RingCentral, Inc. (RNG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Next up, we have Naveed Husain. Naveed is the VP of Vertical Programs at RingCentral. RingCentral is another company that's just been on fire lately. Naveed, welcome to the program. Great to see you. I think we're -- you're on mute there. Okay.

Hi. There we go. How are you doing?

Excellent.

I'm trying to get this virtual background to look good.

Naveed, your shirt is on fire. I can see it.

It is. It's got the RingCentral orange. We've got to look good.

Okay. There we go. Love it. Hey, give us an update, what have you been doing at RingCentral? And give us an update -- people might not know what RingCentral is or who RingCentral is. It really it's a universal platform for accelerating communications, right?

Absolutely. It's a unified communication as a service application. So it really brings all that collaboration that you need to do, that breaking down the silos between your business units and everyone else and your outside customers, and it just creates one place for you to collaborate, right? It enhances your customer experience, so you're all part of one platform. So you spend once and you get many returns out of that.

In a global organization, correct?

Absolutely. We're a 5,100 person organization all over the world. We have native capabilities in over 41 countries, like 30 data centers around the world. All of our technology runs through our data centers. So when it comes to your previous speaker and security, we're very heavy on security. We're very heavy on our -- we're a cloud-first company. We were born in the cloud. So we didn't have to convert. And we bring all those hardware pieces together. We -- pure cloud play, so ability to scale dramatically and really leverage what the cloud is all about and really be that SaaS company that people expect.

Naveed, you really are a thought leader and a former practitioner, right, now on the partner side as an industry vertical thought leader. When you think about 7 months into the pandemic, and we're still mostly all working remote, and the key is culture. And culture drives performance and productivity and innovation, right? What have you learned over the past 7 months? And what's your thought on the future on how to accelerate performance in companies using Video?

I tell you, the first thing you're going to hear on LinkedIn or on Facebook or anything out there, it's I am so tired of video meetings. And if anybody says otherwise, I would be extremely shocked, right? The fact is, is that the culture is exactly that, right? We've left because of the pandemic. We left the office space and -- human beings are social animals to begin with, right? And most of the work as a former CIO, I was able to do with my business units is go down the hall, talk to all my business unit leaders, shake their hands, take them out to coffee, have a conversation about their needs, right, and then build it. It's so much harder when you have back-to-back video meetings. And people consider that digital transformation, but the reality is it's not really digital transformation, it's a digital shift. It's a shift to virtualization, but we still haven't actually leveraged the possibilities of video and online communication and collaboration, right? There's so much more that we can do. And when it comes to culture, it really has to stem from the sincerity of the leadership to take time out and meet with their folks, right? Even if you take a few minutes out of your workday to have a video meeting or a quick message out to your team members and say, "Hey, how is it going, how are you feeling, right?" This way, this whole environment that we're moving into or this is not going to be -- this is not going to go away, right? So we're going to need to adopt and figure out how do we balance both. And it's like Pavlov's dog, if you a -- if you always experience video to be a work element and it's a stress element, you're always going to react that way every time you come on. But if it becomes like you're talking to your boss or you're talking to your colleague and it's a friendly social gathering in a way, right, not always about work, that's what's going to change culture. It's going to make people turn on their videos more often. It's going to have people accept these meetings, take breaks and take 5 minutes before a meeting and then start a meeting 5 minutes later so that you can create that safe work environment, really, that's what you need to do.

It's really thoughtful. Well said. Thanks for sharing that.

Thank you.

It comes down to people like doing business and working with people that they like, right, making friends and building sound multi relations.

Exactly. You are more successful with the business units that you're close to, right? You're going to be more innovative. You're going to be way more open with those business units, right, then you will be with ones that you're only working within the guardrails. If you're only working within the guardrails, so you don't know if you can really trust and share that key information with us. But having that trust and the more interactions you had even through the messaging platform on RingCentral or pick up the phone like the old-fashioned way, right, and just talk to them so that they don't have to turn on video or whatever, it's just a nicer experience. You calm down all those nerves and all that stress that you have, right? And like how many times do you and I just pick up the phone and say, hello, it's just, hey and we have a friendly relationship. And we think about it and we say, hey, let's do this, right? And you're more likely to say, let's do this if you build that relationship, that the cordial relationship rather than something on your calendar that you have to click on and make sure you're on time.

It really comes down to building trust, right, and collaboration?

Absolutely. Trust and collaboration are the new I would say, speed bump, right? If you don't have -- if you don't go over that speed bump and you don't generally manage that successfully and really pay attention to it with sincerity, right, you're not going to build it. And you could totally destroy your oil tank, right? If you're used to those old cars. I know a lot of you guys have Teslas now, but you can really destroy your oil tank on a speed ball, right? So go over it easy, build that trust and really make it a real relationship rather than I'm coming on just to talk to you about these 10 things that I need to get done for this quarter.

Hey, Naveed, what are some of the challenges you're helping your customers with now and into the future?

Yes. So a lot of our customers are coming in and they're new to remote working, right? So -- and they're new to how do I create that -- have customer experience so that I'm not dealing with all these tools. And what's happening is, is that you have all these applications and none of them really work together, right? So even though RingCentral is a -- at its core -- it was born in the cloud for phone and PBX and that and then it became a collaboration company, but really, it's a platform, right? So what we're really helping customers do is say, take away that friction that you have between switching between applications. And if you live within a laptop, right, let's make that environment better. So integrate your applications, so that it's a frictionless workflow on the platform. So we're really getting people used to the fact that what they're dealing with is software and not hardware, and they don't have to buy a whole bunch of new modules. They can really leverage our APIs in our apps gallery and build the integrations into their CRM and build integrations into their ITO tools and things like that. So that whole experience is in one place, and the staff aren't switching. If the staff are calm and easy with the adoption of the software as a whole, you guys are talking about enterprise architecture coming from the business units, right? And really understanding that business unit architecture and relieving the business unit from the learning curve, right, because software is easy, and software skill, right? And the more integrations you build into it and the more you make it part of the workflow of that business unit, it's going to have a higher adoption. And your return on investment and your revenue is going to go through the roof. Because now we're not struggling with how do I make this work? How do I get in on this meeting? It's let's just do it, right? And coming back to, I'm wearing a nice new shirt, just do it. So just do it, right? So that's what we want our customers to be able to do. And think about how they -- they're not just replacing what they had before, but what they're doing is building a real digital transformation strategy based on their architecture and based on how their business units work so that they're actually getting a true return on investment and leaning out the work process. That's what I'm helping my customers with.

That explanation I've heard from a thought leader around how digital and video can -- and unified platform can help.

I mean, really, it's about platform and it's about workflow, right? If it's not in your workflow, you're not going to use the tool. So it's just like going out and buying another product and getting 15% utilization, but you're still paying 100% for it. So if you really think about the user experience and start there, that customer experience is going to be that much better because now the users are concentrating on how do I make this customer's intake better? How do I do first touch resolution? So that's coming back to our contact center portion, right? So what we're also trying to do is relieve a lot of the home agents who are answering these calls and requests from customers. If the customer's issues are resolved through texting or if they're resolved upfront through IVR or whatever, let's do that. And then let's take the harder questions, the more thoughtful questions and escalate that to a human being and have the human answer the more complicated questions and spend more time with the customer. So the customer feels like he really cares about me, he really wants to take care of the problem, I'm going to come back and I'm going to stay with this company because they are looking at ways to make my life easier. I don't have to make another phone call or wait for them to respond, right? They're resolving the issue right now. And it's a human being. So it's a more complicated solution. So this person is thinking, right? And that thinking is what makes the difference, I think, for the customers.

Hey, Naveed, thanks for coming on the program and thanks for RingCentral supporting the HMG platform, really appreciate it. A quick poll here, folks, how ingrained is flexible and remote work in your current company culture? And how would you rate your impact as a leader in your company? If you could simply fill it out, submit, that would be great. We got to go to the next segment. Perhaps we can share those results at the very end.

Okay. Great. Thank you for having me. Take care.

Thanks so much, Naveed. Excellent.