CEOInterviews.AIFive9 CEO, Mike Burkland, at #CXNationSummit (First Attempt of Noise Reduction)

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Interviewer0:25

Five9, but I thought I want to go back to the opening as the new CEO again. You talked about vision and mission.

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Mike Burkland0:32

Yep, I got it right here. I'm gonna please you on this today. No, I know that when you do these things, you argue and agonize every single word. Yeah, I know every single word. So let's start off with vision.

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Interviewer0:39

With vision, it says bringing joy to customer experience. So joy, joy is the emotion. It enjoys the feeling. Customer service is known for joy? Is that what you're saying?

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Mike Burkland0:53

No, it's not. And that's why we exist. We're gonna change what has been historically a frustrating, sometimes your experience. And again, we're making progress as an industry, but we're aiming for joy for every customer interaction. Everyone involved in customer experience should have joy. Not just the consumer, but your agent, the supervisor, our employees, our partners, our analysts and influencer community, especially. Yeah, we're bringing joy to customer experience. It's all involved in customers, so...

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Interviewer1:26

I like that. It's short, it's simple, it's aspirational. Okay, that's great. You also say customer experience. Why not customer service?

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Mike Burkland1:34

Well, again, we've started in customer service, if you will, and contacts. Most people think of picking up customer service, but by the way, we have many sales contact centers already in our customer base. We actually have integrations. It's mostly used in customer service. So again, if you think about customer experience, it expands all four of those: customer service, sales, marketing, and...

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Interviewer2:02

All right, now let's go to the mission statement. This is a little longer. This was a little longer. 'Enabling enterprises of all sizes' – like huge, the biggest companies in the world. When we say enterprises, we imply a large enterprise, but we mean any business. So it's really enterprises of all sizes, but costing quite a bit of prices, but especially enterprises which are making up now majority. Okay, so 'enabling enterprises to reimagine their customer experience.' There's that CEO represents again. 'By providing our intelligent CX platform.' What does that mean?

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Mike Burkland2:39

Well, intelligence stands for artificial intelligence, AI. It's a big part of our platform, as most people know. But it's also the collaborative intelligence that comes from technology plus humans. So it's not just artificial intelligence, it's a human experience. Our people and professional services people, yeah, developers that build our products, go-to-market teams, our support team, marketing partners are a huge part of that intelligence. That's part of the intelligence.

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Interviewer3:13

So I think you kind of actually went to my next question already, because the next part here is combined with passionate experts. Yeah, so...

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Mike Burkland3:24

You know, so when we talk about passion and experts, passion really is about our culture and it's about the culture of our partners too. What we're bringing to our enterprises, right, we're helping them reimagine their customer experience. But we bring both platform intelligence, CX platform, combined with passionate experts. And this passion is all about our people and our partners and all involved in that equation too. They had a singular focus on driving great success for our enterprise customers.

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Interviewer4:02

Let's talk about what success looks like. Okay, so this is... we get back to joyful. The passionate experts to deliver joyful customer experiences and better business outcomes, right? The phrase is pretty packed, it's patent and it's action-packed with every single word being chosen very carefully. Joyful customer experience, pretty intuitive. But again, that's that joy word again. It's all about delighting the customer, the consumer, about your customer experience. And through that journey, whether it starts over the web, it goes through a digital channel, or it's a live or full call, or it's an IVR or virtualization, it's just delivering a great customer experience, a joyful customer experience. But also for our enterprise customers...

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Mike Burkland4:51

It's about business outcomes, right? I mean, they're trying to drive that customer experience up in terms of its quality and its satisfaction. Because guess what? The better they do at delivering a great customer experience with a higher customer satisfaction, they have so retention goes up, revenue goes up, and we also deliver efficiency gains, cost reductions, and just making sure that there's a very efficient machine doing everything it does. So again, business outcomes are defined by all those variables: revenue, cost savings, happier customers.

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Interviewer5:26

All right, well, I guess last question here then is: you've got a vision, you've got a mission. Like most companies, you put these in your bottom left drawer of your desk. Does that mean...?

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Mike Burkland5:37

Absolutely not. We've walked the halls. In fact, we haven't done it yet. We haven't rolled this out to the employees, so they'll probably hear it here in the next couple of days, possibly. But that's okay. But what I want to be able to do is walk down... 'What's your vision? What's your mission?' And if everybody in our company can remember that simple phrase that we bring joy to customer experience, that's success. So it's not going to draw. It's what we live. That is our truly our purpose. It's our... you know, our vision is really our vision for what we do for the world in the coming years, but our mission and my purpose is what we do every day.

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Interviewer6:20

Well, this is exciting. Thank you. It's almost your time. I'd love to ask you some more questions, but I need to get back to the... really appreciate the time.