Telarus Five9 Executive Interview- CCaaS and Virtual Assistance
Automated Transcription:
Adam Edwards:
Welcome. I’m here with Jake Butterbaugh, SVP of Global Channel Sales at Five9 for discussion on industry and all things related to contact center and what’s moving, what’s shaken today. So, Jake, welcome.
Jake Butterbaugh:
Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Adam Edwards:
Appreciate you being here. You know, we’ve we’ve had talks in the past about how things have moved. I think this is our last discussion. Things have changed quite a bit. Love to get your perspective on what’s taking place in the industry right now from the perspective of Five9.
Jake Butterbaugh:
Yeah. And the industry overall. Obviously I think that we’re well aware it’s macro economic challenges everywhere. And there’s a lot of people thinking, Okay, what’s going on out there? The good news from a c c perspective and from a contact center perspective is the, these deals are still on the move. So for us and I look at the overall market, we’re still growing pretty aggressively. We’re having a good experience with you. And our customers are still saying, Hey, I’ve gotta get these projects moving forward. A lot of our customers are still at that point where the PRMs kind of expired, right? We all know that. Some big things have happened there for some of the legacy PRM players. So all these customers are saying, I’ve gotta move. And they know that customer service is critically important, and so they’re still making big investments despite maybe some overall macroeconomic pressures. They’re saying, Hey, how can I use customer experience and CCaaS solutions to help me be better, more efficient, more powerful in market? So in a way, I feel like the overall environment is still working in our favor, and we’re trying to capitalize on
Adam Edwards:
That. So you think even with the recession labor constraints, things like that, is that is that having any impact in a positive way? I, I hear you say just it’s, it’s really not negative.
Jake Butterbaugh:
Yeah. Well, I’m a perpetual optimist, so recession maybe, but yeah, no, it’s, I guess it would be working to a degree in our favor because I do, like I was saying, I do think that there’s a lot of customers that are still saying, I’ve got to make a decision now. I need to move forward. And they can use a good customer experience transformation project to actually address, you know, challenges that they’re facing in terms of maybe spend labor, all of that. If you have a good holistic CCaaS strategy, you can actually address that with what we have.
Adam Edwards:
So let’s talk size accounts real quick. We were chatting a little bit before about what the profile of these accounts looks like. How, how has that changed over the last year?
Jake Butterbaugh:
Over the last year? It’s, it’s really kind of proven that the large enterprises are still ready to make the move or ready to make the move. But what, now, I’ll back maybe a little bit further. So Five9’s been around for a long time, right? We’ve been a CCaaS solution for 20 plus years now, and I think a lot of people look at Five9 and they remember the history of us being an SMB company, maybe a mid-market company. Over the course of the last 20 years. What I’ve seen over the course of the last three or four years is Five9 is now winning substantially in the large enterprise market. So I, I’m proud to say that we are very powerful in the commercial space, which is 50 agents and below our 50 agents to 500 agents, kind of the mid-market area.
Jake Butterbaugh:
We’re doing incredibly well, but now that we’re winning in the thousands upon thousands, even upwards of 10,000 agents, some of the largest contact centers in the world we’re able to be successful there. So to go back to your question of in the last year personally I’m really pleased with how well we’re doing in the enterprise. What I’d like to see with you and, and with our friends in Telarus and some of the partners that we work with, is how do we continue to capitalize on those mid-market environments? Yeah. Right? Let’s make the move, find out what they need have the conversation of do you need an integrated CRM and Five9 solution or CRM and CCaaS solution? Do you need an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution? How can Five9 help you address that? I think that’s actually what we’re looking for and what we’re excited about going
Adam Edwards:
Forward. So killing an smb, smaller and high end. I think you mentioned before Fortune 50, like we really big Yeah. Doing well, but it’s really the mid-market where this channel typically shines is where we can pick it up and sell more into that space.
Jake Butterbaugh:
Yeah. And we’re all ears. I mean, we, we’ll double down with the team and figure out what’s needed. I’m happy to help train and help educate and build partner practices. I think that’s something I’ve capitalized on or emphasized I should better say over the course of the last couple years, is, you know, help the partners figure out how to position seek as well, how to position five, nine. Well, yeah, and those mid-market customers, they need it just as much.
Adam Edwards:
I wanted to ask a little bit about some of the ancillary services. So from a product standpoint how are things changing? What are these customers looking for now, other than just voice?
Jake Butterbaugh:
That’s a good question. So first off, a great CCaaS solution has to be on each channel, right? So the customer wants everything and they want to get it from a singular vendor and understand how to do that. So you need to have your email, your chat your ultimate voice, right? What’s really fun right now is the virtual agent and even the introduction of ai, which is really at the point where mass adoption is coming for AI solutions. But Five9 offers an IVA solution that’s incredible. We purchased a company called Inference I think people are well aware of that. We now call that Five9 iva. And the attach rate is incredible, and it really supersizes the overall deal value for everybody involved mm-hmm. . But it’s not necessarily about the deal size, it’s about the value that the customer gets.
Jake Butterbaugh:
So if you have a great IVA solution, intelligent virtual agent, and it’s an automated experience for the user calling into the contact center or getting into the contact center, and you basically use that solution to offload certain tasks, certain, you know, solutions or certain experiences it actually helps on the back end in terms of total cost because you don’t need to hire as many agents. Yeah. Right? And so we’ve really loved what it’s done for us. Some of our biggest deals, we were talking about the Fortune 50, the Fortune 500 some of our biggest deals are actually funding the agent experience the CCaaS software licenses through the savings of the iva. That’s amazing, right? Yeah. It’s, and it’s real world. I mean, we have case studies on case studies.
Adam Edwards:
So are you seeing that primarily in the very large deals?
Jake Butterbaugh:
No. The IVA attach rate on UCaaS solutions is incredible, huh? And you have other vendors that use our IVA solution as part of that. So it, it applies everywhere. IVA is something that can be a first step into the contact center, or it could be the, you know, ultimate holistic part of the play. We’re happy to work with, with partners and customers.
Adam Edwards:
I dont know if everyone’s grasped onto that yet. It used to be the play was to sell connectivity. You would, you would express it as the savings, you know, can, can be paid to refresh equipment. Yeah. But now it’s, you can reduce labor, true efficiency in the business. You can reduce labor because you’re having virtual assistance and pay for, you’ve already demonstrated you can pay for the license. That that’s a great sales tactic.
Jake Butterbaugh:
It it is. And when you’re facing essentially, potentially a labor shortage, right? Yeah. Or increasing labor costs. These little moves like this, they, they’re subtle. And if you have great technology, they can help take care of it and make it feel seamless. It builds the business case by itself, right. So yeah, I, I think that some of what we’ve built, some of what we’ve shared, some of our recent, you know, white papers, they’re important to kind of grasp and then we’re happy to work on building out.
Adam Edwards:
So let’s talk about next, you know, next year for Five9, what’s coming down the pike. You’ve talked about iva. Sounds like that’s gonna be a big focus. Yep. Talked about mid-markets. Yep. Anything else we should be thinking about?
Jake Butterbaugh:
Well, I think that we need to continue to play into the growth. So early in the conversation here, I mentioned some of the prem players you know, the legacy technologies have to move. There’s at least 25% of what’s on-prim now will move to the cloud in the next 12 to 18 months, right? That’s literally millions of agents. Okay? So in order to address that, what we’re really focusing on in 2023 is how can we make that easy? How can we take our experience in migrations and in successful customer transformations, how can we get that, you know, front and center? Right? Because the greatest thing about Five9 in my opinion, is what we sell, We deliver, and we have a phenomenal delivery track record. We’re more than happy to work with partners and code deliver. So that’s a big part of what we’re focusing on at 2023, is how do we co-deliver?
Jake Butterbaugh:
But customers want that migration. They want somebody to walk in and say, What’s the plan? Here’s the plan, how we’re, this is how we’re gonna execute this and use best practices. And so that’s our big 2023 move is to make sure that we capitalize on that strength. And then you go the next step beyond that and you say, Okay, I can get the prem to cloud migration done, but then how do I get the other integrations that are critically important? And I think that’s something that Five9 is investing in heavily, whether that’s your CRM integrations, your UCaaS integrations or the ISV integrations for great reporting or specific vertical work cases. You know, in healthcare and finance, you know, there’s specific ISV solutions that need to be used in order to meet the customer requirements. So we’re making sure that we have that in our CX marketplace. Great.
Adam Edwards:
Yeah. Great. last question. So just speaking, you know specifically of agents, we talked a little bit about agent participation. How many there are, It seems like the sophistication level of these partners is increasing as they see more and more deals as they’ve been evolved in the technology. More I’d love to hear what you have to say to those who have not engaged yet. Is there still opportunity? Are, you know, have they missed a boat? Is there a way to get involved?
Jake Butterbaugh:
No, there’s certainly room on the boat . There’s a lot of demand. So personally, I started my career in telecom expense management, then I became a UCaaST guy. Literally, I’ve helped sell millions of seats of UCaaS. And now I work in CCaaS. The skills are very much aligned. And I do think that anybody who has experience in network transformation or in uc conversations, VoIP you know, whatever you want to have from a UCaaS perspective, you need to learn how CCaaS will drive decisions. The decision makers for buying CCaaS now aren’t just the guy who runs the contact center, right? The CFO cares, the CEO cares. Everyone in the company needs to know how customer experience impacts, you know, the company’s per performance and success. So yeah, I think any strategic consultant, any strategiCCaaSgent, any strategic partner that you have needs to learn how CCaaS is actually the leading conversation that now can pull through the network, that can pull through the UCaaS decision, right? And then who knows beyond that, you build that relationship. And if you have a relationship with your customer on customer experience, they’re gonna wanna talk to you about the rest of their business as well, whether that’s security or anything else. So, yeah, I’m, I think it’s really important that, you know, learn about it. I’m happy to share anything about how Five9 does that business. We’ve got a lot of white papers and materials and that kind of thing on Telarus. So yeah, certainly go after it. Awesome.
Adam Edwards:
Well, thank you very much, Jake. Just wanna let everyone know plenty of room on the boat you just heard from Jake Butterbaugh, SVP of Global Channels at Five9. Also if you are selling contact center now, virtual assistance, every customer needs to hear about it, wants to hear about it, and just might help you close that deal. Thanks so much everyone.