I mean, talk a little bit about the opportunity to work with all of these big names, Apple, Facebook and the like, and how those relationships, along with this period of time right now, this pandemic, how that’s accelerating your business, what do you see coming down the pike here? LoCascio: Yeah. And I think the coolest part is that when we went live, and this is a little over three years ago, T-Mobile was our first customer, and they’re very customer care focused. And now, more times than none, it’s going toward automation, but we provide all the plumbing and all the platform that enables the brands to scale the conversational commerce and care experiences. I always felt that there are many times you have to ask questions, especially with more complex transactions. LivePerson has a market capitalization of roughly $3.9 billion and is valued at approximately 10 times this year’s expected sales. Before we get to that, I want to just get to — you know, hey, let’s talk about the elephant in the room here, the market is giving you guys some love today. Moser: Yeah. And you talk about helping out big brands like Chipotle, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but I think it’s really interesting, the dynamic, when we hear about how your technology is interfacing and working with other technologies like Facebook Messenger, like Apple’s messaging technology.
LoCascio: The categories. It’s very interesting, retail right now is obviously going through a massive transformation, and most of it looks really bad. So, it looks like, you know, there’s a lot of bankruptcies, every week there’s a bankruptcy of a big one. And I was like, why would a little bit of that, you know, the grass always looks greener on the other side, doesn’t it? And sometimes it just takes a little bit of a catalyst, and you know, I mean, what this ultimately is, this pandemic, has been a catalyst for a lot of businesses. I mean, we live in an on-demand future now. And so, I believe all of that should just be replaced by your message, a question, and you get an automation that says I can help you, and that’s really, that’s the present future of the way a customer experience will be with brands. And if there’s anything left, you get paid. I went out there, and met with him, he said, “You should shut us down.” He said, “There’s no more selling out on the West Coast.” Because there’s all dot coms at the time. How did he go from that terrible situation – which you’ll hear more about in this interview – to creating a company that generated over $100 million in revenue last year?
We did see declines in the SMB space, but again that was not up to this last quarter – fourth quarter, an area of focus of ours, but what I would highlight is if you looked at the bookings performance, not just globally, but really equally driven across North America and internationally, they had record bookings – and it wasn’t just two or three homerun deals. Then we generated another 70 million or so — actually, we generated 100 million last quarter, a month of this data. And sometimes they force you to call them and then they’re like, we can’t handle your call, because now what’s happened is, they’ve shut down the contact centers, just not them, but all the contact centers got shut down because of the social distancing. Customers can contact the nearest stores, and the Wilcon team will take you on a virtual tour where you can explore the available products inside their physical stores. So, I gave you the Chipotle example, where now you can, through Facebook Messenger, you can basically build your own burrito and then when you show up at the store they just hand it to you, you don’t have to come in.
So, when you walk in the store now, next to every product there’s a QR code, you pull out your phone, you put the photo on, it launches iMessage or SMS and then you’re messaging with a human who’s not in the store or you’re messaging with an automation. Because the consumer’s perspective was, they weren’t going to lose you, you are in the device, so you’re literally using the messaging platform, you’re connected, you know, like you are with your friends and family, you don’t disappear like a voice call or chat, you don’t have to call back, they were right there. And we basically had this perspective that that consumer experience that you do with your friends and family, could be done with businesses. LoCascio: Yeah, so the first thing is, you know, those frontends that we use with our friends and family, they’re not really usable with businesses if there’s no platform like ours.