Will Bachman Venkat Nagaswamy Interview

Transcript of my interview with Will Bachman.

Transcript

[Will 00:01]: Welcome to Unleashed, the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which connects you with the world’s top independent management consultants. I’m Will Bachman, and I’m here today with our guest Venkat Nagaswamy, who is the group vice president of marketing at 8x8. 8x8 is a global communications firm that Vincot will explain a little bit more what they do, but their business is way up. They have video chat and remote contact centers. He’s going to tell us what they do, and Vincat, welcome to the show.

[Venkat 00:37]: Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here.

[Will 00:40]: So, so folks, everyone has heard of Zoom and solutions. 8x8 is not as much of a household name. Give us a quick overview of the services that 8x8 provides, including one, you know, uh Jitsi, which is, you know, getting much better known.

[Venkat 01:00]: Yeah, we are not yet as well known a name as Zoom, and we will get there, uh, if I do my job right. So, anyway, uh, so 8x8 is a communications provider, as you mentioned, communications in the cloud provider. We provide, uh, video meetings, uh, phone service, contact center, and chat in the cloud. Uh, what essentially means is that you can, uh, work from anywhere, uh, get your, uh, uh, work done, get your, uh, sales done, get your contact center done, anywhere in the world. Uh, you mentioned Jitsi. Jitsi is an open source version, uh, of our video meetings product. It is the core technology that underlies our video meetings, uh, solution. Um, and that product, uh, uh, has used to see 120,000, uh, monthly active users before COVID crisis started, and now we’re seeing 20 million, uh, monthly active users. Uh, some of cool things about Jitsi are, you know, when the, when the whole thing, uh, started, whole COVID, uh, shutdown started in Lombardy in, uh, Italy, uh, the users called us and now something like 25% of, uh, this of teachers in Italy are using Jitsi to, to provide, uh, classes to, uh, their students. So that’s a cool thing. So, these things that, that, that we’re doing for the community and, and the overall, uh, market will get us more well known in the future, and really looking forward to it.

[Will 02:34]: Yeah, that’s amazing. And for listeners who haven’t used it before, that’s J. I. T. dot S. I. Jitsi. Or I think it’s also at Jitsi, jitsi.org. Include those links in the show notes. That’s amazing. 120,000 to 20 million, uh, monthly users. That’s incredible growth. Um, and you were telling me a story that about how a contact center that was an in-person contact center, they got shut down in Spain, you know, with the, with the lockdown. Tell me what happened next and how you were able to get them, get them set up to work remotely.

[Venkat 03:16]: Yeah. So, our relationship with this particular customer actually started off as them being a vendor for us. They, they are outsourced, uh, uh, BDR team that we use, uh, that we and marketing use, uh, to generate our own pipeline, uh, a company called EIMS. Now, these guys, uh, um, uh, were using a regular on-prem solution, uh, in, uh, Barcelona and come, uh, early March on a Friday, uh, government announced that, uh, we’re going they’re going to lockdown. Uh, and, uh, as you probably know, the shutdown in Spain was a lot more stricter, a lot stricter than what we’re doing here, and people were not even allowed to go outside their apartments. So, anyway, so this happened on, on Friday night. On Saturday, they reached out to us saying, hey, we need your help, and we turned in a proposal Saturday night. Sunday they signed the contract, and Sunday night, the deployment started, and on Monday morning, uh, the team was able to work, uh, without missing a beat. And what excites me really is that this, uh, company, a great partner for us, uh, was able to, uh, as, as I mentioned, they were doing on-prem, and if you cannot be on premises, you clearly cannot run the business. And with being able to move to cloud with us, they were able to serve their customers, and more importantly, stay in business, uh, because of, uh, because of us. So that is to me, uh, super exciting and, and, you know, heart-warming at the same time.

[Will 04:52]: Yeah. That is an amazing story. I mean, to think about how and this is you hear a lot about the pandemic, about how it’s accelerating the future and also accelerating when things get implemented. Just, I mean, just sort of in, you know, intuition, how long would it take if under normal situation a contact center had made an executive decision, okay, we’re going to move to cloud and work remotely? It probably would have been a six-month transition with change management consultants and planning for it and mapping out process and stuff, and you did it in a week, a weekend.

[Venkat 05:28]: Yeah. Weekend.

[Will 05:30]: A weekend on, on a Sunday. What was involved? Tell me a little bit about what it actually took to, you know, set that up so that everyone could work remotely. And then was there, I mean, I imagine there might have been some catch-up processes afterwards on something. I don’t know, just the billing or the, you know, giving people the access codes or something. Like what, what did you have to do to shift a contact center from everybody reporting to a, you know, football stadium kind of sized room on Friday to then on Monday everybody’s working from home? What, what happened to get from Friday to Monday?

[Venkat 06:10]: Yeah. So, actually leading the future, that’s a great way to put it. Uh, you know, I saw a cartoon somewhere recently, which was talking about like, at the top it says like, digital, our digital transformation was driven by. And there is on the left there’s a cartoon which says CEO, and there’s a strike mark through that. And then there’s a box in the middle that says CIO, and there’s a strike mark through that. And then the third box that says COVID, and it and a and a right mark next to that. So COVID has really driving digital transformation on a, on a much more rapid scale than what you’d see elsewhere. And before I come to this particular case, there is also other cases. There’s a big financial services provider within the US, and they were going to deploy our solutions on a more measured basis, and I think they started off with like, I don’t know, 5,000 lines or something like that. And once COVID hit, they immediately called us and said, hey, we need to do 15,000 lines more. Can you make that happen? And we did that, I don’t know, within a week or so, uh, uh, in that time frame. So, this kind of transformation, uh, uh, the, the, what was happening at a more measured pace earlier is been rapidly accelerated because of what we are seeing today. Now, going to this particular example, uh, the immediate deployment itself, uh, because everything happens in the cloud, because, uh, we ourselves do the, uh, everything, our deployment from the cloud, the initial deployment itself was pretty easy, uh, because the provisioning and everything happened from the cloud. Now, the the piece, uh, earlier you would have had to rewire all the phone phone, phones, physical phones, and, uh, maybe have different headsets and so on and so forth. That completely got eliminated because people were working from home. And so all they needed to do was to download, uh, a soft phone onto their, onto their laptop, and loan behold, you’re ready to, uh, ready to, you’re in business. So all the call routing, all the call setup, everything could be easily deployed from the cloud. Now, there was some, uh, I want to change management that needed to happen, uh, in terms of how people did, uh, for instance, uh, uh, track their salesforce reports and so on. But again, because we, our product comes with out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, uh, a lot of those kind of setups were completely obviated as well. It was more around change management of training all the, uh, uh, all the call center folks to do things differently that probably took, uh, another week or so before we could settle things down. But in terms of actual deployment, actual things that we needed to do, uh, 90% of the things because got eliminated, right? The physical phones, the physical, the, the software connections, the routing software, all of these things either were eliminated or could be deployed from the cloud, and so we were able to, uh, uh, that’s the reason why we’re able to do it over a weekend. This is, uh, this, when people talk about cloud, we always, uh, we often talk about, uh, uh, the cost effectiveness of a cloud, which is, of course, true, but something that’s equally important and more important arguably is the flexibility. How quickly can you do these kind of things that you couldn’t do elsewhere. And and love to point out yet another case, this is a a bank, a credit union out on East Coast, about a year or two ago, I want to say year and a half ago, there was a there was a, uh, a hurricane which hit North Carolina, and this bank, which was based out of North Carolina, they had to tell their call center employees to, uh, uh, just work go up and down, save yourself, and go wherever you need to go to, uh, to avoid the storm. And again, these guys went up and down the coast to to shelter away from the storm. And again, they were able to open up their laptops and work from wherever they needed to. And this is a case where it’s a credit union, it’s a bank, uh, after the storm, people were calling in, uh, to understand their, because people’s homes were destroyed, uh, their livelihoods were destroyed, and they were able to call into their banks to make sure that their, uh, financial security is assured. And we were able to support it because of this power of the cloud, right? And again, so, the net net to answer your question, a lot of the because of this move to cloud, the, the, uh, the burden, a bunch of burdens that needed to happen were, uh, or a bunch of effort that you would need to do in terms of moving to the cloud, uh, either got eliminated simply because of the circumstances, or because of cloud, uh, we were able to deploy it at scale, remotely, uh, over a weekend. That’s amazing. Now, I’ve uh, a friend of ours, we’ve actually stayed at stayed at her place, um, has uh, is a, uh, representative for one of the airlines, and she works from home. So, which, you know, doing, doing the calls, taking the calls from home, she has the laptop. So, I’ve kind of seen that uh, in practice. I’ve also visited some contact centers. Uh, tell us a little bit about what it, how it actually works to have call center reps working remotely. Um, be curious to hear about, uh, and maybe you could start with just kind of the, the the monitoring of calls. So, when you’re when you’re a consumer and you call in, sometimes they say, I need to talk to my manager about this or whatever. So, um, how, you know, what if anything is different when when reps are working remotely and what what does it physically look like in terms of how they do their work?

[Venkat 06:11]: Yeah. So, actually leading the future, that’s a great way to put it. Uh, you know, I saw a cartoon somewhere recently, which was talking about like, at the top it says like, digital, our digital transformation was driven by. And there is on the left there’s a cartoon which says CEO, and there’s a strike mark through that. And then there’s a box in the middle that says CIO, and there’s a strike mark through that. And then the third box that says COVID, and it and a and a right mark next to that. So COVID has really driving digital transformation on a, on a much more rapid scale than what you’d see elsewhere. And before I come to this particular case, there is also other cases. There’s a big financial services provider within the US, and they were going to deploy our solutions on a more measured basis, and I think they started off with like, I don’t know, 5,000 lines or something like that. And once COVID hit, they immediately called us and said, hey, we need to do 15,000 lines more. Can you make that happen? And we did that, I don’t know, within a week or so, uh, uh, in that time frame. So, this kind of transformation, uh, uh, the, the, what was happening at a more measured pace earlier is been rapidly accelerated because of what we are seeing today. Now, going to this particular example, uh, the immediate deployment itself, uh, because everything happens in the cloud, because, uh, we ourselves do the, uh, everything, our deployment from the cloud, the initial deployment itself was pretty easy, uh, because the provisioning and everything happened from the cloud. Now, the the piece, uh, earlier you would have had to rewire all the phone phone, phones, physical phones, and, uh, maybe have different headsets and so on and so forth. That completely got eliminated because people were working from home. And so all they needed to do was to download, uh, a soft phone onto their, onto their laptop, and loan behold, you’re ready to, uh, ready to, you’re in business. So all the call routing, all the call setup, everything could be easily deployed from the cloud. Now, there was some, uh, I want to change management that needed to happen, uh, in terms of how people did, uh, for instance, uh, uh, track their salesforce reports and so on. But again, because we, our product comes with out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, uh, a lot of those kind of setups were completely obviated as well. It was more around change management of training all the, uh, uh, all the call center folks to do things differently that probably took, uh, another week or so before we could settle things down. But in terms of actual deployment, actual things that we needed to do, uh, 90% of the things because got eliminated, right? The physical phones, the physical, the, the software connections, the routing software, all of these things either were eliminated or could be deployed from the cloud, and so we were able to, uh, uh, that’s the reason why we’re able to do it over a weekend. This is, uh, this, when people talk about cloud, we always, uh, we often talk about, uh, uh, the cost effectiveness of a cloud, which is, of course, true, but something that’s equally important and more important arguably is the flexibility. How quickly can you do these kind of things that you couldn’t do elsewhere. And and love to point out yet another case, this is a a bank, a credit union out on East Coast, about a year or two ago, I want to say year and a half ago, there was a there was a, uh, a hurricane which hit North Carolina, and this bank, which was based out of North Carolina, they had to tell their call center employees to, uh, uh, just work go up and down, save yourself, and go wherever you need to go to, uh, to avoid the storm. And again, these guys went up and down the coast to to shelter away from the storm. And again, they were able to open up their laptops and work from wherever they needed to. And this is a case where it’s a credit union, it’s a bank, uh, after the storm, people were calling in, uh, to understand their, because people’s homes were destroyed, uh, their livelihoods were destroyed, and they were able to call into their banks to make sure that their, uh, financial security is assured. And we were able to support it because of this power of the cloud, right? And again, so, the net net to answer your question, a lot of the because of this move to cloud, the, the, uh, the burden, a bunch of burdens that needed to happen were, uh, or a bunch of effort that you would need to do in terms of moving to the cloud, uh, either got eliminated simply because of the circumstances, or because of cloud, uh, we were able to deploy it at scale, remotely, uh, over a weekend. That’s amazing. Now, I’ve uh, a friend of ours, we’ve actually stayed at stayed at her place, um, has uh, is a, uh, representative for one of the airlines, and she works from home. So, which, you know, doing, doing the calls, taking the calls from home, she has the laptop. So, I’ve kind of seen that uh, in practice. I’ve also visited some contact centers. Uh, tell us a little bit about what it, how it actually works to have call center reps working remotely. Um, be curious to hear about, uh, and maybe you could start with just kind of the, the the monitoring of calls. So, when you’re when you’re a consumer and you call in, sometimes they say, I need to talk to my manager about this or whatever. So, um, how, you know, what if anything is different when when reps are working remotely and what what does it physically look like in terms of how they do their work?

[Venkat 11:59]: Yeah. So, uh, first let’s talk about a on on quote normal, uh, usual contact center, right? A usual contact center, you’ll have rows and rows of people sitting now, they typically have, uh, a physical phone, uh, and a computer screen and they receive calls, right? And and call comes in through normal, uh, PSDN or, you know, just plain old telephone network, uh, and then it gets it goes to a switchboard, and then it the PBX will route it to the the contact center on prem equipment that you would have, would route it to the available rep, right? And then the available rep answers the phone, and then they do things on the computer as the as the things might happen. In this case, in our case, essentially that piece of place where a phone line comes in and our phone connection comes in, our call comes in, and then it goes to goes and gets routed by an on prem equipment, all of that goes away, or it goes into the cloud. So when a number comes in, we as, uh, uh, the provider would then, uh, look at the available, uh, we’ll look at presence or what we call as presence, essentially, availability of call center reps, uh, and then automatically route the call to uh, an available rep. Uh, and now that available rep, uh, they, uh, can either have a physical phone or more typically, equally typically, they have, uh, uh, an app on the laptop. So this app, uh, is, is similar to what you would do to let’s say, um, a normal Zoom or any of the other apps. So similar to that, it goes into an app, uh, the the phone call gets routed. Similar to what you would do, uh, let’s say with a Skype call or any of those things where you can call a computer. So the app, uh, essentially responds to that call that we get routed and then you just talk like what you would do normally. And now to answer your question around, uh, so when these calls are coming in, because these are, uh, uh, software packets, you can, uh, automatically record them based on, uh, whatever local law laws that apply, uh, you can also have cases where, uh, you can automatically conference people in. One of the powers of, uh, using cloud and especially the integrated one platform that, uh, uh, that 8x8 has is that you can also, uh, have, uh, people automatically call other people internally. So let me give you an example, right? If you have a normal uh, quote unquote normal on prem contact center, somebody calls in, and let’s say the, the, the call center rep needs to, uh, contact, uh, contact a product manager, as a for instance, right? Now the product manager is not going to be on, uh, uh, on the same contact center, uh, uh, on prem equipment, so they’ll probably go through a separate phone line, go talk to them, and that’s why people often put you on hold to go talk to somebody else and come back, right? With our integrated platform, you can get a call through a contact center software, and then using the same software, this call center rep can contact the product manager who might be on their normal internal phone system, right? So, when you do things in the cloud, when you do things in software, it opens up a whole bunch of possibilities that you cannot do normally. And yet another example of this is, uh, uh, is tracking things on, on Salesforce, right? Normally you, uh, the, the call center rep will have to enter all of these details into Salesforce or some CRM tool, uh, uh, manually. But with software and with call center software and other things we provide, it automatically can, uh, you it integrates into Salesforce, integrates into Zendesk and other pieces, so that the call center rep does not have to manually create that record. They can go and update that record, and over time we’d be able to do things like, uh, transcription and, uh, issue identification and so on, that can help them populate those automatically. So, to make a long story short, by, uh, uh, when we go from old, uh, PSDN connection, where, uh, you have your old phone network, and by moving it to software, it allows you to do a whole bunch of things that you couldn’t do otherwise, and to make the call center, uh, uh, reps, uh, life easier, and the experience that their customers get, far better what than what they could do otherwise.

[Will 16:38]: How do you manage issues such as security of data, particularly for, uh, reps that might be handling, um, health information that falls under HIPAA laws or financial information? How how do you, um, how do companies typically deal with those security matters?

[Venkat 16:58]: So, uh, security is a super, very, very important, uh, consideration for us. Communicate, uh, communications is, you know, the bedrock of any business, and we take, uh, security extremely seriously. Uh, and so that the the, whether or not we’re talking about our, you know, video product or just a normal voice product or call center product, all of this, uh, relies on an overall platform, the one platform that we have that underlies this whole, uh, uh, infrastructure, and that, uh, uh, underlies these different the infrastructure that underlies these, uh, these offerings that we have. That is, uh, uh, we’ve spent, you know, we’ve been in business for long enough time that we’ve spent a lot of time and effort in, uh, making that extremely secure, uh, from all kinds of, uh, activities that you can think of, from normal fraud and, uh, those kinds of activities to, uh, digital denial of service attacks. Uh, all of those things are, uh, uh, extremely secure, and again, all the and because of again the fact that we provide a one platform, we can assure, uh, encryption and security all the way to the, the, the phone, uh, service that, I’m sorry, the, the soft phone that you’re using on on your laptop. And so the the fact that, uh, our bed, uh, platform is totally buttoned up and secure, and because we provide all the because we are an integrated provider of software, uh, for all of these systems, we can assure you security all the way up to the soft phone or the physical phone that you’re using, uh, to, to, uh, that the call center person is using.

[Will 18:53]: What have you found, you know, sort of seeing a lot of these virtual contact centers of, of clients of yours, um, what have you seen any difference in the behavior of the reps over time, such as, does retention of reps change if you go from an in-person to a remote contact center? Do people stay longer, do they stay less time? Does it attract a different, different type of population? Do people work, you know, is it maybe more feasible to have people only work for say, plug in, work for two hours and then, you know, take four hours off and plug in two hours in the evening? Tell me about some of the ways that it changes the work and about how maybe how the reps respond to that.

[Venkat 19:40]: Absolutely. So, the key thing around in, in any call center is workforce management. And, uh, uh, to all the things the points that you just raised, right? Uh, based on call volumes, time of the year, uh, time of day, time of week, uh, the capacity that’s required in a call center goes up and down. Now, uh, and these things, you know, as you can imagine like, a retailer is going to have a lot more call volumes around Christmas than they do, I don’t know, in May or something like that. Uh, and so, typically people need to, in a normal contact center, you would need to have complex workforce scheduling software and other pieces to make sure that you have enough capacity, uh, to be able to answer phones and so on, right? And often it, uh, uh, if you need, uh, part-timers, it makes it harder because you you might need it only for an hour or two. So having a physical location and doing all of these things makes it much, much harder. Uh, on the other hand, and and by the way, from a physical equipment perspective, you’re going to have to gear up the physical equipment to make sure that it can handle the maximum amount of volume that you’re going to handle. Uh, on the other hand, because of moving to cloud, two or three things happen, right? You can have a more flexible workforce. And we’ve seen things like, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, women who have just given birth or who’ve uh, uh, who want to have who need to have more flexible, uh, scheduling, they can work from home, uh, or the peaks and valleys that you see during the week, during the quarter, during the year, uh, that a call center would have, all of those things become much easier to manage simply because you don’t need to bring everybody into a single on-prem, on in one location. They can work from wherever, they can work from, uh, in whatever fashion that they need to do. Uh, and because again, a lot of these things happen in the cloud, uh, it’s, it’s perfectly elastic. You can go up and down, uh, uh, in terms of the capacity requirements that you need, uh, without having to, uh, pay for the maximum that you’ll have you’re going to have to ever need, right? So it gives the, it gives the provider flexibility in going up and down. It gives, it makes it, it, it allows, uh, people with who have, uh, more demands in their lives where they they need to be more flexible, it allows them to, uh, uh, have a career in this. And so it it it essentially brings a digital transformation into a situation that so far has been, uh, a far more rigid, uh, working environment.

[Will 22:30]: Right. So, in a traditional call center, and I’ve spent time in a in a few of them doing some projects, you have this issue that you that you mentioned of when you bring people into physical place, you kind of have to give them, I guess, at least four hours, right? So, and you’re trying to predict in advance, and you can never get it exactly right. So, either you have too many people at some points, so you’re paying for people to sit around or you, you you miss the mark and you don’t have enough people, so people have really long wait times and they get frustrated. So, you can never get it perfectly right. You’re always trying to optimize this balance. So, with where I’m curious, so with these virtual contact centers, some people probably want to have a steady, you know, number of hours and they want to work eight hours per shift, you know, full stop. Um, but some people are probably more flexible. So, has there arisen things like, hey, um, you’re kind of on call and we’ll send you a text message if we need you to hop on for an hour or two. And then when their demand drops off, then we’ll kind of cut you off. So, those people might, you know, be willing to just hop on whenever, so does that kind of thing arise where people will hop in, you know, just sort of get some kind of alert and just jump, hey, jump on the call, or maybe whoever gets there first is going to get, you know, get a shift, you know, a half a shift or two hours or something. How how are companies doing that?

[Venkat 23:57]: Absolutely. Yeah, so in I’ve seen people come in and go for even like half hour shifts, right? Uh, it’s to your point, if you have a call center, you need to get them, if they come in, you need to have them work at least half a day, uh, but with this, we’ve seen cases where, uh, people will turn on their availability for a half hour, and then turn it off. In some cases, think of it as like, uh, like Uber, right? Uber, um, I’m sure many many drivers in Uber spend all day driving and and there are yet others who are students and so on, who might turn on, uh, uh, their presence for sometime, and the call center and and Uber routes, uh, uh, requests to them. And at yet other cases when Uber sees a huge demand, uh, in one particular neighborhood, they send an alert to the drivers to say, hey, go to this place and and, uh, because there’s a huge demand there, right? Similar to that, uh, uh, we, we see people do, right? Both from a from the contact center provider perspective and from an employee perspective. Some people work for hours, some others, they want flexible time, so they turn on their presence for, uh, a certain period based on their own needs. At yet, yet other cases, the provider themselves ping the army of people that they have to say, hey, there is a need now, can you log on to, uh, to the, to the software so that calls can get routed to you. So, we see all of these things and as I was mentioning earlier, you could hypothetically, you could go down to even a minute if that’s what you want, which I suspect it won’t happen, but like, people can go down, uh, uh, to sub hours if as the needs needs arise.

[Will 25:43]: And how does does it typically work that do companies pay a premium for someone to just jump in for half an hour or an hour, or is it the same rate or is it less? I mean, is is there a standard of how, you know, do companies pay a bit of a premium for that flexibility? I’m curious about that.

[Venkat 26:03]: So, I’ve I don’t think I can make a blanket statement for most people. We’ve seen things everywhere from, you know, get the same hourly rate versus different rate and higher rate and so on. So it’s, uh, uh, it it’s hard for me to make a a blanket statement around that.

[Will 26:21]: It also occurs to me that, um, you know, reps could much more easily work for multiple companies, right? So, if you if you’re only doing sort of peak demand, maybe you can’t get a full-time job, maybe they’re not hiring for full-time, but they’re only hiring for peak. You might be, you know, willing to work for five or six different companies, you know, as they you for peak. Do you see that happening where reps will sort of, you know, hop on on different, different companies as a to take calls?

[Venkat 26:44]: I think that’s a very interesting thing for us to look at to see because for us, each of these instances that get deployed for different companies are, uh, maintained separately, there’s a separation. I don’t know if there’s a way that we can, uh, figure that out. But I’m sure that happens just as Uber drivers drive for Lyft as well. Uh, but it’s difficult for us to determine it because of identity and protections between different, uh, contact center, uh, providers. So, even if you’re even if you’re, you as an individual, uh, work for two different, uh, uh, uh, contact center providers, we wouldn’t, uh, uh, we wouldn’t be able to determine that, uh, in a privacy preserving fashion.

[Will 27:37]: Oh, I got you. All right. Uh, cool. So, tell me a little bit, so we talked about contact centers some. How do, um, and but one area I didn’t touch is how does the monitoring work? So, uh, a lot of times at in-person contact center, I’ve seen the managers will walk up and down the row and they’ll kind of stare over the person’s shoulder and they’ll plug in a separate headphones to monitor a call. Uh, in the virtual world, do they people, the managers just kind of, uh, jump in on a call and and listen in and sort of watch what’s going on on the screen, kind of Absolutely.

[Venkat 28:12]: Absolutely. I mean, so, uh, you, uh, there are multiple it it the amount of interaction that a manager can have with, uh, a, a rep goes up, uh, in these situations, right? Uh, all of these things that you mentioned around, uh, looking at, uh, looking at, uh, or listening into call, uh, live calls, listening into recorded calls, listening into transcripts of calls, uh, all of these things happen, uh, in a in a in a seamless fashion. And especially with everything being in the cloud, the amount of analytics that you get, uh, are all things, uh, that you wouldn’t be able to, uh, uh, you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. So let me give you an example, right? There’s, uh, often, so people will have physical presence in the office. So let’s say let’s take 8x8 as an example. Uh, we have an office in in Campbell that, well, nobody goes to today, but in normal Covid, pre-Covid days we’d show up, right? And that has a switchboard number. Now, we get a bunch of calls of people looking for support, who call our, uh, who call our front desk, and then the front desk will route the call to call center and, and people get, uh, supported from there, right? Now, in a normal, uh, quote unquote normal situation, you’ll never be able to track, you’ll never be able to track situations where we say, hey, what percentage of inbound calls that come into, uh, the front desk get routed to customer support or vice versa, what kind amount of customer support calls get come from the front desk as opposed to people calling in directly? This kind of analytics, uh, at an aggregate level, at a rep level, at a group level, uh, you won’t be able to get in a typical PSDN situation, right? And to add to it, because of, uh, uh, things in the cloud and this being in software, the integration that you can get with other software like Zendesk or or or Salesforce or any any other thing that you have, those integrations also go up. So, uh, ability for a manager to help the rep goes up, ability to coach them goes up, uh, abilities to, to, to monitor and and look for, uh, uh, rep satisfaction and so on. All of these things go up significantly because of, uh, because of software. Because it’s all in software.

[Will 30:45]: Yeah. I mean, I can imagine that you’re probably already working on things like artificial intelligence to be kind of listening listening into the call, real time transcribing it, and then being, you know, the computer could probably provide to the rep the answers real time to some of the most basic questions so they don’t even need to navigate, right?

[Venkat 31:08]: In fact, I mean, there are some of the things that we demoed earlier, uh, where you could have virtual assistants, uh, and actually do, uh, a bunch of call interception, right? So, uh, something like, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but something like 30% of the calls that we get at 8x8 are about resetting a password, right? And so, when a call comes in, even before it goes to a rep, uh, the we can interact with AI, with, uh, the customer and have them say, hey, what is your problem today? And they say, I need to read the reset the password, and then we can automatically intercept the call and playback a message to them that says, how do you do that, right? So, that level of, uh, uh, we demonstrated that. There are multiple ways in which you can use virtual assistants like that. Uh, and so AI is one of the most exciting things, uh, to, to, uh, to come into the contact center world. In fact, uh, I came into 8x8 as a result of my, uh, uh, company, Mariya and IQ, being, uh, uh, acquired by 8x8. And we were an AI for marketing company, uh, and the team and the technology that we had, uh, now underlies a bunch of the AI offerings that, uh, are going into our contact center, uh, contact center product, our chat product, our, uh, uh, phone product and so on. What, what one instance example of this is, uh, you know, when you have, uh, let’s say a phone app on your, uh, an internal phone app, and you’re trying to call people, often the directory is alphabetical, right? On the other hand, uh, uh, there are only some subset of people that I keep calling all the time. And so, instead of and so when I start searching on my, uh, on my virtual office app on my phone, it doesn’t do it alphabetically. It does it, uh, based on, uh, partially alphabetically, but it also, say, if I wanted to talk to James, or Jim, let’s say, and I type J, uh, because I’ve interacted with Jim a lot, Jim’s name will show up before James’s name shows up because of how frequently I interact, right? So, anyway, so, these are all things that, uh, based on behavior patterns, based on, uh, uh, the call patterns and other things that we see, we can bring intelligence into the app in every interaction that people have, uh, to make the experience better. And AI is one of the coolest things to come in, and we I we believe that this is just early days of, uh, AI being used in contact center and video meetings and so on. And, uh, and and and this is just only going to go up. Another instance of AI is, uh, automatic transcription of video meetings, right? Uh, uh, uh, and over time, automatic automatic translation of meetings, with live translations happening, uh, as you speak. So these are all things that AI enables.

[Will 36:06]: Yeah, that’s amazing. I imagine that, and is that happening now, transcription of the meetings of the of the calls, so that it would go into Salesforce, not just the reps notes, but then the actual transcript of the whole call?

[Venkat 36:19]: The video meetings product that we have does automatic transcription, uh, and and records it. Uh, when it comes to the contact center product, uh, I actually, uh, that I’m not entirely sure how how that enters. It’s probably, it depends on the configuration.

[Will 36:37]: Okay. Could you tell us a little bit about 8x8 and sort of, you know, what you’re able to share in terms of your kind of marketing approach and how you think about the market, you know, if you’re allowed to share sort of how you think about segmenting the the business market and what are the primary segments that that are the best fit for 8x8 and just kind of how you’re going going to market?

[Venkat 37:01]: Yeah. So, um, we, so just to, we’re a public company, we have 400, 440, 450 million dollar in revenue, um, and, uh, over the past year or two, we’ve been growing at, uh, 25, 30% in bookings, 30% above 30% bookings. Uh, in terms of historically, uh, uh, VoIP or VoIP in the cloud, phone service in the cloud was a, a a small business, uh, kind of, uh, kind of, uh, uh, product. Over time, uh, and essentially small business because they were, they saw, uh, uh, essentially with a lower value lower cost value proposition, uh, that’s historically what they would, uh, see. But what we’ve been noticing in the past three years, four years or so is that our mid-market, uh, and enterprise customers, I think, uh, to the street, we report them as, uh, above a billion dollar in revenue. I think that’s the enterprise and mid-market is like, I don’t remember the exact number, uh, how we report to the street, but our growth in mid-market and enterprise is significantly greater than our commercial business and commercial or small business. And, uh, uh, and, uh, and what you’ve noticing in the marketplace over the past few years is that, uh, in mid-market and enterprise, people are more excited about the flexibility, uh, the possibilities that digital transformation can do for you, and that’s what we’re seeing increasingly, uh, in in in that space. And the way we look at it, like, for very small, uh, companies, SoHo, uh, small business, uh, we, uh, you can buy the product online. There is a low-end express service that you can buy completely with zero touch, uh, zero touch, uh, approach. Uh, and for commercial, typically it’s a it’s an inside sales kind of operation, and for mid-market and enterprise, it’s more of a field sales. And to support these different activities, uh, marketing is aligned in those in, in those three buckets. E-commerce is owned by marketing. Inside sales, we, uh, for commercial, we we have a different approach of marketing, which is more broad-based, uh, uh, approach to marketing. Whereas for mid-market and enterprise, we are heavily, uh, uh, partner oriented and heavily, uh, uh, field oriented to to provide, uh, pipeline to those guys.

[Will 37:44]: What’s that mean to be partner oriented and field oriented?

[Venkat 37:48]: So, uh, one thing that I should have pointed out is that what the biggest growth that we’ve been getting over the past few years, uh, as I mentioned, is coming from mid-market and enterprise, uh, but a lot of, a significant portion of that growth comes from our partners. So, in the Telco world, there are a whole bunch of master agents and sub-agents, uh, who have been historically, uh, people who have relationships with the end customers, and it’s these, uh, partners who, uh, have been bringing us a lot of business, uh, and these are trusted providers, they’ve had relationships with the end customers going over decades, uh, and and truly people who, uh, take the end customer’s perspective. And these partners have, uh, have started seeing the value that 8x8 provides and and, uh, and therefore, uh, we are a partner first organization, uh, in in, in taking, uh, uh, what that means is that when there is contention between partner and a direct deal, it’s, it’s partner’s deal gets precedence over direct, right? And so, from that perspective, partners bring us a lot of deals, our growth is driven by partners, and, uh, and therefore, uh, uh, we we put partners first.

[Will 39:11]: That’s interesting. So, so is that like larger Fortune 1000 type companies will have what would you call that kind of firm? It’s it’s a not exactly a management consulting firm, but it’s someone who is their Telco kind of It’s

[Venkat 39:27]: It’s they’re called Telco channel partners, I mean, you could just do a Google search for it, you you’ll find it. Telco or telecommunications channel partners is is what they you would call them. And they typically are people who, uh, who service, uh, uh, anybody pretty much like, you know, below above a 100 employee company, typically they have these relationships with them, right? And in some of them might be MSPs, like managed service providers. Uh, some of them could be referral partners, some of them could be doing other value-added reselling. So, for instance, you might take, uh, uh, pieces of our, uh, uh, uh, so, uh, you might take pieces of the the solution that we have add other software to it to have an, uh, uh, and more integrated solution for an end customer. So, those are all the different types of partners that we have, but if, uh, typically they’re called, uh, technology, uh, I’m sorry, telecommunications channel partners and some of the big, uh, uh, mass regions are people like, uh, Avat and, uh, Avat is a is a big one, for instance.

[Will 40:40]: Ah, interesting. I didn’t know about that world. That’s pretty interesting to hear.

[Venkat 40:44]: It is a, I myself didn’t know about this until I came to 8x8, quite honestly. That world is a very different, uh, world from the what, uh, in technology that I was used to historically, which is like, you know, distributor VAR world, uh, in the physical hardware, or you had like, uh, you know, management consultants and in the software world, like people like, uh, let’s say Deloitte or Accenture, those are the kinds of partners that I historical used to, and this channel world in Telco is a different kind of, it’s a different world.

[Will 41:19]: Yeah. Now, you were, I think, an associate partner at McKinsey, and then you had a startup. Could you talk a little bit about your own journey and and, um, kind of what you did before 8x8?

[Venkat 41:32]: Yeah. So, I, uh, uh, yes, I did, uh, before 8x8, I, uh, as I mentioned, I came to 8x8 as a result of my company being acquired by 8x8. We are an AI for marketing company. I got the idea to start that company when I ran enterprise marketing for at Juniper, which meant I was head of marketing for like a 1.8, 2 billion dollar business there. And, uh, and that’s when I got the idea to start, uh, Mariya and IQ. Uh, prior to, uh, Juniper Networks, I was, uh, an associate partner with, uh, McKinsey in the Silicon Valley office. I served, uh, high-tech clients up and down the coast, and primarily, uh, in all kinds of areas, uh, uh, online services and sales and marketing. Those are some of the areas that I was focused on. Uh, prior to that, I started another company, which was a mobile payments company. You know, if you go to Starbucks and get a barcode on your phone to pay, that was our idea, except we did that in feature phones before, uh, the arrival of iPhones. And as I always say, that’s where I learned the lesson of being at the right place at the right time by not being at the right place at the right time. So, um, and prior to that, I used to sell plastics for GE in the automotive industry, uh, and I used to work at Ford as well. By background, I’m an engineer, or, I should say, by training, I’m an engineer, even if not by practice. Um, and I also have a business degree from Michigan.

[Will 43:03]: All right. Um, so, what do you see kind of as the future, um, you know, particularly around contact centers? I’m curious, do you envision that companies having, you know, experimented with this remote model will just stick with it? Are you hearing that companies are planning to pull their people back to the to the, um, in-person on-premises type type thing? What what what do you see as the future, uh, how it evolves?

[Venkat 43:33]: Yeah, I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the pre-Covid days. Uh, the the degree to which we do will vary, but we’re never going to go back to, uh, to the pre-Covid days. One of the things that we’re seeing is that, uh, or one of the things that we believe will happen and we’re seeing this to an extent right now, is that, uh, uh, remote work, business continuity, uh, all of these kinds of activities are going to be topics for, uh, boards to consider, right? You know, 12, 13 years ago, you had, uh, everyone talking about SOCs and how SOCs compliance was a big deal for boards to focus on. Similarly, boards are going to start focusing on business continuity and making sure that the, that their companies are, uh, best positioned to, uh, ride out a future such eventuality, uh, you’ll see more and more of a focus on that. And from that perspective, uh, uh, we don’t, I mean, even and you’re seeing this even today, there is, uh, there is going to be a new normal in terms of, uh, people working from home, uh, versus people working from anywhere, uh, versus, uh, centralizing everything in one location. Uh, one and you’d seeing this in a lot of things that, uh, are happening in the valley, right? Even though technology historically has enabled people from working from wherever, we ourselves, we technology companies ourselves, have all to some extent have a have had a culture of everyone showing up to physical offices to work. Uh, and that’s been the case until now. But now you’re seeing people like Facebook announcing that you don’t have to come to work till the end of the year, irrespective of what their sheltering in place, uh, laws are. And, in addition to that, Facebook has even said, hey, you can move to wherever you need to and work from wherever. And you’re going to see and you’re seeing this trend with Google, with Microsoft, with Twitter, Square, and so on and so forth, and my own company. Uh, and, uh, I, in fact, yesterday I got an email from our we center an email or we got an email from HR saying, hey, uh, we’re not going to go back to, uh, our physical office in the foreseeable future. And so, it’s, uh, uh, uh, both from, uh, a knowledge worker perspective, contact center perspective, or anything for that matter, we’re never going to go back to the pre-Covid days and we are going to see more and more of people, uh, working remotely, uh, and, and, uh, and technology like ours enabling that to happen.

[Will 46:14]: Looking around corners, do you see what other new developments do you see happening in terms of to sort of facilitate this remote work?

[Venkat 46:26]: So, uh, the the technology itself is there. It’s more of, uh, companies, uh, uh, needing to change their practices is what I, uh, see happening. One analogy I would give is, you know, uh, is the introduction of electric motors into into manufacturing, right? Historically, before electric motors came in, you would have these water wheels or windmills, and therefore the the whole, uh, uh, and, and because water wheels were only on one side, you had these, uh, uh, factories which are more vertical because you had to have these belts that would go up and down and so on. When electric motors initially came, they just substituted it one for one, and then over, only later did they realize that, hey, if you put the, uh, and which happened in Chicago with meatpackers, say, hey, if you take the assembly line and make it flatter with electric motors, you can make it run and make it happen, etc, etc, etc. The motor itself was the same, right? Nothing changed. But there was a huge improvement in productivity simply because of having assembly lines in a horizontal, uh, way. The reason I bring that up is similar to that, I think, uh, the core technologies are already here and, uh, as Arthur C. Clarke said, the the future is, uh, already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. The future is here, the technology is there. It’s how do we have other, uh, uh, uh, supporting processes and supporting, uh, uh, uh, um, human things that we need to do to make enable that. That’s basically what we need to work on.

[Will 48:05]: Yeah. You know, there’s one that’s gonna happen. there’s one thing which I don’t think video conference can do yet, and I’m hoping that it nails it soon because there’s a big need, which is it’s great for kind of a formal meeting where you have one person talking at a time to a group that’s very attentive. It’s it’s pretty good for that. I’d say almost as good as real life. What video conferencing doesn’t seem to be as good at yet is if you have, um, more of sort of a cocktail party mingling kind of thing where what I’d love is some kind of tool where you could be in a big group, but, I mean, you know, Zoom, you know, or other ones have breakout rooms that are formal. I’m now putting you in the breakout room. But nothing that I’ve seen yet allows you to be in a space and kind of wander around and walk up next to some other people and just enter the conversation and move to another group. That that’s what I’m hoping comes soon, that being able to have a large group with with multiple conversations going on that’s more fluid.

[Venkat 48:07]: And that’s

[Venkat 49:07]: Yeah. So, there there are, I suspect there are certain things like where those kind of human interactions that need to happen that we’re not going to be able to solve with technology, like this kind of things that you’re talking about, right? Maybe it’s that 30 seconds that you need to talk to people before you go into a, into a, into a, into a, uh, into a conference room, right? Those kind of human interactions, it’s a lot more, a lot harder to do right now, and maybe there’s a business idea there for for someone to do something in that direction.

[Will 49:36]: It seems doable, especially if you had almost like virtual reality glasses on. You could imagine, you know, being able to look around and and simulate real life and be able to walk up to a small group. So, I’m hoping that someone out there, maybe a listener will will work. maybe it already exists and I’m it’s unevenly distributed and I just haven’t been invited to that particular app yet. Um, so, anyway, Vincat, this has been a really fantastic discussion. Um, any links that you want to share, your Twitter handle or or anything else, so people could, uh, you know, follow what you’re doing and and and, um, if they if they’re interested after this show.

[Venkat 49:42]: Absolutely, right?

[Venkat 50:14]: Absolutely. My Twitter handle is @VenkatNagaswamy, V E N K A T, uh, N A G A S W A M Y. Please give me a follow and I’ll certainly be following you back.

[Will 50:26]: Great. And we’ll include that in the show notes. Vincat, thank you so much for joining me today.

[Venkat 50:31]: Thank you. This was a lot of fun. Take care.