspect and the contact center is separate and having it work seamlessly was our number one criteria. So come up with some things that you cannot do without. And so come up with some things that you can, you say, look, these are core to our business needs and we're not going to divert from that and we want to be able to try to find a solution that works in those parameters. Great advice, David. Thank you so much for sharing what Carfax is doing with 5.9 and what's next for you guys. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much. It was great to be here. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.