Live From Enterprise Connect 2017: Vik Verma of 8x8

In this Executive Insights video podcast, Jim Burton is joined by Vik Verma, CEO of 8x8. 

Transcript

Jim Burton: Welcome to BCStrategies Executive Insights. I’m Jim Burton, and I’m joined today by Vik Verma from 8x8. We just had a session at Enterprise Connect, which I thought went quite well, talking about the state of the industry and where we’re headed. And I’ve invited Vik to come up and talk to us about what’s going on in our industry. 

And very, very specifically as we’re launching the new BCStrategies, to become BCStrategies, website, it’s all about a buyer’s journey. What is your advice to those people out there who are just starting a journey to try to figure out what kind of products they’re looking for in our space? 

Vik Verma: So the number one thing is to do your homework. What I’ve learned is that there are a lot of vendors out there. And cloud is this new buzz word, and everybody’s cloud. 

And so first and foremost, I think you always start with what exactly are you looking for? How many offices do you have? Are you looking for business communication system? Do you want to have video conferencing? Does your team spend a lot of time on chats? What kind of chat do they have? Are you looking for an inbound contact center or an outbound contact center? And then tying all of these things together, what exactly is the kind of performance, what defines success for you as a customer? 

So once you have that kind of information, then you can go in and start to look at...I think I’d start with your website. And then literally, you have an idea of what are the macro vendors out there. And then I encourage people to also go in and do a little bit of a deep drilldown. 

And then I think particularly if you come to a company like ours, if you are a credible customer and you reach out to us, we will basically assign a solutions consultant to you who can actually help really understand your business requirement and help map out the right system for you. 

Jim Burton: Yeah. Well, that kind of brings the second question. When someone’s finally gotten to a point they realize they want to get into this space, and then they’re trying to narrow down the number of vendors, what are the important things that they need to consider about your product? 

And one of the things that you’ve done a very good job of is integrating all those different components in a business solution into one solution. But without putting the words in your mouth, what are the things that you would say as you come look at us, these are the things that we do well and you need to make sure you consider that because that’s why you buy our product?

Vik Verma: I think the number one thing you look for with a cloud vendor is stability because in essence it’s a brand new technology. You want to make sure whoever you go with has a track record, that they’re not a “johnny come lately.” And so for us, we’ve had 27 consecutive quarter of profitable growth, which is, I think, an oxymoron when it comes to SAS companies. 

In addition to that, what I would look for is I’m a big fan that cloud is the ultimate in turnkey. So what you really need to look at is you need to look at all your requirements today, tomorrow, and the next day. And then basically, design your system such that you almost have like a Chinese menu approach. Today you get one feature. Tomorrow you get another feature. You want to get a vendor where you can get all of these features so there’s one throat to choke, one common SLA, one common bill. 

What happens often with our customer is they have an initial need for a business telephoning system. It makes total sense. I need to make a phone call. Great. Very shortly after that, they come to us and say can you do video conferencing because we’re finding that video conferencing is starting to become a greater and greater part of our business productivity. Great. We just add that on. Literally, you go onto our portal, and you check a box. Now you have video conferencing. That’s the beauty of cloud. 

Then you may decide hey, I want to have team collaboration. And actually I want to integrate not just with my own collaboration system but with Slack as well as with IHG Chat, as well as Google Teams because all my folks are using different collaboration systems. We have the ability, and you check a box. You’re now able to get that. Or you want contact center. Or you want quality monitoring. That’s the beauty of cloud. 

And for us, I think the reason we are as successful as we are and why we think we can be a great partner for our customers is we become that one throat to choke where business communication systems, team collaboration, contact center, analytics, video conferencing, all bundled together on one common platform with a layer of analytics you can get from us. And you can get in a mix and match basis. 

Jim Burton: That’s fabulous. Well, one of the things...because I follow the industry and I know a lot of people in the industry, and one of the observations I’ve had about what you’ve done over the last couple of years is you’ve really beefed up your team to go after larger enterprises. 

Like most people in your spot, you started off with a smaller, I’ll call them SMB. They might’ve been SME size. But you’ve got a team of people now that understand and have done a great job in their prior careers of going after big enterprise. So would you talk about where you fit in with that and how you’re scaling it up?

Vik Verma: I think one of the great things about moving up to enterprises is we give people the ability to go one department at a time, one office at a time, or all of it all at the same time. And in addition to that, by making it global, what we have been able to do is you’re able to go in and provide companies with four-digit dialing all over the world. 

And in essence, now communication becomes a unifier, and all the aggregate data off any real time interaction is all sitting in one common platform, which gives you tremendous insight about what is going on into your company. And so those things allow you to have dramatic improvement in productivity because communication goes from being a utility to being a business enabler and/or being an insight into your business. 

Jim Burton: Well, I think you really nailed something because international businesses, you have broad reach. And that’s something others don’t have. They’re starting to maybe expand. You’ve been expanding for a while. So talk a little bit about the reach you’ve got and your future plans for expanding globally.

Vik Verma: I think there are about a hundred and fourteen countries globally, about 15+ percent of our revenue comes globally. And we view that as a massive growth driver. Our global revenue, even adjusted for currency, is growing quite significantly. 

And so what we see an opportunity to be is a company where we will be truly the only one capable of providing global communication by having people and support centers and data centers all over the world and to make sure we build not a US-centric company but a truly global company. So in essence, if you want to talk to your salesperson, it’s a local salesperson. If you want to talk to your support person, it’s a local support person. That’s the true essence of globalization as opposed to a US-based company just going out and deploying their service everywhere. 

And so for us, we believe we’ve done a great job of being able to deploy our services to a hundred and fourteen countries. Now we see an opportunity to go out and put pockets of people all over the world so we can provide a truly global experience for our customers. 

Jim Burton: I was visiting your facility within the last couple of months, and one of the conversations we had was what you’re doing to be able to turn these things on quickly with local phone numbers and all of that, which is a really big thing. I don’t think people quite understand the complications you go through in being able to light up a new customer in a new country in a short period of time. And we’re talking about days, not weeks and months, which is what it’s been in the past. So congratulations on that move. 

Vik Verma: Oh, thank you. I like to think of us as a duck. There are a lot of feet paddling like crazy underneath the surface, and everything’s supposed to look serene to our customers. And that’s hopefully where we...the goal is to make the customer experience seamless, flawless, and easy. The fact that there’s a lot of complicated underlying technology that we’re the world’s best at, that’s our problem. 

Jim Burton: Yeah. And that’s what people want. They don’t want to see all that. They just want it to work and have a really good customer experience. So another question for you, and you touched on this before in a broader sense, and that’s the contact center. And one of the things that...it amazes me, by the way, that some people in this industry really never got the contact center solution nailed down, or they don’t even offer their own contact center solution. 

But if you’re a company that’s got more than 50 people, and certainly over a hundred, you have a contact center. And so it’s something that you guys have focused on. So maybe spend a couple minutes talking about that. 

Vik Verma: Any time customers are reaching out to you, you have a contact center. And so you can try to do it with a complicated series of ring groups, an Excel spreadsheet, or you can just bite the bullet and get a real contact center. 

Now, traditionally, contact centers have had this very heavy connotation, lots of training, banks and banks of agents sitting on queues with headphones answering the phone. And what we’ve done is we made it such that it’s very easy. 

It’s software as a service. You can sit wherever you are. You can have people do this as part-time. And we’ve also come up with a contact center where you can literally log on, you have a visual IVR. You can determine what is the call flow you want, which is the agent you want answering what kind of call flow. Do the basic skills-based routing and do it all in real time with a visual database, our original interface, and now you’re done. Now you’re running a call center. 

A hairdresser can be a contact center. A car dealership can be a contact center. And suddenly, you can get massive productivity improvements. 

Jim Burton: Yeah, I don’t know about the hairdresser part, but I got the car dealership. So I think that one of the things that the industry is focused on is digital transformation. And the reason I actually bring this up is not...I want to hear your point about that. But I think one of the most important things people have to look at when they’re on their buyer’s journey is where is this company headed? 

And the beauty of talking to the CEO is you’re the guy that’s supposed to know that. And we’ve had some conversations about that with a vision of where you’re going because if you’re headed down the path of being a voice solution to somebody, that’s all well and good, but we’re beyond that. And I wouldn’t waste my time talking to you if that’s all you were going to be. 

But maybe you can talk about your ideas of the future, digital transformation, and you brought up AI, I think, in our panel earlier today. 

Vik Verma: Yeah, if you really think about it, we’re in this trend towards predictive analytics. What do you predict on the basis of? Raw data. What is the rawest data in any company? It’s the human interaction in real time that happens, the human communications. The text that you send, the faxes that you send, the real time communication that happens in terms of phone, in terms of video, both with your customers, with your vendors, as well as your partners. 

Guess what? All of this now, because of the power of the cloud, sits in one common location, which means for a global company, you have the ability to look at trends, to look at every interaction that is happening and basically feed this into the relevant business application so you have context. That gives you amazing insight. 

It takes communication from being essentially a utility to being a business enabler and a business productivity tool and to being essentially information and insight. That is a dramatic change. That change suddenly makes communication not the pipe. It makes communication information and something that becomes mission critical as well as strategic and has the attention of the CEO. 

Jim Burton: Yeah, and I think that’s important because as you move forward, those are the things you’re looking for. And again, it’s something you brought up. It’s the value that the cloud can provide, which you just could not do in a customer premise environment. 

Well, listen, this has been fabulous. Thank you very much for your time... 

Vik Verma: My pleasure. Thanks again. 

Jim Burton: ...at the panel and for helping us out with BCStrategies. 

Vik Verma: My pleasure. Thank you very much.