So, you guys know, okay, so my Call Center, Chronicle family, last week, we talked to Joel Richardson, Senior Executive over at Group Elite. And we talked through just kind of where we are going with technology and call centers as a whole. So right now, we call them call centers, contact centers, because we have this hub of people that are coming together for a common good of serving the end user, the customer. And so, it got me to really kind of thinking how we are progressing with that model in the pandemic, we will be in a place right now. I can remember just before even doing customer service consulting and call center consulting, if we would have ever said, Hey, we want to have this remote environment that would have been like this big no-no for reasons that were good.
We were just kind of stuck in our ways, and now post pandemic, that is just a norm to have customer service reps at home providing great customer service in most instances. And so, I wanted to understand more about what does post pandemic, the call center industry looks like. And so, we began to really talk through that and talk through, I think it was really important, Joel kind of noted on, and we talked through how going back and looking back at where this call center arena, this evolution kind of evolved from talking about the telephone, how the telephone was even invented and talking through all of that. So, we did a little history lesson and I want that fun to continue, so we are going to do the same thing here.
So, let’s go ahead and talk through our history lesson for today with us live, you will see my screen and so we began to talk through ancient. We talked through the telephone last week, but I wanted to talk through ancient civilization technology and just the history of technology, period.
So, we’ve come a pretty long way as it relates to technology, so we talk about ACDs, we talk about AI and we talk about all our modern technology, but as I begin to really kind of do more and more research, I began to see how technology isn’t just electronics; it’s really a methodology and a systematic approach to doing some very unique types of things.
And so, when I began to look up technology from ancient days and we look at, you can see some images here from the first tools dating back 3.3 million years ago.
Like that is absolutely insane. My mind was just really blown when I begin to think about how far technology goes back. When we think about before the common era, it began to progress and we begin to see things like gunpowder. We also saw things more, we would probably be more familiar with around conferences and all of those different things and then as we transitioned to become more modern and modern, we saw things like photography, the use of the telephone or the invention of the telephone, automobiles and then just here not too long ago, Artificial Intelligence really has begun to be introduced into how we’re servicing human beings and how we are just progressing and evolving as human beings and so I think technology is just such a great helper of the human civilization.
And as I begin to really think about how Artificial Intelligence is one of these new things that is really not new, but we are now more adopting it more. It really made me begin to think about how we’re leveraging it today. And so, I begin to see that the code COVID clinic, it’s the largest US COVID testing organization. They selected Five9 to power its cloud contact center and so I thought that was super cool and as I was reading more about it, it was saying that a caller can call in, right, put their zip code in and it’ll tell them where the nearest testing center is. And as you know, COVID is something that we’re dealing with across the globe and to be able to have that type of information readily at your fingertips is going to be so impactful to how people are getting rapid testing and all of those good things.
But then the other thing I began to think about is how that frees up the agent in the call center, to be able to move on to bigger and complex task. So, they’re not a person doesn’t have to wait to speak to a person. They can actually type in their zip code, find COVID testing center near them and then again, that allows agent to deal with some more complex types of things. And so, I thought that was super cool, that technology one has advanced to this point. Okay. So, we’ve started back 3.3 million years ago with snowflake stone chips and carving out different things to make human civilization better to more modern types of technology, like the telephone, printing, conferences, steam boats, automobiles, all those different things and now we’re at a place in history where we are leveraging technology to automate things, even remove and do a lot of the heavy lifting that we no longer as humans have to do, but still advance, our advance our life.
So that is your history for today. Also, one of the ways in which I want to talk with our guests today about how we are actually leveraging this technology, Artificial Intelligence, how diversity matters and so that is our show for you today. I hope you enjoy without further ado, I am going to introduced to you Genefa Murphy CMO of Five9. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I’m super, super excited to have you again, like I said, I’m just so in awe about technology and how we’re leveraging, how Five9 is leveraging AI and some of the capabilities that we have now. Tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Genefa Murphy: Sure. So, thank you for having me. I’m really glad to be here and I love a good fact, I love a good history lesson. So, as you mentioned, my name is Genefa Murphy, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer here at Five9.I joined Five9 about three months ago now, after spending over 15 years in enterprise IT.
I came originally from the product management side of the house and then evolved into the marketing side of the house as well. So broad spectrum of the business, but the best thing about all of my jobs has been the ability to work with customers and get to know how they can make the most out of technology.
Juanita Coley: That is awesome. So, I was actually doing some research and I was looking at the COVID Clinic, like I was saying and I saw that transpired on, I think March, beginning of this month that the COVID Clinic was partnering with you guys. Tell me a little bit more about that, partnership.
Genefa Murphy: Yes, so that was a really great opportunity and as you mentioned, so the COVID Clinic provides a critical public health service at the moment by delivering drive-through testing sites for COVID-19. So, they currently have about 65 locations across six states in the US and they’re adding about an average of two new locations every week, so they’re ramping up really quickly. Their goal is to have roundabout 200 active testing sites set up by the end of 2021, across 27 States.
So, they’re going from six states to 27 that adding almost two new locations a week and they want to have 200 active testing sites set up by the end of 2021.We’re speaking to them and one of the big challenges that they came to us with was saying essentially, as they were ramping up, as they were adding more sites, one of the challenges that they had is that their call volume was spiking getting some cases. It was going to 20,000 a day and they had live agents, they’ve still got live agents, but really their goal was to sort of understand how can we really ramp up? And so, using intelligent virtual agents or IVAs, that was really a way for them that they could have this hybrid or buy mode or joined workforce where they were leveraging the IVAs in order to sort of take on some of those routine tasks, appointment setting, date checking, those types of things and then they can augment their live staffing agents, because it was just going to be too expensive and quite frankly, too slow to actually get the live agents ramped up in time.
So, we’re partnering with them to do that inbound calling, to support their live agents and their digital agents, giving them IVA, and then also supporting digital engagement channels like SMS so that they can send appointment updates, so that people can find the nearest testing location, get test results, easily schedule, reschedule, cancel appointments because as you mentioned, especially COVID, it’s very personal. I mean, if you have to go get a COVID test for yourself, a member of your family, you want instant information, you want to know where can I go first. I remember a few months ago, my son, he’s six, he had to go get a COVID test because he had a bit of a cold and before he went back to school, he had to go and get a COVID test and just that feeling that, Oh, man, I want to get to the nearest place right away and get the information sooner than anything that was just such a personal thing and everybody has their own story. And so, I think for us being able to partner with someone like COVID Clinic and help them to accelerate what they were trying to do was just a really cool use of technology and a really cool partnership.
Juanita Coley: Yes. How long did that take? I’m curious because like you said, you were able to help them ramp up really quickly because in a standard type of situation, you would have to hire all these people do background checks, not only that, train them and all those different things, where to look in the system to find the closest location and all those different things versus using this technology, I can type in a zip code in, within seconds know where my nearest center is or testing station is. How quickly was that ramp?
Genefa Murphy: Yes. So, we were able to do that within a number of days, weeks, what it came down to at the end of the day was just to get their logic, get the understanding from COVID Clinic so that we could build that into the system. The other idea to benefit our Five9 and inference the technology that we acquired for IVAs at the end of last year is that we have a lot of pre-built task libraries. So, we have pre-built flows based on different verticals, like healthcare, like retail, etc that can be used in order to speed up that process. So instead of starting from a blank sheet of paper, you can look at the task libraries and you can sort of say, okay yes, this gives me a great base of the common tasks that you might want to do as part of a healthcare engagement flow. So that really helps speed things up.
Juanita Coley: I love that. I love the prebuilt slows based on industry that’s even like taking it to another level, because then that gives you ramp really quickly. So hey, if you are in the healthcare industry, these are some things that are standard that you may want to consider and really be able to build out that workflow very quickly so that you can now go live very quickly as opposed to a hospitality industry, we’d have different types of workloads. So, I think that is super cool and a very effective way to use that technology and leverage it to get the best use out of ramping really quickly. That’s cool.
Genefa Murphy: No, and that’s what a lot of our customers want, is how do you we say re-imagine your customer experience and realize results and part of realizing results. One of the things we did with COVID Clinic was we actually helped them. We’ve got an ROI calculator that we use with customers in order to show the ROI that they can expect to get and to help them to build the business case. So, it’s the content to get things done, but also building the business case and with COVID Clinic, the cost savings probably in the first year, we said that it could be anywhere up to $2 millions of ROI that they could start to receive back. But that time to market is what’s actually really going to help them because that helps them to provide a better level of customer service and also to be differentiated.
Juanita Coley: As we talk about technology, right? It’s not the technology, it’s the users of the technology that we got to worry about, right?
Genefa Murphy: See that’s it but the civil way is going to be a world where you need people,
Juanita Coley: Right. But now it’s actually going to be that perfect segue into one of my other questions that I was going to ask you about. So, one of our goals at Solid Rock Consulting is really to normalize women in tech, get people really used to technology and leveraging technology so that we can make better and larger impacts on human life and human experience, customer experience. And so, with leveraging technology so much, do you think that diminishes the importance of diversity or that diversity becomes more important? I don’t know. What do you think?
Genefa Murphy: I think, it’s a balance. I think, if you just take a step back for a moment and put yourself in the shoes of the customer, you say in your intro, being in the shoes of the customer, being with customers, I mean, think about it when you have got a problem that you’re really stressed about, that you’re really frustrated about, a lot of the times you want to interact with another person. I think technology is great, I think that the role of AI and automation in the contact center is evolving and people are looking for practical use cases to make it real. But I think at the same time, you still want that human engagement, you still want that person on the other side and I think as you mentioned as well, like people often misconceived as a bit of a bad rap the automation gets, right. Everyone always thinks all automation, AI, you’re going to implement that in the contact center and it’s going to lead to people losing their jobs, but that’s not really the goal of AI and automation. The goal of an AI and automation is to improve, make you more efficient, IQ more effective, use your people where it matters most.
Juanita Coley: Yes
Genefa Murphy: So, I think that’s the key, it’s how do you leverage the human brain power and the human element with technology to augment it and just make it better, just make it more efficient, more effective because a lot of contact center agents, they don’t want to be doing the routine tasks necessarily that can get a bit mundane, a bit boring. So, if that can be automated and they can spend more of their time engaging with customers and using their knowledge and experience to provide better customer service, then that’s a win-win.
Juanita Coley: So, this is your first time on the show so I have to tell you about the “Gem Drops”, right. So, we do “Gem Drops” when I need to get a mind blown emoji, first of all, because that’s what I really feel, right. When you said that about using your people where they’re needed most, and then you also said, when you have like these high stress situations customers; the last thing they want to really probably do is deal with AI, right?
Genefa Murphy: Well, you leverage technology, you go to the website, you do self-service, you do what you want to get. If you making the effort to call it’s probably because either you’re not quite used to that technology yet, and you’re not comfortable with it so you want a person, or you’re so frustrated you can’t find the information that you want to speak to a person. If you look at things like technology buying cycles, 70% or more of the assessment is done online, why? Because there’s so much great information out there, there’s chatbots, there’s FAQ’s, there’s knowledge bases, there’s forums. So, most people are coming to a call having probably done quite a lot of that and they want to speak to a person.
Juanita Coley: That is so good. What I just heard you say if I call, I want a person. If I’m calling, like you said, buying patterns, I’ve already went online, I’ve looked, most people want to still serve a lot of times they can get to the information much quicker, but by the time I’m calling a lot of times I want to speak to a person. I want that human interaction just guides me, give me the answer at this point, so I think that is super cool. This is kind of a spin off question, how do we then balance making sure that we don’t force AI onto people or technology onto people, but that we encourage technology and we give them the resources to use while still making sure that they get what they need?
Genefa Murphy: Yes. Well, I think that’s where for me, it comes down to, I sort of talk about it is the three A’s; It’s AI, Automation and Analytics, because I think if you have a good analytics strategy, a good data strategy, you can actually look at the places that you’re applying AI and Automation, and then you can use the data to understand, well, is this getting us the outcome that we wanted to achieve? So for example, have we taken a use case and we’ve automated that use case, but then do we see a correlate tree effect with for example, customer’s level of satisfaction going down but the only way to do that is to actually look at cause and effect, and so that’s where analytics and data becomes a really powerful tool to use in partnership with AI and analytics to actually show, are you having the desired outcome or are you just getting a level of efficiency, but actually the end goal which is improved customer service, more brand loyalty, better revenue, that’s not actually being achieved.
Juanita Coley: That is good, AI, Automation and Analytics. So those are our three A’s on how we can really make sure that we’re not forcing the automation and the technology and all of those things on to the customer experience, but that we’re using it to enhance their experience. One example that I’m really thinking of is, and so I come from the call center world, I was groomed in, and I can tell you about it till to the moon turns orange or whatever, and so one experience that I’m thinking about is when we create IVRs to, if you don’t opt a certain way and you keep hitting zero then it just drops you off.
So, in that instance, you are forcing the customer to select something instead of maybe then putting them to a department that is triaging them some kind of other way and so that is kind of where that question comes from, is how do we make sure that we’re leveraging the technology to enhance the customer experience and not forcing it on them. So really good. I was talking with Ebony Langston over at TTEC, and we begin to talk about diversity and in all of those different things and I think it’s a great conversation that you are talking about as well as we talk about technology and diversity and by the time a person calls in, they actually want to speak with someone. Diversity is great, but Ebony begins to talk about inclusion. How do we make sure that diversity and inclusion go together and make sure that we’re leveraging that in our call centers?
Genefa Murphy: Yes, so I think it’s a big topic, so it depends sort of what you mean by that. But I think diversity can take many different forms, making sure that you have diversity in the people you have working within your contact centers, diversity in how you leverage people versus technology. But inclusion, I think really comes about making it a more welcoming, inclusive experience where people want to feel engaged. It’s not just diversity because it’s a number or a check box, it really is something that gets lived and breathed throughout the values of how you operate your contact center, how you engage with your customers. The scripts, if you will, that you choose to create and the tasks or the ways in which you train your different teams in order to engage with each other and with the customer as well. So, I think diversity is sort of one step, inclusion is looking at the broader experience and how you sort of think through all the different touch points of the working environment and then the engagement of those people with the customers as well and that’s where a lot of the analysts are talking now about total experience; how do you take customer experience and employee experience and the two together.
Juanita Coley: I’m glad you said that, because that makes me begin to think about now that we have, and I was talking about this earlier at the beginning of the interview where we were talking about how we’ve seen call centers evolve from call centers to contact centers to now, do we even have centers? Which I know we do but as we have people at home now and we’re thinking about diversity and all those different things, how does that shape that total experience and what are the different things that we have to now tackle from a technology standpoint as far as like, for example, even with Five9 and having the cloud environment and having the IVR and these pre scripts, how do you envision us having these work at homer’s having people in centers and having all of these different facets and components that we have to contend with now, the technology of Five9 shaping that environment, how does that work?
Genefa Murphy: So, by its very nature cloud gives you an additional layer, a level of flexibility to enable a workforce so these working from home and that these working in a more traditional contact center but the thing is I think we see more attention being paid to workforce engagement tools, workforce optimization tools. It’s about how do you empower the agent and the supervisor in order to in some ways recreate the experience that it would be if you had all of your contact center employees in one place, being able to leverage skills and knowledge off each other and in some places it’s re-imagining what that experience is So for example, one of the solutions that we have as Five9 is called Agent Assist and that’s a solution really for the agent and for the supervisor to empower the agents and supervisors to get real time coaching and learning as they’re going through the call.
Now in a traditional contact center, you might get that someone walking around, you might get that in an automated fashion, if you’re at home by yourself, you need to think of ways in order to be able to do that and leverage technology. And so that’s where things like Agent Assist, where you can pop up coaching cards, you can do also calls where you can for example, the supervisor can listen in, but sometimes that’s a bit freaky so maybe you want to just chat, and you can look at the remote desktop and you can say, hey, actually, maybe go and suggest here or here’s some things that you could do as a next step. So, I think it’s that balance, but we’re definitely seeing a lot more interest in our workforce optimization, workforce engagement, gamification tools, gamification has been out there forever.
Juanita Coley: Yes.
Genefa Murphy: And I think people really know how to take advantage of it and has there been a need to be? probably not, I think 2020 is accelerated that for sure. So, I think that’s where we’re focusing a lot of our time, it’s four areas.
How do we engage customers to give them their channel of choice? So, they can pick, do I want a person, or do I want to engage via SMS?
How do you engage and empower your agents so that they can work remotely and they can get just as good, a level of experience and support and engagement from their employer as if they were in their office?
How do you then close the loop with customers? Make sure you understand what are they feeling? Are they feeling engaged? Did they get their problems solved? And it’s not about how did the agent always perform it’s about how did the brand before, how did the overall customer experience perform?
And then the last piece is connecting the contact center back into the rest of the business I think with people working more remotely, it’s going to be even more important for the contact center to leverage data from other parts of the business and all of the awesome insights from the contact center to get into other parts of the business as well and sometimes you don’t see that happen.
Juanita Coley: Man. That is really good! I’m particularly interested in the last point that you made about I’m dropping gems all over the place.
Genefa Murphy: We got to get that emoji!
Juanita Coley: Got to! So, I’m particularly interested in where you talk about connecting the call center back into the overall business, because that is key, I think that is really key. We can have all the data, we can have the best customer service, but if it doesn’t loop back into the business, then we just have insights, but we’re not using it to drive any anything. We just have a lot of data, a lot of good insight, but we’re not using it to say, okay, well, we see that a lot of our customers do prefer to actually talk to people versus the SMS and so while we are beefing up over on SMS, we should really probably be beefing up the actual more people or how do we improve our SMS so that people will prefer it, different things like that. Does Five9 have anything? So, I know about the Agent Assist, Five9 have anything that talks through how we now connect back into the business, those insights?
Genefa Murphy: Yes. So, I think a lot of that comes from the integrations that Five9 has. So we have a number of different integrations across all different parts of use cases that the sort of standard one, the most common one is definitely the integration of Five9 into CRM systems, whether that’s Salesforce, whether that’s Oracle or whether that’s some of the other players like customer for example, so that’s one area because that’s where you can pull data from the CRM system in order to be able to give it to the agent right in the point of time so that when a customer calls, you can identify them, you can look at their record, get the latest information and then push the information back as well so that the next time when somebody else goes to engage with them, they truly start to have this 360-degree view of what the customer engagement is.
Other areas are integrating with some of partners like ServiceNow on the IT side of the house. So, they have a huge presence with the IT team, they’re building out workflows, how you can be more efficient, more effective and so we have a number of integrations that can actually help power that and ensure that we’re closing the loop so that you can, for example say, okay great, I’ve got this task to now complete, say for example, someone is doing a simple thing, password reset. You may be able to do the password reset directly in the contact center, or you might need to kick off a flow with your IT service management solution, your ticketing solution, well, great. You want to be able to do that, but then you want to be able to close the loop back to say, okay, well, how many people are calling in to do password reset? Is there some other problem? Is it just that people are forgetting their passwords or is there some of the bigger problem that there might be the case that we have to address?
So, I think CRM is a common integration. Unified Comms is another area, so zoom teams, we’ve seen great uptick in our integrations with them and then also a service now and some of the broader sort of IT landscape as well.
Juanita Coley: So, I didn’t know that! You all are integrating with zoom?
Genefa Murphy: Yes. So, zoom is actually a long-time partner, we’re a user of them, they’re a user of us and we have a lot of shared customers together because for example, we do actually see some of the data shows that there is a rise in the number of video calls happening in contact center. I think a lot of people have got video fatigue but then at the same time it’s, How do I make it more personal? How do I make it more engaging?
Video is a great way to be able to do that particularly if you think of like a sales and marketing use case where you’ve got your LDRs or BDRs who are maybe using the Five9 Contact Center in order to be able to deal with different writing of calls, maybe they want to use zoom to instantly jump on a video chat with a prospect versus just having a phone call. So, we have that capability to integrate with zoom and jump to zoom and integrated as part of the platform. So, if you want to do a video chat, if you’re using zoom as your UC provider, we can integrate it fully with the Five9 Contact Center and it provides a pretty streamlined experience.
Juanita Coley: That’s pretty awesome. I didn’t know that, you taught me something new.
Genefa Murphy: There’s so many different players, like I said, I’m new to contact center. I’m not a vet, so even I’m like, Whoa! All of this cool stuff that we can do.
Juanita Coley: Yes. It’s, so much and my entire career has been in contact center, so I love how we’re leveraging the technology to have that full circle and I love what you said about that total experience. So, we have, for the last few years, I’ve been saying the customer experience, and I was actually talking about this on I think episode or so before where I was talking about, maybe we’ve been thinking about customer experience from the wrong angle or wrong lens, maybe we have to begin to think about it from a holistic approach and so I love the term that you use of the total experience, I absolutely love that. So Yes.
Genefa Murphy: No, it’s really key.
Juanita Coley: Tell me, what’s next? I’m super excited. What can you tell me? What’s next for Five9?
Genefa Murphy: So, a big thing for us is we are continuing to grow our customers of all shapes and sizes, but a lot of focus for us is definitely on helping customers within specific verticals. So, we’ve recently launched a number of best practices and different capabilities for different verticals, whether it’s healthcare, we released an Epic integration, or whether it’s financial services or retail where we’re putting best practices out there, because part of what Five9 is, it’s not just great technology and we’ve got some awesome things that we’re doing in the space of AI and automation, but it’s as much about the people and helping our customers with best practices. So, in the coming weeks and months, you’ll see much more about that, how we can actually take all of the conversations we’ve had with customers and with our partners and package that into something that our customers can use to sort of look at where are they now, where do they want to go and how are they actually going to get there.
And the most important thing is we talk about it, re-imagined. So re-imagined customer experience and delivering results because re-imagine gives you that vision, that future of where you can use AI, where you can use automation, where you can use the cloud, but at the end of the day, everyone’s got a job to do and that job normally is about delivering results and those results need to be delivered in the here and now to even get the opportunity to be able to think about re-imagining. So, we want to help our customers with both sides of that.
Juanita Coley: That was good. We have to deliver results now so that we can be able to even focus on re-imagining that was good
Genefa Murphy: Exactly! Because sometimes when you go in and it’s like, Oh great. Yes, we would like, our job is to help provide our customers with a vision and where things are going but at the same time, we take a lot of pride in helping customers see results in the here and now, and sort of buy that bandwidth, to be able to continue to innovate and take advantage of technology, because I don’t know about you, but a lot of teams don’t exactly have money falling from the sky to be able to necessarily take advantage of all the technology. So, you often have to make your current approach more effective and more efficient in order to get that chance.
Juanita Coley: That is that’s so great because that leads me into my last question. Again, like I said, my whole career has been spent in contact centers and so I was working in contact centers. So I got started by reading blue pumpkin manual, which is now Verint and I was like, I think I like this and so I started working in call centers, building out workforce teams, working in workforce management and all of that good stuff, and absolutely fell in love with it because of the holistic, you have to have good data, then you move into forecasting and so I have this whole methodology of how I go through that methodology of building out a workforce management team and all of that good stuff and leveraging now the technology to do the heavy lifting.
And so you said one thing that was just, it stuck out to me about, we have to get the basics or we have to deliver results and then we can reimagine, we don’t have a core foundation and I see this so many times where I’ll go into a contact center and they’re leveraging this Ferrari of a tool but because they don’t have the basics, they don’t have the foundation, they don’t have the data points or they don’t have a good understanding of what forecasting even is, or they don’t understand why they would do a split shift over a stair-step shift or whatever the case may be. What intraday is, they don’t understand those different components are that what I call the life cycle of workforce management, then they have an excellent tool that will work, but they don’t know how to appropriately maximize it and reimagine the possibilities.
And so, I think that is what is so important is that we have a good foundation and then we can be able to re-imagine and so that leads me to my question about you were mentioning earlier about workforce engagement has been a big thing, you’ve been seeing that has been a big concern of customers. How are you guys at Five9 making sure that you meet that demand and meet that question mark for customers of, okay, well, I have this awesome piece of technology, How do I make sure that my customers are engaged my workforce staff? I’m having on performance management; all of those different components of workforce management demands are being met?
Genefa Murphy: Yes. So, I think it’s really sort of helping customers to understand where they are right now and where do they want to go. So, for example, are they doing manual quality management or can they automate that process? Do their supervisors have limited or no workforce or quality management tools behind their various channels? Are the quality management tools only on one channel and not looking at the full channel?
So often you’ve got people who are doing maybe quality management on the voice, but are they really doing it across everything across all the different digital channels. So I think that’s one area is helping customers understand and just being honest about are you in that sort of emerging stage and an evolving stage, or are you going into a sort of leading a stage as well and then I think when you get into that leading stage, you can create sort of super agents and super supervisors where supervisors have got advanced abilities to manage and measure resources and performance and can compare and using sites to predict scheduling needs and balance them across the different channels that they have available.
So, I think that’s part of it as well is we’ve got great solutions, we’re continuing, we did an AM, I think it was about six-seven weeks ago. Now we did another great release of our WFM solution but we’re also putting some best practices out there as well to sort of help customers look at where they are, where they want to be, and then what are some of the both tactical and strategic steps that they can take in order to evolve their approach.
And the other piece is really making sure that other referred solutions are integrated into the sort of broader Five9 capabilities. So, we did do some acquisitions last year, bringing those in, making sure as well that you can access to them directly from the Five9 platform and also creating a more unified UI and user experience so that people don’t have to click around to multiple places, they can get to it in as few clicks as possible.
Juanita Coley: Yes, that I love because feasibility, the UI is so important because if users have to open up 50, 11 million, like my grandmother would say, write applications right there, the likelihood of it being sticky or them using it consistently is very slim. They’re not trying to pull up 30,000 tabs.
Genefa Murphy: Yes. You want things to be integrated, so supervisors are looking at, for example, like what are the learning modules? How many members of my staff have adhered to those learning modules? Do they need to do more learning? Is there someone who’s struggling? Can I help them? Like you were saying, do you split shift versus dedicated, etc.
So, I think it’s as much about the integration of the technology as it is the integration of the best practices and that’s where partners are a huge element for us; partners and consulting because they really can, help us to evolve our own team and to augment our own team in helping customers on that journey.
Juanita Coley: Absolutely. And you guys do a great job with that. Can you talk more about how you guys partner to make sure that you have a very diverse and just from experience backgrounds and your partners can reach any kind of basically audience from, can you talk more about that?
Genefa Murphy: Sure. Yes. So our partner program actually has been evolving over the past couple of years and this year actually the team just launched even a few weeks ago, a really exciting project which is our Partner Amplify Webinar Series and what that’s designed to do is to better enable our partners on some of the latest and greatest from Five9, so that they can feel more empowered when they’re going into talk to customers about what our capabilities are, what they aren’t as well and where we can actually help augment the services and solutions that they bring to market as well.
So, we’ve got the Partner Amplify Series that just kicked off. We did at the beginning of this year, our first partner sales kickoff; our partner summit, where we brought hundreds of our partners together to actually again, hear directly from the Five9 to engage, give us feedback. and that the partner team is really just going leaps and bounds, how we can do more co-marketing, enablement, awareness and segmenting the partners as well. Often a partner is a very personal thing for a customer especially if they’re helping you to consultant transform your business and so for us, we want to make sure that we have the depth and breadth of partnerships that can support our customers to do that and we really see our partners as being an extension of Five9 and the values that we have, we look for partners who have those similar values as well.
Juanita Coley: Well, we’re here, Solid Rock is here for you guys. Thank you so much for the interview today. Genefa, it has been fantabulous and I want to ask you one last question that I love to ask guests, leave us with a word of wisdom. If I had to ask you a word of wisdom,
what would you tell us?
Genefa Murphy: I think, I don’t know if it can be a word of wisdom, but definitely my thought is put yourself in the other person’s shoes. So put yourself in the shoes of the customer, if you’re running a contact center, call up the contact center, see what the experience is; call it, use the chat, see what happens because sometimes you sit there as you’re building things and you think you’re doing the right thing but then when you put yourselves in the shoes of the other person, you experience it very differently.
Juanita Coley: That is so good!
Genefa Murphy: Go undercover bus on the contact center.
Juanita Coley: That is good, yes, we should. Someone should do that.
Genefa Murphy: There you go.
Juanita Coley: That is so good. We think about all these different IVRs and all these super things we want to automate, but how is it translating to the customer? How has it actually, and so we never actually call the IVR, you know and so that is good; put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Thank you so much, hang out with me, I’m going to send you back over to the green room and then I’m going to wrap up the show and I’ll be right over with you. Okay.
Genefa Murphy: Awesome. Thanks Juanita.
Juanita Coley: Bye.