CEO Chat: Mike Burkland, Five9

Thank you, Dave. Great to be here. Sorry for the scratchy voice, under the weather. It's great to see you again. I just saw you in Mexico, we were together. Yeah, that was a great week with both analysts and customers. It was a wonderful event.

Wow, we sure had a great week. It was wonderful. But I heard you stayed a little longer to recover, which was probably a smart thing to do.

Yeah, Dave, great question. They are very carefully curated words, designed to capture the emotion and feeling that consumers get when they have a truly joyful customer experience, joyful CX. Our vision for the industry is to deliver that joyful CX – connected, seamless, effortless, and very personalized. The way to deliver that from end to end, not just in customer service or the contact center, but throughout the customer journey, that's really our vision. Five9's mission long term is to enable a joyful CX from the very initial interaction with a brand to purchase decision, commerce, sales, support – an entire journey. We want that to be a seamless, effortless, personalized experience.

Yeah, great question, Dave. Over the last 15, 16 years, our compound annual growth rate has been in the 30s, mid-30s. It's a massive market. The growth is continuing to come from three major trends in our industry in CX. One is a shift to the cloud. The legacy on-premise solutions are being end-of-life, and large enterprises are moving to the cloud at an accelerating pace. Secondly, the strategic nature of CX and customer experience. This used to be a cost center, and now it's becoming a top-line revenue driver for most enterprises. Brands know how important CX is as a differentiator for customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth. Lastly, AI. The revolution that has happened over the last – we've been in AI for four or five years, but it's become very front and center in the very recent past. That is driving more focus on AI-driven CX. To benefit from AI in customer experience, you have to be in the cloud. So we're beneficiaries of that trend as well.

Yeah, we talk about three main growth drivers, and international growth is one of the three. It is absolutely front and center in our growth. We also talk about our march upmarket. We've won some of the largest enterprise deployments in the world in terms of contact center in the cloud. Some of the largest brands are running their global contact center footprint on Five9. And we also talk about our platform as a major growth driver. We've been at this for quite some time. We've got the most mature, broadest, deepest platform, but we're also out ahead in terms of AI and innovation around CX as well.

Nice try, but no, this is not about pricing, Dave. It's all about our investments in R&D and innovation, quite frankly, and very specifically in AI innovation. As you know, we've been leading the AI revolution in CX for quite some time. We name projects at Five9 to rally the troops and get buzz internally. Project Surge is all about a continuation of our innovation and our AI solutions. As you recently heard at Enterprise Connect, that was our most recent news around AI innovation.

It's an acceleration of our investments and a focus. We're in a massive market. We've got 20% cloud penetration today in terms of contact center, broader CX probably even lower. We have a huge opportunity ahead, and we're investing very aggressively to extend our lead.

Yeah, great question, Dave. As I said, for quite some time now we've been leading the AI revolution. We have the most modern and most advanced AI engines and models. But models alone do not deliver great CX. You have to have the data – contextual data. That is the key to driving AI-driven joyful CX. That is the position we're in, and it's the position we expect to continue to lead this market from.

It definitely has, Dave. ACS brings us a few things. It brings us this platform of data integration. Their business was built on being this API set that provides hooks into a massive amount of backend systems. So what ACS brought to Five9 was this reach into more and more contextual data at the click of a mouse, or automatically through our platform. Access to contextual data was key. But they also gave us an advantage around migrating these large enterprises off of legacy on-premise solutions and into the Five9 cloud solution, doing so seamlessly with access to legacy data and backend systems throughout the migration, so there's no interruption in the business.

Yeah, Dave, we understand the importance of EX as it relates to CX. Agent performance and agent experience is important for the eventual CX. So our WEM strategy is multi-pronged. We have some wonderful partners that we OEM their solutions in our cloud. We've also got our own solution for certain segments of the market. Our approach has always been best of breed, customer choice. Those are the two things that drive our WEM strategy, and it's working really well. Most large brands have an opinion when it comes to WEM, and they have solutions they prefer. We provide the most choices. So if they have an opinion, you have a menu. If they don't have an opinion, you have your own solution that you lead with.

That's exactly right, Dave. Well said. Okay.

Yeah, Dave, it's a great question. Our customer advisory board was a wonderful session. The takeaway I walked away with was that our customers really appreciate our customer-first culture. We talk about it a lot. It's the power of technology – our platform is the best in the business, but our people are also the best in the business. That is what they really appreciate. They know that we are an extension of their team. I call it software as a service – it's the 'as a service' part. We're providing them technology, but also people with the right expertise and conviction to drive their success and deliver better business outcomes. They were ecstatic. It was great to hear that directly from them.

That's our ultimate goal, Dave. You're right on.