Transforming Customer & Employee Experiences With Webex By Cisco | Vinod Muthukrishnan

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #251 we welcomed Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP & COO at Webex by Cisco based in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. 

Vinod leads all go-to-market, business and customer operations. He was previously Co-Founder/CEO of CloudCherry, a customer experience management company, which was acquired by Cisco in October 2019.

Prior to that he spent nine years at sea as a First Officer before running Global Sales at Market Simplified. Based in the Bay Area, Vinod enjoys cricket and expanding his library of leadership and P.G. Wodehouse books.

In this episode, Vinod and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team at Webex by Cisco think through on a daily basis to build world class customer & employee experiences.

**Episode #251 Highlight Reel:**

1. How time in the Merchant Navy led to a career in entrepreneurship 
2. Building CloudCherry & being acquired by Cisco 
3. The shift of contact centers from cost to revenue centers
4. Why understanding your customer journey is paramount
5. Foundation for building a world class tech-stack 

Click here to learn more about Vinod Muthukrishnan

Click here to learn more about Webex by Cisco

Click here to get in touch with Webex

Huge thanks to Vinod for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused business content. 

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #251 - Vinod Muthukrishnan (Cisco Webex)

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles Podcast. Super excited for today's guest, guys. We have an awesome customer-focused business leader joining us from a company that every one of us very much knows and is very much familiar with. Vinod is joining us from Cisco. Vinod is the Vice President and COO of Webex Customer Experience. And I'm super pumped, guys, for Vinod to join the show today and share a story with us. Vinod, introduce yourself to the CX Nation, my friend. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:35) - Awesome. I am, as was pointed out, the VPN Chief Operating Officer for Cisco's Webex Customer Experience Unit, which encompasses everything we do with contact centers, CPaaS, and customer experience data insight and analytics. So this is the definitive Webex Customer Experience business, but at heart, I'm a founder. I'm a builder. I founded a company called Cloud Cherry in the customer experience management space, and Cisco acquired us in 2019. So I'm here because of my shared passion with you. 

Speaker 3 (00:01:04) - Nice. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:05) - All things customer experience, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. 

Adrian (00:01:09) - All right, number one, thank you for joining us. I was super pumped for today. And the story that you have is incredible, and then you are at the right place, because people that are tuning into this show, Vinod, we're the guys and gals that are thinking about customer experience, customer service, customer success, anything related to how we can make a customer experience better, sharper, faster. And then on top of it, you've got all this incredible background experience. You've worked at all these incredible companies. 

Adrian (00:01:35) - Now you're at a business like Cisco helping to literally drive some of the world's biggest companies in the ways that they manage their customer communication. So I'm pumped, man. So before we get into the pillars, I'd love, can you spend a couple minutes, Vinod, give us your stepping stones, man. You know, I love to ask this question out of the gates, but like, spend a couple minutes just kind of talking about some of the, what brought you into the space? 

Adrian (00:01:57) - So, and I'd love for you to get into the business that you just mentioned that brought you to Cisco, but like, how did you get into the space? What were some of the early things that you were doing in your career that kind of set you up for what you're doing today? 

Speaker 2 (00:02:09) - Awesome. My first career pursuit was to find a career option that was full of adventure and no education. My father was in... the Navy. And I said, okay, if I joined the Merchant Navy, I get to see the world and not study. What I didn't get was, there's a lot of math and science that goes behind keeping a ship afloat. So that didn't happen. I did get to see the world, spent nine years in the Merchant Marine, went to 60 odd countries, was the best part of my life. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:36) - But the thing that I take from that in terms of transference is that, a ship 300 meters long, 1,000 feet long would be run by 14, 15, 16 people around the clock, three, six, five days a year. And what I took away from that was two things. One, cross-functional, cross-cultural teams win when properly aligned and oriented. And the second is, a small group of highly motivated, well-trained, mission-oriented people can do anything. Like literally anything. And armed with that optimism, I actually joined the founding team of a startup as an experiment. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:08) - For three months that I was on leave, and I thought, look, you learn something and you'll go back to sea. The experiment turned out so well that I ended up spending seven years there. We actually launched the first mobile stock and derivative trading applications in the United States with TD Ameritrade and the likes of that. A business we've built in our 20s as a bunch of kids back in India. After seven years of that, I felt confident enough to do my own startup. Nothing prepared me for what was to follow. And it just didn't for months. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:38) - I think that's the serendipitous moment where I think, which led to us having this conversation. The startup was in customer experience, except nobody in the founding team was from customer experience. And so when we pitched to our investors, we said something that is very precinct, and I'll talk about this in many shapes and forms. When they asked, why you? I said two things. One is, first, my leadership team has 200 years of collective experience as customers. So that is one. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:07) - And the second is, I don't know more than X number of brands in the palm of my hand who have my undying love and loyalty. And as a customer, I feel that the customer experience problem is unsolved, which means whoever's an expert in the space is obviously not doing the job they're supposed to do. So I want to split from an end user perspective and create the kind of customer experiences I want as a customer that obviously got us funded. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:30) - We scaled the company, and Cisco acquired us in 2019, around the time when there was a sweeping realization that the contact center business was actually a customer experience business from what was previously seen as a cost center and actually massive revenue center.

Speaker 2 (00:04:50) - And that customer experience is essentially a journey and a continuum. 

Speaker 3 (00:04:54) - Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:54) - And a very pivotal point in that is when someone calls you frustrated, or even better, if you can preemptively engage with the customer and prevent them from reaching out to begin with because, you know, the best contacts and experience you ever had was one you never had. 

Speaker 3 (00:05:06) - 100%. 

Adrian (00:05:07) - Yep. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:08) - That industry pivot acquisition happened. I ended up being the chief operating officer of this business for a couple of years, left for close to three years to do enterprise AI as at Unifor because I wanted to be a hands-on practitioner. But when the opportunity came to bring together, and I think this is what we are excited about, bringing AI and customer experience together. When these two worlds meet, I think it is the single largest enterprise software opportunity of our lifetimes. I love it. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:35) - And it was hard to pass up on the call to come back to Cisco with this platform, with this customer credibility, and this base and build here. So hence, I'm back. That's the boomerang story. 

Speaker 3 (00:05:44) - I'm back. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:45) - The second. 

Adrian (00:05:46) - I love it. Number one, I love it for so many reasons. Number one, good thing you got off the ship, huh? Good thing you got off the ship and you actually took those three months, right? That's number one. But number two, the journey is incredible. Nothing beats building something with an incredible group of people. I want to go back to the comment that you just made because you and I talked about this when we chatted a few days ago. But like a small group of Navy SEALs, people that just understand, they have their specific subject matter expertise area. 

Adrian (00:06:17) - They're motivated. They're passionate. They can just get shit done. That small pocket of people can go so far. They can build huge, unimaginable things, unimaginable-sized companies. And it's funny because then you get to the third part, the AIPC that you brought up. This is why I was super pumped to have you, man. You just nailed it. This customer experience, customer contact, customer communications are already changing forever. 

Adrian (00:06:41) - This is a major, huge time in history for people in our space because number one, you've got all of these new possibilities with this technology that we can leverage. 

Adrian (00:06:52) - Number two, to your point about if a company's not proactively removing, reducing, and smoothing all the friction points in their customer journey, shame on them because they might not have the right people leading the right types of teams to actually unpack and map and understand all the variables and understand all the different intricacies of what a user or a customer goes through along their journey. That's just at a high level. The other piece, too, is just like your comment about this is one of the most pivotal times in our space. 

Adrian (00:07:24) - I couldn't agree more, man. Over the last six to 12 months, and I know that's kind of late because we've had people on the show talking about how their companies were technically leveraging AI 30, 40, 50 years ago. Bill Wade, a CTO from FICO, he said that FICO, the credit management, they've been literally doing different types of learning and language models and different types of just general like AI techniques since back in the 60s and the 70s. I was like, Bill, that's crazy. 

Adrian (00:07:59) - Everyone thinks that this is a brand new thing and it's just hit us in the mouth. This has been something that smart people like you and smart people like your team have been working on for a long time. Big companies have already been spending a ton of money and have already invested a shit ton of time and energy and just some of the smartest people building this stuff. 

Adrian (00:08:16) - Now we're at a point where companies have an option where they're either going to get on board and they're going to immediately figure out which solutions and which people, which leaders, because this is the big thing. I was pumped for you. I know you're going to get into this in a little bit, but people that are scared about AI are ridiculous. AI is going to do all these incredible things. 

Adrian (00:08:32) - We still need extremely smart humans that understand how to build the prompts, the logic, how to synthesize, how to understand what to do with some of the things that are going to be able to come. I just think it's a super exciting time for our space. I know you're going to get into some of the stuff your team's doing, but I love that, man. Let's jump into the first pillar of team, man. 

Adrian (00:08:52) - I'd love to learn more about your team at Cisco Webex, and I'd love to understand some of the different roles or some of the different areas that you've set up to be able to manage all the incredible things that you guys are doing with your customers today. Awesome. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:06) - In my job, obviously, I own the go-to-market. I run the business day-to-day, so all the business ops and the customer ops, everything that happens post-sale. Without getting too tactical about the team, it takes a village to get this right. My theory around dreams, essentially, the first element is culture. The fact that you're competent at your job is an unstated assumption. If I'm asking you to be a plumber, my assumption is you're a great plumber. Obviously, there's a very, very high hiring bar. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:38) - There's a great premium on people who know what they're doing. They've done it before, obviously, but that's not the only thing. You need to have a raw set of skills because everything about our world is changing, which means when I say you need to be a good developer, what language you work on is going to evolve with time. In fact, there are elements of code you don't need to write anymore. The ask is to build great products. What shape and form that skill set comes in can change with time.

Speaker 2 (00:10:09) - Same holds true with customer success, same holds true with deployment, delivery, what have you. So huge premium, obviously, at the heart of it is who are you hiring in terms of skills and competence? And very importantly, the evolutionary arc, which is the world is going to change in ways we can't describe. Are you going to change in lockstep with that, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:10:29) - And there's a saying there, which I told a customer recently, because I honestly feel when you engage with customers, when everything is changing, you have to be open and honest and vulnerable about everything. So the thing I said, and which is true for anyone we hire to complete out the pillar or team, is in the age of AI, everything's changing so fast. And the pool of human intellect and capital that is deployed towards evolving AI is so massive that anyone who claims to be a master in AI is probably lying or delusional or somewhere in between. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:02) - What I told that customer was, I'm not here claiming to be the expert, but I promise to be its best student. So I honestly feel that's what we look for in people and great people build companies. You know this, you've seen it multiple places. I've been a founder. Whether you're Cisco scale or Cloud Cherry scale, the good people make great companies. So I spoke of capability in between, but the two things around it, which are incredibly important, the first overlay on that is culture. Because great teams invariably have great culture. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:34) - But no matter how brilliant you are, how good a quarterback you are, if nobody is receiving those darts you're throwing, it's pointless. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:44) - You can't push it. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:44) - So the point is you have to realize no matter how good an individual is, culture, their willingness to coexist, work as a team, subserve themselves to a larger goal and purpose, which is the business's goal. That's very important. So culture is a very important thing for us. Obviously Cisco, as you know, great place to work. It's always been on top of the charts there. There's just a massive, massive, massive premium put on people who work well as a team because nobody's brilliant enough to do this alone. That's the second part. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:11) - And the third is attitude. And attitude is how your skills and your culture manifest themselves in situations, which is how do you treat failure? How do you treat having to deal with frustrating steps? How do you deal with a problem where you know less than you do? Attitude is where everything comes to bear, your skills, your cultural orientation, all of that comes to bear. That's where rubber meets the road. So I had written this long ago and the heart of it is competence. There are two concentric circles around it, a culture and attitude. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:45) - If you find people who have this in the right mix, you have the unicorn employee. And you need, everyone doesn't need to be like that, but you have enough number of people who are like that. You can create magic in any company. 

Adrian (00:13:00) - Number one, I absolutely love that. You hear so many founders and so many successful people that have built huge companies talk about this notion of, especially early on, if you find people that have the three pieces that you just talked about, or simply put, you keep getting A players, all-stars, people that are literally just gonna kill it. And they're gonna figure out. And even if they don't know something, they'll go learn it that night, but come back to work the next day. 

Adrian (00:13:25) - And then to attitude, you've gotta be, you almost have to have like this intense curiosity or an insatiable appetite for learning and growing and developing to be one of those people. But here's the other piece. You get put in every one of like, some of the best companies I've had the fortune to work for, when you sit in a room with a handful of people where you feel like, shit, I'm not, I'm like the dumbest person in here. That's a great place to be, and that's a great sign. 

Adrian (00:13:56) - And then when you talk about your culture, your third piece there, man, you, whether you want, we can go to the sports analogy, but I wanna stick with business for a second. Like when you have a group of people pushing each other that way, or the bar keeps naturally staying high because of the performers in the room, sports is an easy one. You're right. Like Tom Brady, would he have won all those Super Bowls without Bilecik? And all of the Patriots that they literally had for 20 years, I'm a Bills fan, but don't you know that? 

Adrian (00:14:23) - I'm here in Buffalo, but Sean McDermott, for example, when you talk about like just setting a bar or creating a buying mentality, the Bills were terrible for 20 plus years. From the time I was a kid to an adult man, we were losing every year. Sean McDermott comes in the last seven years. He has one simple thing, trust the process. And his simple bar is like, look, this is a 53 man game. We might have a really great quarterback. 

Adrian (00:14:48) - We might have some awesome receivers, but like it's trusting the process, buying into a simple notion, and then it's getting a bunch of people to buy, and that's when the magic happens, man. So I love it. I love how, before I jump off of team, you've built a bunch of different companies. You've built a ton of different products.

Adrian (00:15:04) - For some of our listeners that are like early on, right, they're still building, they're scrapping, they're figuring out how to get their business off the ground, or they're at one of these smaller venture-backed companies where maybe some of that sophistication isn't there, because- let's call it what it is- the focus is often on growth, sales, revenue, money, money, money, which I love- money too, baby, I love money too. 

Adrian (00:15:24) - But sometimes our CX folks or CX and our CS leaders- and this is why I do what I do- I told you the other day part of why I started this show was by the time I got to the fifth or sixth executive leadership team, with a different board of directors, with different investors, I started to realize, shit, it's not that they don't care, but they don't know how difficult and how hard and how challenging it can be when you're leading the customer unit. And then the other thing, it becomes a catch-all. 

Adrian (00:15:52) - Many companies, whether it's CX or whether it's your customer ops, you get stuff dumped, and so it's like a question that I have for you is like for some of our people building, if there's like one outside of the three areas that you just laid out, but like what's like one of the most important early hires that you could think about. Is it sales? It might just be sales, because if you don't have sales, you don't have blood in the business. 

Adrian (00:16:16) - But for you, like, is there one type of person or type of role that can maybe breed some of the other three circles that we just kind of chatted through? 

Speaker 2 (00:16:25) - No, I love it if I did a startup again. I already know my first hire, so I know my first. I probably know my first 50 hires, like logically, by name, birth date and star chart. 

Adrian (00:16:38) - So love it. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:42) - Fairly well-defined. And here's the thought process. In the absence of that, very early on in your startup's life, you're talking about hiring people. You need more generalists than specialists, because imagine hiring the best sales rep out there, the best sales reps are like Tom Brady, right, which is they're specialists. They do one thing really really well. Okay, they can do it in their sleep, but they can't do it alone. Yeah, you need a steady stream of leads. You need marketing, messaging, branding, positioning, what have you right? 

Speaker 2 (00:17:13) - What can a sales rep do without that? So going to the best sales rep or the best marketer, this or that, is pointless. You need a generalist. Now, what are you trying to do between zero and the stage is called zero to one right. Zero to product market fit. 

Adrian (00:17:23) - Yeah, zero to one. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:25) - Your quest is entirely product market fit, which is: I am trying to sell this product to CX Chronicles or CX experts of the world. Who are they? What do they live and breathe? Where do they hang out? What moves them, what makes them money and why would they care? How would they consume? All of this needs to align. Your product market fit is all of this getting in sync and so that you can do rinse and repeat on the process- and specialists are usually very bad at doing this- you need the Swiss Army knife generalists who are able to wear multiple hats. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:00) - Be a product manager. At heart, it means I'm building a product. I need to know why you will buy it. Be able to articulate that value, prop to you right. Be smart enough to take what you're saying and not just take feedback. Convert that into a product idea, because you might say: I want a green button there. Yeah, very little intellect to make a note of green button on the top right. The request might be: I want easy access to be able to go somewhere right. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:25) - So if you solve for easy access, you're a good product manager if you put the green button, you're not a taker right. 

Adrian (00:18:30) - Yep. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:31) - So we're just discussing so many skills wrapped in one, which means my first three or four or five hires would be these ultra generalists who are able to do all of these things yet retain the ability, as we scale, to pick one part of the business and specialize. I will own support, I will own sales, I will own whatever. But early days you don't specialize. And I think it was the Airbnb example. They did all the first 500 hires or even further out, like one by one themselves. They didn't even hire us. And I would say: take your time. 

Speaker 2 (00:19:04) - To be without your first hire for three months may not kill you. To have the first five hires wrong will decidedly kill you. 

Adrian (00:19:10) - So- 100%. 

Speaker 2 (00:19:11) - Yep, and what do you want? 

Adrian (00:19:12) - That's- so I love it. And so the generalist piece. It's funny, I feel, like part of why I fell in or landed into or stepped into the world of CX- some of the early businesses that I had the opportunity to help build in New York City. I didn't have a choice. I had to bounce across the customer journey. Some days I was selling or informing or creating awareness. Other days I was operating and I was literally delivering and facilitating. Then some days I would be working with our engineers and our product team to be able to almost-. 

Adrian (00:19:44) - Decipher or normalize what I'm hearing from the users in the market and then try to try to try to, almost like, get to the the most important bits of what they were doing. And it's funny, after years and years and years of that, I started to realize that's where I was like this is customer, this is the whole experience, this is customer experience, customer journey. But I love, I love that thought. 

Adrian (00:20:05) - I want to jump in a second pillar of tools and- and we can take this a couple different ways- um, definitely want to hear about the tools that you and your team are building. But- and if you're able to show, I'd love to kind of understand a company like Cisco and in a position like yours, with, with, with you know, working with WebEx, what type of tools is required to keep the trains on the track? Number one and the number two, and typically the bigger a company gets, the more people you have. 

Adrian (00:20:35) - For how many, how many employees does Cisco's got a football stadium of employees alone? Right, like? It's so, like it's right. 

Speaker 2 (00:20:42) - So it's like public company. So I know the number will be public somewhere. I think it's approximately 80,000. 

Adrian (00:20:47) - Yeah, it's, it's, it's so like. I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about tools, either the way that you vote, the way that you've thought about them or the way that your team is using them today, or your builder man and your founder. So like or like. You just had kind of spent a couple minutes talking about as you've gone through your journey, as you've built your playbook and as you, as you've gotten deeper and deeper into career. 

Adrian (00:21:07) - Spend a few minutes just kind of talking about how people should be thinking about what tools to invest in, how to get their teams to utilize it, how to know if, after X period of time, they got the right thing, because sometimes you got to change fast to make sure you're not building on something that's not going to scale. But I'd love to just kind of hear you talk about tools and tech for it for a bit. 

Speaker 2 (00:21:27) - No, I love it. So obviously, tools are incredibly important. I won't name name any because you know it's. It makes sense not to mention anyone in particular, but I'd see tools as in sort of three buckets: right so there's systems of record, there's systems of collaboration and the systems of action. Right so, systems of where stuff actually comes to bear. 

Adrian (00:21:50) - And I love that. 

Speaker 2 (00:21:51) - I said out is because systems of record- the primitive purposes bring data and capture, capture, capture, system of collaboration are ones where you bring multiple people. They lend themselves to virality, right, because I couldn't do a webex call without a counterparty, correct? So, obviously, if I have a Webex subscription, I invite you, I'm already telling you: hey, come on board this platform, because you know we can, we can collaborate. 

Adrian (00:22:17) - Wait, how bad are you that? I, when I sent you a zoom link, by the way for today- incredibly mad. We're gonna talk about that later, aren't we? We're gonna talk about that once we're done recording. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:26) - Well, I'll do a shameless plug. I said this on the stage at Webex one. I said: this is Nora who runs our devices business. And I said: you know, it's only half a joke, that part of the reason I came back was because I missed my desk pro a lot and the other day I had- I won't name him, I'm having a webinar with the president of a very large company, public company, and and I obviously said, hey, we need to do this on Webex. And we did. And when they came and recorded the, we did a fireside chat, literally here, this is my fireplace. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:56) - So, yeah, my desk pro there. We sat on either side of the fireplace and we did a fireside chat with a fire on, okay, and they were so insanely delighted and intrigued by the audio video quality form factor of the Webex meeting inside that desk pro that honestly, I probably need this at my desk. So I'm sorry, it's a shameless plug, but the reality. We make really, really good every modality of human communication. We make really good software. We have really good connectivity. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:29) - We make great hardware, so, anyway, so it's fine, you know what this is your, your show, so I will play by your rules, but I love it enough. So, alright, so let's come back to the tools, right? So systems of record. Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is in the age of AI, someone, some people even questioning: do I need a system of record? 

Adrian (00:23:49) - Yeah, right, do I need a system of record? 

Speaker 2 (00:23:51) - The way the databases are structured are changing. The way I look up information is changing. 

Adrian (00:23:53) - What's the value in that? 

Speaker 2 (00:23:55) - My massive pivot and orientation is- and obviously large companies need systems of record. Right, because you need a nice place you go to and say, okay, show me the pipeline. Yeah, tell me how much money is there in the bank. You don't want to experiment with, you know foundational questions like that right or employee records, for example, correct. They're safety, privacy. You need role-based access, but those are systems record. But really where you get productive is when you take that data to collaborate and drive action. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:23) - And for me, a massive premium is on products which are what I call systems of action, wherein you take that data and you're doing something with it. It is telling you something that you need to do and obviously we have everything from CRM. We have a huge sales tech and martech stack. Obviously we have a lot of investments in customer experience. Don't want to name products. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:44) - Because at Cisco, we don't generally go out and endorse products, right? But the stack, essentially, my over-rotation is on, if I have a system, and I'm getting a PowerPoint with, like, screens slapped on, there's a problem. Because my software is supposed to give me the insight on what's happening with my customers, who's growing, why they're growing, what's happening. So in general, my premium is on systems that either help you collaborate, communicate better. I'll give you a bad example of that. 

Speaker 2 (00:25:12) - A bad example of that is, you buy a hundred license something, there's a hundred, you know, edit, right, full featured access. And what happens is, once a month, I generate a report, let's say a pipeline report or something, and I send it to you. And that's all you see. All you care about is how much money is coming, how much has come, what's the story. You need software for that, right? You literally need one admin license, and monthly, you need to send people dashboards. That's not a collaboration or action, correct? 

Speaker 2 (00:25:40) - Systems of actions are ones that are giving you real-time dynamic signals, helping you do things. Right? So for example, in the customer experience realm, I'll talk about a couple of things that we're doing, which I think are systems of action. Why do you use AI? Let's go inside the call center. It's a hard job. Anyone who's been inside a call center... 

Speaker 3 (00:25:58) - Super hard job. Right? 

Speaker 2 (00:25:59) - It's a tough job. 

Adrian (00:26:00) - Yep. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:01) - And remember, we never call in the call center and ask the agent, how's your day going, or we empathize with the fact that they didn't cancel your flight, you know? And yet we say, you know what, nameless, faceless, let's go and hammer this individual on the other side. Systems of action are like, let's use AI for two purposes, for example. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:21) - One is, we have something called agent wellness, which is to detect on a real-time basis what's happening to the agent, what's the sentiment, how the calls are going, and maybe see if the agent needs a break, something to breathe, refresh. And this was actually called out, even in the magic quadrant, as something that is unique about us. Because if you don't invest in the people, how can I offer you a great customer experience if I hate my job and I'm having a bad day on top of that? 

Adrian (00:26:47) - You know, I'm a firm believer you cannot have incredible customer experience without incredible employee experience. You have to have it. You have to have it. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:53) - And it's a nice slogan, but are you putting money where your mouth is? So we are doing that, right? The other things that are on things like auto CSAT, for example, we are looking at... Nobody gives feedback. A very small percentage of people actually give feedback, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:27:07) - We've built an AI model which takes that as a reference set and actually predicts what the CSAT of this engagement would have been if you had actually given CSAT. So now imagine the equivalent of 100% of your customers, happy, unhappy, middle of the ground, giving you a CSAT score, which allows you to better understand what's happening on a real-time basis to these conversations, right? 

Adrian (00:27:27) - Vinod, a quick question on this. Is this basically... So the technology, without getting into the recipe, but you're taking... There's positive sentiment. There's negative sentiment. There's tonal change, right? Somebody that's very, very loud versus someone that's being soft and sweet and kind and easy. Is it this type of stuff that basically bakes into the magic, if you will, around how at the end of that conversation on both agent and customer side, you're getting a temperature? Like it's a temperature check, essentially. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:55) - Tone, tenor, sentiment, outcome delivered, all of the above, right? You put it together. You do a benchmark against actual customer feedback, right? And then you build a model that doesn't need it. Even if you get half a percent of your customers giving feedback, that's enough to make sure your system is learning. And then the other 99.5%, the auto-CSAT model takes it. So the reason I'm taking these two examples, we are doing a lot around things, of course, but systems of action actually help you do stuff. I'll give you one... 

Adrian (00:28:23) - Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:25) - So external facing tool, of course. So if you look at bots, they've been around for a long time. We actually feel that bots that are either very deterministic or not connected to systems of record or systems of execution, so to speak, are useless. So when you're calling and you're messaging or calling and you're saying, look, I'm not able to make it for my appointment. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:47) - The fact that it can go into a backend system, check what other slots are available, engage with you, and actually move your appointment from the slot you can't make to one that you can, and then trigger a message back to you and send a mark to your calendar to make sure you don't forget again and don't double book again, that is a system of action.

Speaker 2 (00:29:09) - Yes, and our massive orientation is on: don't make stuff that looks good on the wall, make stuff that looks good in your hands, getting stuff done, so from the AI agent itself, all going all the way down to execution, very proud of it and within the context in itself. Things like this, I feel, are systems of action which allow you to do something on a real time basis that gets stuff done, as opposed to throws a bunch of dashboards which, essentially, are nice, you look really smart and busy doing it, but it does nothing for your business. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:41) - So, number one, I couldn't agree more with all of this stuff and it's amazing. There's a few points I want to jump on. First, one is feedback. I promise you- I'm not even saying this because we're in this conversation now, but I- two client meetings today where people are asking for build outs around the NPS, CSAT, customer effort score. All this whatever. It doesn't even matter what your favorite you know earlier. Where is on the feedback medium side? 

Speaker 1 (00:30:09) - What you just said is something that I promise you, and I'm lucky because I get the great fortune of chatting with awesome, incredible people that are way in the front of this, but I've- literally I'm one of the few customer experience consultants. That has been almost shaming people around. Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, let me get this right. You want us to spend time and money and energy building something that's essentially a rear view mirror behind here, when we're already years into the AI evolution. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:40) - It's going to change the world as we know it- in a good way, by the way, not the scary way that the layman that hasn't dug into this and understood how this is going to make life better, not just for business, but for all of us. This is going to. This eventually creeps into all these other areas of our life where things are about to get, if they're not already easy, they're about to get even easier. That's number one. Number two, maybe: these companies are software companies and my thing is like: guys, we have to get. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:06) - We have usability data right in front of us. We already know who's using, who's not using. We know which features are that most used, least used. We already see areas of warm direction, cold direction. What do you mean? We're setting a cert. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:21) - What are we setting a cert? 

Speaker 1 (00:31:21) - That's number one. And then number two there's for the companies that are at least doing some of their CS extremely well and they're doing regular customer check-ins, they're doing their QBRs, they're doing all the right things to make sure that they've got a success plan. They're following up on this. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:36) - Every one of those meetings has so much gold in a 30-minute conversation, like what you and I are doing right this second, that if you can't extract some of the positive and the negative sentiment, I don't know about the actual algorithm piece of mapping. What you guys have done with, like benchmarking across cause. That's probably a little bit more complicated. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:52) - But, like my point is, even some of our listeners that are in a startup right now and you're building and you're trying to become the next Cisco, this is stuff that you can do right this second. And then the last thing is, if you guys don't already know, survey fatigue is an extremely real thing. This is why you guys are doing this, where the perfect scenario is a customer doesn't have to fricking, tell you anything. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:13) - They just buy the thing, do the transaction, go through the journey, go through the experience and it's either positive and frictionless or there's the interruption and then we know about it, we have to remediate and all that. But, like guys, this is the way that we all got to start thinking and it's funny, so I love that you bring that up. One last piece: the action, and I'm sorry I keep saying this, guys, I've said it on every episode for like the last 50 episodes- but the world spends three quarters of a trillion dollars per year on software. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:43) - And then the best companies on planet earth- probably the Ciscos- frankly, Cisco's, Google's, matters, all these- they claim that they see 20,, 30% and they're the smartest and the brightest and the best. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:53) - So I guess the last part I want to say is, if you are a SAS founder and you're building a piece of software and you're not doing what Vinod says, right, this second, where there's actionability created from your software, you literally need to go back to the drawing board right now, because I think what's going- and I could be wrong here, but from all these incredible people I get to chat with, you know like I think that's going to be the one disruptive element- that AI, the action piece, meaning companies, whether it's software, whether it's service, how they're leveraging AI, the ones that actually focus on the action piece the most, and it gets shit done and they figure things out. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:26) - It's almost like the proactive measure of like eyes in the sky. How are they going to lose. How are they going to fail? That's one of the easiest ways that you can keep a customer coming back. Again and again and again they become promoters. They go tell their friends about why you got to go talk to Vinod and his team at Cisco. And then, lastly, it's just like people want to spend their money with companies that they actually feel give a shit, care about it and are monitoring that entire journey. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:49) - So I love it, man. I love some of these things that you laid out. 

Speaker 2 (00:33:53) - Let me just add one, since you said this, and it's really a matter close to my heart. There was a chief marketing officer at a very large bank who was a huge cloud cherry customer. And whenever we asked him for a reference, which is exactly like a very large bank in the US, our sponsor there, whenever he comes in for a reference call, they both did the same thing. I saw two leaders in two different countries do the same thing when they come for a reference call. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:17) - They opened up their product, the dashboard, and they started showing how they use it, as opposed to speaking in words, or say, let me get my team to send me a report. These are people at the top of the chain. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:28) - That's awesome. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:28) - With the software hands-on. And if I'm building, I want to build stuff either people use like that, and they live by it, they tell their stories using my product, or I won't build. Because any product that goes to the backend generates something once a month for people, soon you'll realize why am I paying for these licenses, or whatever. In the utility bottom end of the segment where people use your software every day, day in and day out, live by it, that's the crutch that holds them up, like the indispensability of your product. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:59) - If not, I believe there's a problem. 

Speaker 3 (00:35:02) - Yep. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:02) - Love it. Totally agree. But I'd like to bounce into the third pillar of process. And this one, I'm going to be a little bit more specific, because you have this awesome background, and I think our listeners would appreciate it too. But as you went through your career, can you just spend a few minutes talking about how you thought about building your playbook? I don't even really care, because Cisco is so big that we don't need to get into that process. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:26) - I'm actually more interested, and I bet your listeners are more interested, as you went from company to company, especially the one that you built, how did you think about, as you got better at the game, how did you start thinking about how to build and capture or chronicle your playbook? And how did you start to think about how to document and then leverage the learnings and the findings that you and your team and your customers were going through on a regular basis? 

Speaker 2 (00:35:53) - Awesome. So let me think about customer experience itself. That's the majority of the people here. My one perspective is, cliches are cliches because they're unfortunately true. And cliches are also harmful and dangerous. They're harmful and dangerous when you take them as it is and apply it to your world. They can be incredibly valuable if you understand the deeper meaning behind them. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:19) - So we're talking about putting the customer at the center of tradition, being customer first, customer involved, but there are many variants of that cliche. But what does that mean? If I'm taking, going back to our analogy around the green button on the right, I'm an audit taker. You don't need a significant amount of intellect to say, Hey, he told me get a green button. Let's do the green button. To truly understand. So first of all, being customer obsessed truly means you put yourself in the shoes as a customer. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:42) - Please don't be a startup founder or a CX practitioner. If you don't know what the day in the life of your user looks like. If you're selling to call centers, you better know what the call center manager goes through. The supervisor goes through, the analyst goes through, the agent goes through. If you've not walked the flow of a call center in your life, hugely problematic, right? If you've worked great, not everyone should have done it, but you need to have spent enough time to understand how that world works. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:07) - You must have spent enough time being frustrated on the phone or on chat. You need to bring those two worlds together, right? How do I create a better world for both of them? If you haven't done it, to be honest, it's a bit like, you know, being a war historian when you haven't, you know, picked up a stick. You can offer great advice from afar, but you won't be good in war. So you need to be a practitioner to win. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:29) - The reason I say that is, the first part is you need to be able to articulate, and it's okay to seek hundreds of inputs to that, what the ideal customer journey and experience should look like, right? Now, there are hundreds of ways to deliver customer delight, a few ways to do it profitably. My assumption is everyone tuning in runs a for-profit entity, which means your first job also is to turn in a profit, you know, make $1 more. Which means you got to look at that customer journey, and there are many ways to make it delightful. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:00) - Most of them are not value accretive. They don't have a 10X impact on customer sentiment and have like a debilitating impact on profitability. So devise the ideal customer experience, journey, and outcomes. For example, let me take just one, okay? Isn't it horrendous if I speak to you and three minutes into the conversation, the call drops because I'm driving, I call back again, the new guy picks up and says, hey, I'm Adrian, how can I help you? I'm not calling you again, okay? 

Speaker 2 (00:38:29) - So let's say you will not, you agree that it's a tactical problem, it's terrible, okay? Or now Adrian doesn't even know that I'm calling three times for the same issue, my TV is still broken, okay? My warranty is still not fixed yet, okay? So would it not be awesome if I don't have to repeat myself? Would it not be awesome if what I spoke last and got cut off on miraculously appears and the agent starts by saying, hey, Adrian, I mean, Adrian's the agent, hey, Vinod, looks like we're giving you a terrible time with that television. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:02) - I truly apologize for what's going on, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:39:05) - It doesn't usually happen with us, okay? Sorry you're having to call so many times, let me work on fixing this for you. That is so much more the kind of experience we want. Funny enough, the agent on the other side would love to be able to do it too because he doesn't want to hear you scream and say, don't you know I've called up three times over the same thing, you're useless, you're this, blah, blah. Now let's start with just a very tactical example in a broader customer journey. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:25) - If you agree, the next point is what is the tangible business value of fixing it? If I fixed it.

Speaker 2 (00:39:32) - What would change? First contact resolution might improve, NPS might improve, repeat repurchase rate might improve, customer retention may improve. There is a tangible business benefit to solving this problem. If that is the case, then what is the technology that powers it? So we have two very simple things. One is a call drop summary. When a call drops and you call again, the call drop summary with context, the entire conversation and the summary both come to the agent. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:58) - And the customer journey data service makes sure that it pops up calling three times and even pops up and says, most likely calling first television, which is broken. It allows you to start a contextual conversation. So if you put this in a stack, customer experience value, tangible dollar business value of investing in this, and the scale at which we can do it, and then go to product, hit gold. If you flip the other way around and say, I've got this new shiny AI thing, let's use it somewhere. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:29) - Now you're a hammer looking for a nail, which is I'm saying deploy this bot. And you're like, why should I deploy this bot? If you do this, and then you work your snake your way to value, whereas you have to start with an experiential impact, quantify the business value for it, then come to the product you're selling. That is my approach to doing this. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:49) - This is my only architecture on Toolkit, which is if you do this for every decision you make around customer centricity, and you document why, you'll know why you're building a certain product, why you're pricing it a certain way. All of these decisions should be downstream to this matrix. This is my Toolkit with regards to how to build product, how to prioritize, how to know what's next, what's important. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:17) - I love it, man. It's such a good approach. And then the other piece too, going back to earlier in the conversation, you've got the right people on the team parsing that out. This is why you can be unstoppable, meaning you're getting deep, you're unpacking the under, you're going layer deeper, layer deeper, layer deeper. You're understanding, you're actioning on the things that matter the most. You're actioning on the money part too. You've got to make sure of that. Lastly too, it also hits on the EXCX side that we talked about. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:45) - What I just heard right there, meaning not only are you putting your customer front and center, but we've both been on terrible phone calls where you're just getting hammered. This is back in the day, so we didn't have some of these luxuries by the way. People want to wonder how they're going to keep some of the best and the brightest on their front lines and on their support. You better be thinking about how you're going to make investments or have some of the technology or some of the support that allows them to make it more human too, by the way. 

Speaker 1 (00:42:13) - It's a shitty experience, but if you dropped off the phone and I picked that next call up, at least we can make some not fun of it, but be humans about it. Vinod, I'm so sorry man. I saw you got cut. 

Speaker 2 (00:42:25) - I'm picking this up. 

Speaker 1 (00:42:26) - I already got everything right here, which never happens by the way. There's so many companies that are not at that level yet. It's such a good way of thinking about it. It makes me wonder too, and I want to bounce into the fourth pillar of feedback. I'll give you two, actually three, because you are a product expert too. I'd love to have you spend a minute talking about some of the things that you've seen. It might not even be Cisco. 

Speaker 1 (00:42:53) - It might be some of the customers you guys work with, but I'd like at least one example around some things that you've seen the best companies on planet Earth do with their customer experience. Then I'm going to roll that question so that you can roll it out together. Some of the best things that you've seen those companies do on the employee experience side and then the product experience side, because I know it's a loaded question, but I know that you're going to kind of blend this together. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:18) - I'm just very interested in how some of the golden nuggets across your career of what you've seen on the feedback side of what we're all doing with this type of work. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:27) - I think it's Charlie Munger who said, so correct me if I'm wrong, who said, show me the incentive and I will show you the action or something. The larger the scale grows, and I'm talking about a scale of dozens of people, not even thousands or hundreds, incentives drive action. In a large company, if you truly want everyone to be focused on, let's say you go to the Nordstrom level and say, I'm ultra focused on customer delight. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:55) - If I'm in the call center and I'm beating you up on AHT, and I say, no, no, you need to finish your calls in three minutes or less. Then it's super hard to expect that frontline employee to behave the way you want and give you like, no, don't worry about it. For example, hey, I have my credit card. What's your credit card number? I'm looking for it. Sorry, I left my wallet in the other room and now the agent is like, can you please have the credit card with you when you call? He's like, my three minutes are getting up. 

Speaker 2 (00:44:24) - The reason I'm saying that is the greatest companies in the world do some things right.

Speaker 2 (00:44:29) - So, we've seen companies, let's take the example of NPS, right, let's take that example. I've seen one company, I think this was in the annual report of Bank in Australia, 20% of the leadership team's variable compensation is on NPS improvement metric. So they're baselined, they said this year we're going to improve by this much. Now the moment your leadership team is going to lose 20% of their incentive to that, you know they'll be maniacally focused, right? So let's start from the top. 100%. 

Speaker 2 (00:44:59) - And then cascade down to everyone having the same thing, right? That is the incentive part, which forces you to design things that are truly long-term because you can't just tweak your survey to improve your NPS. Maybe you can do it one quarter, right, with a more than flattering baseline. But the more than flattering baseline is going to become your nemesis because quarter after quarter you can't tweak the system. 

Speaker 2 (00:45:19) - So you know, so which means you're truly saying what can I do to improve NPS holistically and which means what should my support experience be? What should my this be? What are the metrics I should drive with? Is AHT more important than FCR, more important than CSAT, right? Or how do they kind of come together, okay? Why am I telling you this? 

Speaker 2 (00:45:36) - The reason I'm telling you this is, there's this incredible bank that I've worked with when they realized that this NPS program became a beating stick, which is I'm the NPS guy and I come to you in sales, retention, branch operations, and I'm like, hey, your NPS needs to go up. Now, soon you're fearing it because what is the number 40? It needs to go to 42 this year. And now suddenly you're like, this is the stick you use to beat me up. And now you hate the metric. 

Speaker 2 (00:46:05) - What they did beautifully and I think all great CX teams and programs should do is to spend the time, effort, and energy to map the causal relationship between customer experience and the outcome that you are paid to do. You are paid for repeat repurchase rate or branch turnover or what have you, right? Customer retention, new products or whatever. If we are able to show how this drives that, you no longer need to focus on that. 

Speaker 2 (00:46:35) - You say, you know what, when I invest in these five things that improve NPS, it helps me retain my customers better, improve share of wallet, sell more products, increase the branch GMV, whatever, right? Or increase transactions on this channel, on mobile. All of these teams are using NPS as a proxy to the performance on which they are paid out, right? That's your incentive. And the team said, the reason this customer experience leader whom I absolutely love, he said, we basked in reflected glory. 

Speaker 2 (00:47:05) - Which is you sold more, they converted more, their GMV increased, this thing increased, that thing increased, and everything rooted back down to, oh, this customer experience program really helped us, optimizing the things that matter, as opposed to trying to do 100 things that don't matter. So that is a way of top to down incentive alignment, converting the anchor metric, it could be anything. I know banks which have a composite, they have their own sort of experience score. 

Speaker 2 (00:47:31) - Take that, drive the at least correlative, if not causal relationship between that and the metrics that matter, right? Because the simplest one is, oh, let's put an NPS goal on sales, okay? NPS doesn't know how to convert NPS to that. But if they say, hey, do these few things, okay? And it'll help you sell more, and while it also improves your NPS and helps you with that KPI, you'll suddenly see complete incentive alignment, and you'll see more CX programs than not succeed. 

Speaker 2 (00:48:01) - So this is what I've seen in the best companies, and I think it's something everyone should emulate. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:05) - I love that, Vinod. And it's funny, too. I have Fred Reichelt, who is the founder, the father of NPS, Spain & Co., on the show years ago. Awesome, awesome dude. And it's funny, because you just nailed it where like, I'm not saying that the metric isn't the count that CX leaders should think about. You just, like what you just said, there's so many, there's a menu, there's all sorts of different ways you can count this stuff. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:29) - The most important thing though, and Fred literally said this, he's like, you know, the thing is, is when we kind of rolled NPS out, we were trying to get companies to realize, and you literally said almost verbatim what Fred said, there's this holistic thing that needs to happen to make a product, a service, a delivery, an experience, whatever your industry is.

Speaker 1 (00:48:51) - consistent, reliable, repeatable. And it's funny because to hear even the guy that developed the MPS, and then one last thing that's funny, I do bring this up whenever we get into the MPS thing. Fred Reichwald also did not get rich from creating the MPS. You know how he got rich for not? He told me, it's in the episode too, so we can go back. He told me, he's a gator, you know how I really got rich? I was like, I don't know, 30 years of bank account? He's like, no. 

Speaker 1 (00:49:15) - He's like, my entire year of, all my career of investing, I only invested in public companies that were actually leveraging MPS because of what you just said, Vinod. Because he knew early on before the rest of us, what you just said were, those are companies that fucking get it. Those are companies that understand the top to bottom. They have leadership and executives that are bought completely in and they're maniacal about customers and employees, they understand that piece. 

Speaker 1 (00:49:40) - And he told me that literally, that's how he, that he's like, yeah, I just, for 30 years, I invested in companies that had extremely high MPS. And then he said it started to not work because as more people adopted what you got to do, then people start to change the game, right? If they can change the rules of the game, they change it. Vinod, this has been an absolute pleasure, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:49:57) - Before I let you go, anything that's coming up with you, your team, anything that you want to shout out, cool things that your team's working on, events that your guys are going to be present at or that you're excited about. Anything that's coming up and then please finish with where people can get in touch with you or your team if they want to learn more about Cisco, they want to learn more about WebEx. 

Speaker 2 (00:50:16) - Absolutely. So, multi-part questions. Obviously, at Miami, we had WebEx One, our flagship event. 

Speaker 1 (00:50:21) - It's going on the road. 

Speaker 2 (00:50:22) - It's in Frankfurt, London, Paris. 

Speaker 1 (00:50:24) - It's going across the world. Nice! Nice roadshow. 

Speaker 2 (00:50:28) - So, if you're local to any chapter, please, please, please look at WebEx One online and please attend a local event. I honestly think it's incredibly valuable. Now, in terms of product, we announced a few things that I really am very, very proud of. We announced our first AI autonomous agent. That is a completely autonomous agent. 

Speaker 2 (00:50:45) - We allow scripted and obviously autonomous modes to it, which does human-like bi-directional conversation across all modalities, supports multi-modality in a parallel conversation and is integrated to systems of record to do execution. So, human-like engagement, bi-directional exchange and obviously system integration to execute upon transaction or orchestrate certain actions. Very, very proud of that. Next, we also announced and all of this is designable by a layperson using the agent studio. Again, absolutely love that experience. 

Speaker 2 (00:51:20) - The WebEx One keynote highlights obviously online, you can watch it, but if you're not attending the event. We also announced the AI assistant, which is now in the contact center. We have AI for the agent, assistant for the agent, for the supervisor and for the analyst persona. So, we announced a slew of things for the agent, full call transcriptions, summarization, agent health, topic analytics, auto CSAT, what have you. Everything to make the agent super, super productive. And I'm really, really proud of those announcements that we've made. 

Speaker 2 (00:51:50) - And obviously, most people might not know, but we also have an entire CPaaS platform. So, we have WebEx Connect, which means engagement with the customer across any channel of choice, literally any channel discovered by humanity or invented by humanity we support. And almost any system of record where transactions need to be logged or things to be done, we do integrate into. So, the WebEx Connect really, really helps us orchestrate all of that. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:14) - So, this is coming together essentially with the three pillars that we're talking about, which is proactive engagement. We are saying, you know, best contacts and engagement you ever had is one you never had. Which means proactive engagement across all modalities is at the heart of preventing the root cause of a call. There's AI around it. We're not looking at AI as a feature or a module. It is embedded across the fabric of our entire product suite. And we have a huge commitment to ethical AI principles that we've espoused that for a long time. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:44) - In terms of getting in touch with us, if you don't see us locally, Cisco WebEx is easily lookable online. I'm available on LinkedIn. Happy to share my coordinates with anyone who wants to get in touch with us. You have a contact sales button on every page there, but please reach out to me if you want perspective on customer experience. I would very happily engage with you on any conversation around customer experience and then connect you to the right people at Cisco. 

Speaker 1 (00:53:08) - I love it. Vinod, number one, thank you so much for doing this today, man. I really was super pumped to get you on the show. This was awesome. Just so many, so many awesome CTAs and golden nuggets of wisdom. I'm super appreciative. Number two, for our listeners, I'm going to make sure that I put the the WebEx information into our show notes because some people might be interested in coming by and meeting you in the flesh or meeting your team in the flesh. But Vinod, it's been an absolute pleasure. 

Speaker 1 (00:53:31) - I'm pumped to see how you and your team continue to do in the future. And I'm looking forward to chatting with you again, my friend. This is awesome. 

Speaker 2 (00:53:39) - Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate you.