Will Bachman Venkat Nagaswamy Interview

Transcript of my interview with Will Bachman.

Transcript

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 Venkat 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 Venkat, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here.

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 Jitsi, which is getting ready for the pandemic. And Venkat, you’re going to be much better known.

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

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, J-I-T-S-I dot org. Include those links in the show notes. That’s amazing. 120,000 to 20 million monthly users. That’s incredible growth. And you were telling me a story about how a contact center that was an in-person contact center, they got shut down in Spain with the lockdown. Tell me what happened next and how you were able to get them set up to work remotely. Yeah.

So our relationship with this particular customer actually started off as them being a vendor for us. They are outsourced BDRs, and they are also outsourced to a company called EIMS. And they are a very popular team that we use, that we in marketing use to generate our own pipeline, a company called EIMS. Now these guys were using a regular on-prem solution in Barcelona. And come early March, on a Friday, government announced that they’re going to lockdown. And as you probably know, they’re not allowed to go outside their apartments. So anyway, so this happened on a 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. On Sunday night, the deployment started. And on Monday morning, the team was able to work without missing a beat. And what excites me really is that this is a very, very important step in our business. And we’re going to continue to work on this.

Yeah. think about how, and this is, you hear a lot about the pandemic, about how it’s accelerating the future and also accelerating the way things get implemented. Just, I mean, just sort of, 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 processes and stuff. And you did it in a week, weekend, a weekend 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’ve 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 happened to get from Friday to Monday?

Yeah. So accelerating the future, that’s a great way to put it. You know, I saw a cartoon somewhere recently, which is 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, you know, a, you know, a 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 a right mark next to that. So COVID has really driving digital transformation on a, you know, on a much more rapid scale than what you’d see elsewhere. And before I come to this particular case, there’s, there are also other cases, there’s a big financial services provider within the U.S. And, you know, 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 in that timeframe. So this kind of transformation, the, the, what was happening at a more measured place earlier is being rapidly accelerated because of what we’re seeing. Today, now going to this particular example, the immediate deployment itself, because everything happens in the cloud, because we ourselves do everything, our deployment from the cloud, the initial deployment itself was pretty easy because of provisioning and everything happened from the cloud. Now the, the piece, earlier you would have had to rewire all the phone, phone, phones, physical phones, and. Maybe have different headsets and so on and so forth that completely got eliminated because people from working from home. And so all they needed to do was to download a soft phone onto that onto that laptop and lo and behold, you’re ready to, you’re in business. So all the call routing, all the call set up, everything could be easily deployed from the cloud. Now there was some, I want to change management that needed to happen. In terms of how people. Did for instance track their Salesforce reports and so on. But again, because we, our product comes with out of the box integration with Salesforce. A lot of those kind of setups were completely obviated as well. It was more around change management of training all the all the call center folks to do things differently. That probably took another week or so before we could settle things down. But in terms of actual deployment, actual things that we needed to do. 90% of things got eliminated, right? The physical phones, the physical, the software connections, the routing software, all of these things either eliminated or could be deployed from the cloud. And so we were able to That’s the reason why we’re able to do it over the weekend. This is this when people talk about cloud. We always We often talk about The cost effectiveness of cloud, which is of course true. But something that’s Really important and more important, arguably, is the flexibility.

How quickly can you do these kind of things that you couldn’t do elsewhere. And I’d love to point out yet another case. This is a Bank, a credit union out on the East Coast. About a year or two ago, I want to say a year and a half ago, there was a there was a hurricane which hit North Carolina and this bank which is based out of North Carolina. They had to tell their call center employees to Just work go up and down save yourself and go wherever you need to go to 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 after the storm. People are calling in to understand that because people homes are destroyed. Their livelihoods are destroyed. Their livelihoods are destroyed. And they were able to call into their banks to make sure that financial security is assured and we were able to support it because of this power cloud. Right. And again, so the net net to answer your question. A lot of the because of this move to cloud the the The burden a bunch of burdens that needed to happen will a bunch of effort that you would need to do in terms of moving to the cloud either got eliminated simply because of the circumstances. Or because of Because of the circumstances.

The reason why the problem is that you’re able to move to a cloud where you’re able to deploy at scale remotely or weekend. That’s amazing. Now I have a friend of ours. We’ve actually stayed at stay at her place. Is a 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 In practice. I’ve also visited some contact centers. So tell us a little bit about what it how it actually works to have call center reps working remotely. Be curious to hear about and maybe you could start with just kind of the the the monitoring of call. 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 How You know what, if anything is different when when reps are working remotely and What what is it What does it physically look like in terms of how they do their work.

Yeah. So first, let’s talk about a quote unquote normal usual contact center, right, a usual contact center, you have rows and rows of people sitting down. They typically have a physical phone and a computer screen and they receive calls. Right. And a call comes in through normal PSTN or, you know, just plain old telephone network. Right. And a call comes in through normal PSTN or, you know, just plain old telephone network. And then it gets it goes to switchboard and then it the PBI will route it to the call center on prem equivalent 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 it things happen, in this case in our case, essentially, that piece of place where a phone line comes in and our phone connection comes in or call comes in and then it goes to the phone and it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s like, oh my gosh this thing is not working. But it works. Right. Yeah. Awesome. Bye bye. Bye bye. 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 the provider would then look at the available, we look at presence or what we call as presence, essentially availability of call center reps, and then automatically route the call to an available rep. And now that available rep, they can either have a physical phone or more typically, equally typically, they have an app on the laptop. So this app is similar to what you would do to, let’s say a normal Zoom or any of the other apps. So similar to that, it goes into an app, the phone call gets routed, similar to what you would do, let’s say with a Skype call or any of those things where you can call a computer. So the app, 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, so when these calls are coming in, because these are software packets, you can automatically record them based on whatever local laws that apply. You can also have cases where you can automatically conference people in. One of the powers of using cloud, and especially the integrated one platform that 8by8 has is that you can also have people automatically call other people internally.

So let me give you an example, right? If you have a normal, quote unquote normal on-prem contact center, somebody calls in and let’s say the call center rep needs to contact a product manager as a foreign source. Now the product manager, is not going to be on the same contact center, on-prem equipment. So they’d 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 that 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, is tracking things on Salesforce, right? Normally, the call center rep will have to enter all of the details into Salesforce or some CRM tool manually, but with software and with call center software and other things we provide, we can do that. things we provide, it automatically can, it integrates into Salesforce, integrates into Zendesk and other pieces so that the call center 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 transcription and issue identification and so on that can help them populate this automatically. So to make a long story short, when we go from old PSTN connection where 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 reps life easier and the experience that their customers get far better than what they could do otherwise.

How do you manage issues such as security of data, particularly for reps that might be handling health information that falls under HIPAA laws or financials? What’s that like? How do you establish all the information? How do you HR yeah, hello. A linux security auth about your financial information. How do you? How do companies typically deal with those security matters? So security is a soup, very, very important consideration.atics.

For us, communicate communications is the bedrock of any business. So they. just a normal voice product or call center product, all of this relies on an overall platform, the one platform that we have that underlies this whole infrastructure. And that underlies these different, the infrastructure that underlies these offerings that we have, that is, we’ve spent, you know, we’ve been in business for a long enough time that we’ve spent a lot of time and effort in making that extremely secure from all kinds of activities that you can think of from normal fraud and those kinds of activities to digital denial of service attacks. All of those things are extremely secure. And again, and because of, again, the fact that we provide a one platform, we can assure encryption and security all the way to the phone service that, I’m sorry, the soft phone that you’re using on your laptop. And so the fact that our bed platform is totally buttoned up and secure, and because we provide all the, because we are an integrated provider of software 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, to, that the call center person is using. Hmm.

What have you found, you know, sort of seeing a lot of these virtual contact centers of clients of yours, 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 a in-person to a remote contact center? Do people stay longer? Do they stay less time? Does it attract a 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 reps respond to that.

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

Right, so in a traditional call center, and I’ve spent time in a few of them doing some projects, you have this issue that you mentioned of when you bring people into a 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, Yeah. and you can never get it exactly right. So either you have too many people at some point, so you’re paying for people to sit around, or you miss the mark and you don’t have enough people, so people have really long wait times and they get frustrated. Exactly. So you can never get it perfectly right, and you’re always trying to optimize this balance. So with, I’m curious, so with these virtual contact centers, some people probably want to have a steady number of hours and they wanna work eight hours per shift. Of course. You know, full stop. But some people are probably more flexible. So has there arisen things like, hey, you’re kind of an 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

Absolutely. alert and just jump, hey, jump on the call, or maybe whoever gets there first is gonna get, you know, get a shift, you know, half a shift or two hours or something? Absolutely. How are companies doing that? Yeah, so I’ve seen people come in and go for even like half hour shifts, right? 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. But with this, we’ve seen cases where people turn on their availability for half hour and then turn it off. In some cases, think of it as like Uber, right? Uber, I’m sure many drivers in Uber spend all day driving. And there are yet others who are students and so on who might turn on their presence for some time and the calls and Uber routes requests to them. And yet other cases, when Uber starts, you know, they’re like, oh, I’m gonna go to this place. And then Uber sees a huge demand in one particular neighborhood. They send an alert to the drivers to say, hey, go to this place and, because there’s a huge demand there, right? Similar to that, we see people do, right?

Both from the contact center provider perspective and from an employee perspective. Some people work full hours, some others, they want flexible time. So they turn on their presence for a certain period based on their own needs. 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 the software so that call’s getting routed to you? So we see all of these things. And as I was mentioning earlier, you could hypothetically, you could go on to even a minute if that’s what you want, which I suspect it won’t happen, but like people can go down to sub hours if as the needs arise. 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 there a standard of how, do companies pay a bit of a premium for that flexibility? I’m curious about that. So I don’t think I can make a blanket statement for most people. We’ve seen things everywhere from, get the same hourly rate versus different rate and high rate and so on. So it’s hard for me to make a blanket statement around that.

It also occurs to me that reps could much more easily work for multiple companies, right? So 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 willing to work for five or six different companies as they pay you for peak. Do you see that happening? Do you see that Uber reps will sort of hop on on different companies to take calls? I think that would be an interesting thing for us to look at to see, because for us, each of these instances that get deployed for different companies are maintained separately, there’s a separation. I don’t know if there’s a way that we can figure that out, but I’m sure that happens just as Uber drivers drive for Lyft as well, but it’s difficult for us. But I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. We have to be able to determine that because of identity and protections between different contact center providers. Okay, got it. So even if you as an individual work for two different contact center providers, we wouldn’t be able to determine that in a privacy-preserving fashion. Oh, I gotcha. All right, cool. So tell me a little bit, so we talked about contact centers some. How do, and whenever you didn’t touch it, how does the monitoring work?

So a lot of times, 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 in a separate headphones to monitor a call. In the virtual world, do the people, managers just kind of jump in on a call and listen in and sort of watch what’s going on on the screen, kind of? Absolutely. I mean, so, there are multiple, the amount of interaction that a manager can have with a rep goes up in these situations, right? All of these things that you mentioned around looking at, or listening in to call, live calls, listening in to recorded calls, listening in to transcripts of calls, all of these things happen in a seamless fashion. And especially with everything being in the cloud, the amount of analytics that you get are all things that you wouldn’t be able to, you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. So let me give you an example, right?

There’s often, so people will have physical presence in an office. So let’s take 8x8 as an example. We have an office in Campbell that, well, A dépendance measure, 10x8, or a 42 and we got an arrival with a stereo e-cigwriter. How Baba arbearno whec take all of that in? I don’t know if that’s possible from a practical standpoint, but, well, only if, you know, the thing that’s uh, what is that logic could change in it, you know, if somebody can send you his phone number, but nobody goes to today, but if novel COVID, percentage of inbound calls that come into 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 at an aggregate level, at a rep level, at a group level, you won’t be able to get in a typical PSTN situation, right? And to add to it, because of things in the cloud and just being in software, the integration that you can get with other software like Zendesk or Salesforce or any other thing that you have, those integrations also go up. So ability for a manager to help the rep goes up, ability to coach them goes up, abilities to monitor and look for a rep satisfaction and so on, all of these things go up significantly because of because of software. Yeah. Because it’s all in software. 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? In fact, I mean, there are some of the things that we demoed earlier where you can have virtual assistance, and actually do a bunch of call intersection, right? So something like, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but something like 30% of the calls that we get at 8x8 are about resetting password, right?

And so when a call comes in, even before it goes to a rep, we can interact with AI, with the customer and have them say, what is your problem today? And they say, I need to reset the password. And then we can automatically intercept the call and play back a message to them that says, how do you do that, right? So that level of, we demonstrated that there are multiple ways in which you can use virtual assistants like that. And so AI is one of the most exciting things to come into the contact center world. In fact, I came into 8x8 as a result of my company, Mariana IQ, being a company that was a little bit more, you know, a little bit more advanced, you know, a little bit more advanced, but as you can see we are incredibly empowered by its, it is recently acquired by 8x8. And we were an AI for marketing company and the team and the technology that we had now underlies a bunch of the AI offerings that are going into our contact center, our contact center product or chat product or a phone product and so on. One instance, example of this is, you know, when you have, let’s say a phone app on your, an internal phone app, and you’re trying to call people, people often the directory is alphabetical, right?

On the other hand, there are only some subset of people that I keep calling all the time. And so instead of it, so when I start searching on my virtual office app on my phone, it doesn’t do it alphabetically, it does it based on, partially alphabetically, but it also say, if I wanted to talk to James or Jim, let’s say, and it’s like, Jay, because I’ve interacted with Jim a lot, Jim’s name would show up before James’s name shows up because of how frequently I interact, right? So yeah, so these are all things that, based on behavior patterns, based on the call patterns and other things that you see, we can bring intelligence into the app in every interaction that people have to make the experience better.

And AI is one of the coolest thing to come in. And we, I think, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I, we believe that it is just early days of AI being used in contact center and video meetings and so on. And, and, and this is just only going to go up. Another instance of AI is automatic transcription of video meetings, right? And over time, automatic translation of meetings with live translations happening as you speak. So these are all things that AI enables. Yeah, that’s amazing. I imagine that, and is that happening now? transcription of the meetings of the call so that it would go into Salesforce, not just the reps notes, but then the actual transcript of the whole call. The video meetings product that we have does automatic transcription and records it. When it comes to the contact center product, actually, I’m not entirely sure how that enters. It depends on the configuration. Okay. Could you tell us a little bit about 8x8 and what you’re able to share in terms of your marketing approach and how you think about the market, if you’re allowed to share how you think about segmenting the business market and what are the primary segments that are the best fit for 8x8 and just how you’re going to market? Yeah. Just to reiterate, we’re a public company. We have $440, $450 million revenue. And over the past year or two, we’ve been growing at 25%, 30% in bookings, above 30% bookings. In terms of historically, VoIP or VoIP in the cloud, phone service in the cloud was a small business kind of platform. It was a small kind of product. Over time, and essentially small business because they saw, essentially with a lower cost value proposition, that’s historically what they would see. But what we’ve been noticing in the past three years, four years or so, is that our mid-market and enterprise customers, I think to the street, we report them as, above $1 billion in revenue, I think the enterprise and mid-market is like, I don’t remember the exact number, 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 what you’re noticing in the marketplace over the past few years is that in mid-market and enterprise, people are more excited about, more excited about the flexibility, the possibilities that digital transformation can do for you. And that’s what we’re seeing increasingly in that space. And the way we look at it, like for very small companies, Soho, small business, you can buy the product online. There is a low-end express service that you can buy completely with zero touch approach. And for commercial, typically it’s an inside sales kind of operation. And for mid-market and enterprise, it’s more of a field slants. And to support these different activities, marketing is aligned in those three buckets. E-commerce is owned by marketing. Inside sales, for commercial, we have a different approach of marketing, which is more broad-based approach to marketing. Whereas for mid-market and enterprise, we are heavily partner-oriented and heavily field-oriented to provide pipeline to those guys.

What’s that mean to be partner-oriented and field-oriented?

So, one thing that I should have pointed out is that the biggest growth that we’ve been getting over the past few years, as I mentioned, it’s coming from mid-market and enterprise. But a lot of the significant portion of that growth comes from our partner. So, in the telco world, there are a whole bunch of master agents and sub-agents who have been historically people who have relationships with the end customers. And it’s these partners who have been bringing us a lot of business. And these are trusted providers. They’ve had relationships with the end customers going over decades. And truly people who take the end customer, who take the end customer’s perspective. And these partners have started seeing the value that 8x8 provides. And therefore, we are a partner-first organization in taking… What that means is that when there is contention between partner and a direct deal, it’s partners’ deal gets precedence or direct, right? And so, from that perspective, partners bring us a lot of deals. Our growth is driven by partners. And therefore, we put partners first. That’s interesting. So, is that like larger Fortune 1000-type companies will have… What would you call that kind of firm? It’s not exactly a management consulting firm, but it’s someone who is their telco kind of… They’re called telco channel partners. I mean, if you just do a Google search, you’ll find it. Telco or telecommunication channel partners is what you would call them. And they typically are people who service anybody pretty much like below, above 100 employee company. Typically, they have these relationships with them, right? And some of them might be MSPs, like managed service providers. Some of them could be referral partners. Some of them could be doing other value-added reselling. So, for instance, you might take pieces of our… So, you might take pieces of the solution that we have, add other software to it to have a more integrated solution for end customer. So, those are all the different types of partners that we have. But typically, they’re called technology partners. So, we have technology… I’m sorry, telecommunications channel partners. And some of the big master agents are people like Avant. And Avant is a big one, for instance. Interesting. I didn’t know about that world. That’s pretty interesting to hear. It is. I myself didn’t know about this until I came to 8x8, quite honestly. That world is a very different world from what in technology that I was used to historically, which is like in a distributor of our world in the physical hardware, or you had like management consultants. And in the software world, people like, let’s say, Deloitte or Accenture, those are the kinds of partners that I historically was used to. And this channel world in telco is a different kind of…

It’s a different world. 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… Could you talk a little bit about your own journey and what you did before 8x8?

Yeah. So, I… Yes, I did… Before 8x8, 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 the company when I ran enterprise marketing at Juniper, which meant I was head of marketing for like a $1.82 billion business there. And that’s when I got the idea to start MariannaIQ. Prior to Juniper Networks, I was an associate partner with McKinsey in the Silicon Valley office. I served high-tech clients up and down the coast and primarily in all kinds of areas, online services and sales and marketing. Those are some of the areas that I was focused on. Prior to that, I started another company, which is 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 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… And prior to that, I used to sell plastics for GE in the automotive industry. 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. And I also have a business degree from Michigan.

All right. So what do you see kind of as the future, 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 do that? Are you hearing that companies are planning to pull their people back to the in-person, on-premises type thing? What do you see as the future, how it evolves?

Yeah, I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the pre-COVID days. The degree to which we do will vary, but we’re never going to go back to the pre-COVID days. One of the things that we are seeing is that, or one of the things that we believe will happen, and we’re seeing this to an extent right now, is that remote work, business continuity, all of these kinds of activities are going to be topics for boards to consider, right? You know, 12, 13 years ago, you had everyone talking about SOX and how SOX compliance was a big deal for boards to focus on. Similarly, boards are going to start focusing on business continuity and making sure that their companies are best positioned to ride out a future, you know, business plan. So, I think, we’re going to have to try and find a way to do that, and I think the next few weeks, when we see it over, such eventuality, you’ll see more and more focus on that. And from that perspective, we don’t, I mean, even, and you’re seeing this even today, that it’s going to be a new normal in terms of people working from home versus people working from anywhere, versus centralizing everything in one location. 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 had a culture of everyone showing up to physical offices to work uh and that’s been the case uh 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 the sheltering in place 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 in fact yesterday i got an email from our we sent an email or we got an email from hr saying hey uh we are not going to go back to our physical office in the foreseeable future and so it’s uh uh both from a knowledge worker’s perspective contact center perspective or anything for that matter we’re never going to go back to the pre-covered days and we are going to see more and more of people working remotely and and technology like ours enabling that to happen looking around corners do you what other new developments do you see happening in terms to sort of facilitate this remote work so uh the the technology itself is there it’s more of companies needing to change their practices what i see happening one analogy i would give is you know uh it’s introduction of electric into manufacturing, right? Historically, before electric motors came in, you would have these water wheels or windmills and therefore the whole, and because water wheels were only one side, you had these 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 only later did they realize that, hey, if you put the, and which happened in Chicago with meat packers, said, hey, if you take the assembly line and make it flatter with the electric motors, you can make it run and make it happen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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 way. The reason I bring that up is similar to that. I think the core technologies are already here. And as Arthur C. Clarke said, the future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed. The future is here. The technology is there. It’s how do we have other supporting processes and supporting human things that we need to do to enable that. That’s basically what we need to work on. Yeah. And that’s what’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 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 more sort of a cocktail party mangling 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, you know, one of the big 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 then move to another group. That’s what I’m hoping comes soon, that being able to have a large group with multiple conversations going on that’s more fluid. Yeah, so that are, I suspect there are certain things like where those kind of human interactions that need to happen that we are not gonna 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 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 someone to do something in that direction. It seems doable, especially if you had almost like virtual reality glasses on, you could imagine, you know, being able to look around 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 work. Maybe it already exists and it’s unevenly distributed and I just haven’t been invited to that particular app yet. So anyway, Venkat, this has been a really fantastic discussion. Any links that you wanna share, your Twitter handle or anything else so people could follow what you’re doing and if they’re interested after this show? Absolutely, my Twitter handle is at Venkat. My Twitter handle is at Venkat Nagaswamy, V-E-N-K-A-T-N-A-G-A-S-W-A-M-Y. Please give me a follow and I’ll certainly be following you back. Great, and we’ll include that in the show notes. Venkat, thank you so much for joining today. Thank you. This was a lot of fun, take care.