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>> Hey everyone.
Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22.
I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni.
Jonathan Rendy joins me, the SVP of products at PagerDuty.
Jonathan, great to have you on the program.
>> It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Lisa.
>> Lisa: It's great to be back at PagerDuty Summit.
So much news this morning.
So much buzz and excitement.
Talk to me about some of the things
that you're most excited about
as we are in such a massively different work environment
these days.
>> Yeah, so much has been going on
and we've been innovating in so many areas.
I think you heard in the keynote this morning,
automation is such a foundational part of PagerDuty now,
and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition
from a couple of years ago.
And we've also extended PagerDuty to new audiences.
So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time
with SREs and developers and ITOps,
and we've really come to realize that
the front office is so important,
and one of the leading departments there
that we can make an impact
and extend into with our solution is customer service.
>> Lisa: Customer service is absolutely critical these days
as we all know.
One of the things that was in very short supply
the last couple of years is patience.
Patience when you're a consumer,
patience when you're a business person.
And so the voice of the customer,
being able to get things escalated quickly
and resolved quickly,
to those customer service folks is critical
for any organization. Without that,
people easily go to Twitter or Reddit
and escalate problems publicly,
and suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem
for the organization.
>> Yeah, you're spot on.
I mean expectations are at an all time high.
People's tolerance is at an all time low.
And that gets translated, I always think,
to the front door of the organization
when there is something that doesn't go right,
and that's typically the poor customer service agents
who have to deal with that kind of feedback
and open up cases and deal with it.
And, you know, unfortunately they're not armed
a lot of times with the information that could help them
not only be better reactive but be better proactive
and have information to actually turn
what could be a bad experience into a really good one.
>> Lisa: You mentioned something really interesting.
Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning
that I was able to watch.
And you said it takes, for every negative experience
that a customer or consumer has,
it takes seven additional positive experiences
to turn them back around.
And I thought, wow, do we even have the patience
or the tolerance to your point,
to give a business seven more options
to turn our experience around?
>> Yeah, it's tough.
And it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations
and nobody's exempt from it.
The connection between the front office and the back office,
there is no real gold standard for that.
And so, is there a path forward? Is there a way forward?
We believe there is
and we believe there's a way to help,
but teams really need to focus
on getting information to those folks
so that these very negative kind of situations
can become a customer satisfaction,
can become something where a customer feels like,
"Wow, I didn't expect that."
There was another statistic that we heard about
the other day, which is, you know,
greater than 50% of issues are often identified
from customers, not from the monitoring products.
So, you know, whether it's 50, or 40, or 30,
it doesn't really matter.
The customer is a signal
and it's so important to be attentive to that signal.
>> Lisa: What are some, well...
you'd rather have that found out
before the customer even notices.
Talk to me about some of the things
that PagerDuty just announced that are going to help
not just the front office, back office
kind of blurred lines there,
but also to ensure that the incident response is smarter,
it's faster, and it's being able to detect things
before the customer even notices.
>> Yeah, so the trick, the $64,000 question,
however you want to phrase it or characterize it,
is all about getting teams ahead of problems.
And while I think it's unrealistic to ever, like
every single customer, get ahead of any issue
that any customer could see,
it's so important that the first customer that comes in
with an issue becomes near to the last customer
that comes in with an issue,
meaning that one, everybody knows about that
and they know how it's related to existing issues.
That's important so that other customers
can be preemptively explained, but then
given what PagerDuty's always done,
sometimes we know about issues on the back end
that may be impacting customers
that they don't know about yet.
So a shopping cart may not be working correctly,
but before somebody hits it,
if the customer service team knows about that right away,
they can proactively get ready for communication
to their customers to let them know,
"Hey, there might be an issue here.
We know about it, we're working on it. Please stay tuned",
or direct them to something else that can help them.
>> I can imagine that goes a long way to CSAT scores
NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn.
>> Jonathan: Oh, big time, big time,
whether it's CSAT or NPS, you know,
everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year,
of getting that big sale, going to, wanting to order that,
and then either not being able to complete the order
or having to wait too long for it to be delivered.
And then you end up having to go
to a brick and mortar outlet to buy it there anyway.
So there's so many opportunities
and those situations will happen, outages will occur,
it's just a matter of when. Those can be avoided
in those bad situations via the use of other discounts,
coupons, other customer satisfaction areas.
You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones.
>> Definitely. And I think we all have that expectation
that that's going to happen, when outages do happen,
'cause to your point, those are the things that
it's not, "Is it going to happen?" It's when,
and how quickly can we recover from that
so we minimize the impact on everybody else?
Couple of the things that you announced this morning,
Incident Objects and Service Cloud,
talk to me about what that is. It looks like
a deeper partnership integration with Salesforce.
What are some of the benefits
that your customers can expect?
>> Jonathan: Yeah, so we have several partners
in the front office, and one of the biggest
known to the world is Salesforce.
And so we've been working with the Service Cloud team there
for going on a couple of years now,
better integrating our platform into what they're doing.
And we've actually built an app
that runs inside of Service Cloud.
So a customer service agent doesn't need to
swivel chair around and look at other products
in order to understand what's going on in the back office,
it's all built into their experience.
That's one, number one.
Number two, we've upped that relationship
and invested more where Service Cloud, Salesforce
has come out with a new incident capability.
And so we're integrating directly to that
so we can sync up with that system of record from PagerDuty.
So wherever the issues are found,
whether it's in distributed DevOps teams,
or whether it's in a central team,
or whether it's a case agent working on the front end,
everything will be kept in sync.
So we're really excited about that bidirectional integration
>> That bidirectional sync is critical.
We have, you know, one of the biggest challenges,
we've been talking about it since we were
back at HP days back in the day, Jonathan,
silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges,
is there's still silos between teams and systems,
which impacts, you know, time to identify an incident,
time to repair that incident, and then of course
let alone repair the relationship with the customer
on the other end.
>> Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, and there's some great examples,
working with our own customers, that we run into
where when we can make that golden connection
between the front office and the back office
and sync up customer cases with incidents,
magic starts to happen. So we've seen situations
where the back office team working on an incident
doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting.
They don't realize that there were three, and then four,
and then five case tickets opened up,
that it's really impacting customers.
And when they see that rise in customer impact,
they change the priority. They get other people involved.
The urgency changes on that issue.
Imagine working in a world
where that visibility doesn't exist,
people continue to work at their own pace
and who suffers? The customer, the customer experience.
>> Lisa: Without that visibility, so much can suffer.
And quickly, we also have this expectation,
I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply
in the pandemic as patience and tolerance,
but another thing is we expect things in real time,
realtime access to data, realtime access to the customer,
to a product or service, is no longer a nice to have,
it is business critical for organizations in every industry.
>> Yeah. Yep. And you know, customer service is such a
obviously service-centered activity, that it can be,
you know, death by a thousand paper cuts
to a customer experience.
And to the point that you're raising,
nobody likes to contact finally someone as an agent,
and then get passed to another agent,
who gets passed to another agent,
and have to repeat the problem that you're having
so many times.
What if we could capture all that context together.
What if we could empower that agent
to be able to manage that case
from beginning to end more effectively?
Like what would the reflection be
on the customers who are calling in?
They would feel taken care of.
They would feel like they were heard.
They wouldn't feel ignored, so to speak.
So all of that is a part
of our solution that we're partnering
not only with Salesforce,
but also with Zendesk and others to deliver.
>> Talk about the automation in CS Ops
and some of the main benefits.
Obviously, you mentioned this a minute ago,
but the ability to empower those agents
to have that context is night and day
compared to, you know, the solutions from back in the day.
>> Jonathan: Yeah. Automation is so fundamental
and foundational to everything we do at PagerDuty
and if you look at all the audiences
that make use of PagerDuty today, whether it's developers,
whether it's IT operations and now customer service agents,
it's no surprise that, you know,
everyone has to do more with less,
everyone's working in a more siloed, disconnected manner.
So the amount of potential toil, potential manual steps,
having to open up a system to get the status of something
and then pivot over to my other system,
or do research, or ask a customer multiple times
when it could automatically be captured
what their problem is, what the environment is,
and all that information from an agent
could be automatically inserted into the case.
How valuable is that?
Not only for the case, but then the teams on the back end,
that helps them diagnose and fix those problems.
So the amount of automation that we've built
and now just announced and made available
as a part of Customer Service Ops
just like in DevOps with our automation actions,
really important to automating
some of those manual toil steps for those agents
where, again, 50, 60% of their time is spent
doing manual activities. We can get rid of that.
We can empower them to do more, to do more with less.
>> To do more with less and do more faster
and it makes such a huge difference there.
Talk a little bit about the DevOps-CS Ops relationship.
You know, one of the things that's kind of ironic
is here we are in 2022,
we have so many tools to collaborate and connect,
yet there's still so many silos,
and that can either break trust between a customer
and a vendor or a solution provider,
or it can really facilitate trust.
And that was a big theme of the keynote this morning
is that trust.
But talk about the trust that is you, PagerDuty,
really thinks essential
between the DevOps folks and the CS Ops folks.
>> Yeah. It's critical, as I kind of mentioned before,
there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection,
a standard that's been set between CS,
the customer service organizations and the back office.
And how I like to characterize it and what I've seen
over the years working with customers is
frequently it's almost like when I was a little kid
I lived nearby a semi-pro baseball team
and I could never get tickets
and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence
and I would look at the game
through a little knot hole in the fence
and I'd be like, "Man that would be so great to be in there"
Well, that's essentially customer service,
sitting there looking at the game happening,
constantly trying to interrupt the teams
and saying, "Hey, what about us?"
And so, by making that a seamless connection,
by making customer service a part of the solution,
a part of the team in a non impactful, intrusive way,
everybody gets what they need, no one's interrupted,
and now those customer service agents,
they're sitting in the stands.
They're not looking through the little knot hole
at the back of the center field.
>> Lisa: Well you got to tell us,
did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now?
>> No. No.
>> Aww
>> Still waiting.
>> Oh man. Talk to me, last question here,
I asked you before we started filming
if you had a crystal ball or a Magic 8-Ball,
so next time at least bring me a Magic 8-Ball.
What are some of the predictions that you have
as you see where we are in...
now half of calendar '22 almost gone,
the announcements coming from PagerDuty today,
this synergy is between PagerDuty,
its, what, 21,000 plus customers, your partners,
What are some of the things that you're excited about
that are coming?
>> Jonathan: So a couple things.
One is I really think the first example,
we talk about the Operations Cloud, what PagerDuty is.
And to me, what it really is, is
it's not just the DevOps audiences and the ITOps
and the SRE teams in the back offices
that have to deal with interrupted realtime work,
but it's other parts of the organization as well
that have to get proactive versus reactive.
And the first of those,
the first step that kind of personifies the Operations Cloud
outside of that back office is customer service.
But there will be more, there will be more,
whether it's security or other teams.
So it's the audiences that can participate and engage
in realtime work, that's one.
And then I think in the area of customer service
and Customer Service Operations,
where we are, what we've been doing
and what we've been so focused on
is making sure that those agents
can start to get proactive
and start to get to the next step.
But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them,
proactively, in a targeted way, talk to their customers
and provide that as an automated part of the process.
Today that's very manual,
so we can empower them with information,
but a lot of their communication with their customers
is manual. What if we could automate that?
And that's our plans,
and that's what I'm really excited about doing.
>> Can you imagine the trust built
between an empowered, proactive CS agent
and a customer on the other end.
The sky is the limit on that one.
>> If I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer,
I'm paying for a certain level of customer service.
How great would it be if based on the extra that I'm paying,
I'm actually getting that service proactively
and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them.
That to me is building trust.
>> Lisa: Absolutely.
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today.
Great to see you back in person.
Great to hear some of the things coming down the road
for PagerDuty, and we're excited
to see your predictions come true. Thanks for your time.
>> Likewise, Lisa. Thank you very much.
>> My pleasure. For Jonathan Rendy.
I'm Lisa Martin covering theCUBE on the ground
at PagerDuty summit '22.
Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest.
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