TTEC Holdings, Inc. Q2 FY2020 Earnings Call

Welcome and thank you for standing by. Welcome to TTEC's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. I would like to remind all parties that you will be on listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. This call is being recorded at the request of TTEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Paul Miller, TTEC's Senior Vice President, Treasurer and Investor Relations Officer. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. TTEC is hosting this call to discuss its second quarter results for the period ended June 30, 2020. Participating on today's call are Ken Tuchman, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Regina Paolillo, our Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, and Jonathan Lerner, our President of TTEC Digital. Yesterday, TTEC issued a press release announcing its financial results. While this call will reflect items discussed within those documents, please complete and review our second quarter 2020 quarterly report. Before we begin, I want to remind you that matters discussed on today's call may include forward-looking statements related to our operating performance, financial goals, and business outlook, which are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinion as of the date of this call and we undertake no obligation to revise this information as a result of new developments that may occur. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, or factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expected and described today. For a more detailed description of our risk factors, please review our 2019 Annual Report on Form 10-K. A replay of this conference call will be available on our website under the Investor Relations section. I will now turn the call over to Ken Tuchman, TTEC's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks Paul and good morning to everyone. I am pleased to report that we delivered record second quarter results, demonstrating the relevance of our CX-as-a-Service platform as we rapidly pivoted to an engage-from-anywhere environment. Our focus on execution, combined with the agility of our team and platform provided seamless continuity to our embedded base and enabled us to win a significant number of new logos. Our revenue growth rate accelerated 15.4% and our non-GAAP operating income grew 96.2% versus the prior year period. Our adjusted EBITDA was an impressive $71 million, up 58.4% year-over-year. Based on our strong first half performance and forward revenue visibility we are reinstating and increasing our original 2020 guidance. Our record bookings of $214 million for the quarter predominantly reflected heightened demand for digitization and virtualization solutions across our client base. Our ability to rapidly enable clients with a frictionless and fully digitized customer experience has never been more critical. We continue to build momentum with our agile operating model and proprietary Humanify Cloud technology platform. Our end-to-end approach to designing, building, and operating customer experience-as-a-service is succeeding for increasingly complex, high-end, and mission-critical client needs. Here are some recent examples of the essential work we are handling on behalf of our clients. TTEC has helped multiple federal, state and local government agencies with citizen engagement throughout the pandemic. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, our TTEC Humanify Cloud stepped in to support the Bureau of Unemployment Insurance, which experienced a sudden spike in daily unemployment claims, moving from a couple hundred to tens of thousands of claims per day. We rapidly deployed our fully virtualized Humanify Cloud solution to provide an on-demand, highly scalable and secure at-home technology, along with a virtualized customer experience team to deliver an end-to-end citizen engagement solution. We also partnered with the bureau in identifying new opportunities to improve citizen satisfaction and reduce costs through the expansion of digital channels. We rapidly implemented a new digital conversational messaging platform, so citizens could conveniently access vital information about their unemployment claims process. Our technology allowed the commonwealth to migrate 35% of their voice calls to digital interaction and delivered a 50% cost savings benefit. Operator, I apologize. I may have to take a brief break and pull up my script. I am very sorry.

Ken, I am e-mailing it to you right now.

No, I have it. I apologize. Apparently, my printer chose not to print one page. One of the benefits of doing this from home and last night, I did not check. So I have to find my second page. Okay. Apologies, everybody, for the break. For a premier Fortune 500 health care client, TTEC Engage won a new mandate linked to the mission-critical task of hiring hundreds of registered nurses and other medical professionals to bolster frontline staff battling the pandemic. The scope of the work quickly expanded to take advantage of TTEC Digital capabilities enabled through a nurse line, so patients can engage around the clock 24x7. TTEC registered nurses interact virtually with patients and utilize case-by-case evidence-based assessments to ensure appropriate care. Highlighting the complexity of the work, the nurses not only engage with patients, but also work with pharmacists and attending physicians to ensure clinically safe, cost-effective prescriptions. This is a great example of highly skilled work that has been virtualized as a result of the COVID surge and will remain with TTEC well beyond the pandemic. For Volkswagen Group U.K., TTEC has kicked off a five-year digital transformation project to reinvent the customer experience, moving from current voice-centric systems to a fully contextual and integrated omnichannel experience. With TTEC Digital, Volkswagen will leverage our AI, our machine learning solution to power intelligent virtual assistance and other cognitive engines to enhance VW's customer experience. The fully virtualized end-to-end CX ecosystem will be delivered with TTEC Engage work-at-home customer experience team. The outcome will be a solution with significantly higher customer satisfaction and deliver on lower overall cost to serve. The VW solution reflects a mega trend where consumer products are turning into experiences. According to IDC, experience has overtaken price and brand as the number one differentiator for consumers. It's just no longer just about the type of car you drive, but rather the entire experience you receive from the car manufacturers' brand. From integrated infotainment systems to telematic-enabled servicing, consumers have significantly higher expectations of their auto providers. This trend holds true in every industry. Consumers expect brands to offer continuous, personalized, effortless engagement in their channel of choice with expertise in transforming the customer experience in ways considered futuristic only a few months ago. Leading brands are recognizing they need TTEC's Humanify Cloud technology more than ever. Our continued strong bookings through July are the best evidence of this market demand from the iconic brands that we target and serve. But to be clear, TTEC is well positioned to win both in and out of the current crisis with our proprietary customer experience-as-a-service platform, consisting of our Digital and Engage businesses. They work together to virtually support the entire spectrum of the human and digital workforce at global scale. TTEC's digital operating model is highly differentiated and I would like to spend some time unpacking this offering for the benefit of everyone seeking a better understanding of our overall value proposition. TTEC's digital technology and services are delivered through our integrated technology platform we call the Humanify Cloud. Our Humanify Cloud is a turnkey CX technology solution, enabling the largest, most complex organizations in the world to obtain all the cloud technologies they will ever need to interface seamlessly with their customers. It is important to stress that our Humanify Cloud is unique in the ability to routinely serve clients with hundreds of millions of end customers. Our Humanify Cloud has three main components. The first component is our Humanify Cloud, our CX ecosystem, consisting of dozens of best-in-class pre-integrated CX technology solutions, spanning omnichannel, AI, machine learning, robotic process automation, enterprise CRMs, ERPs, and marketing automation, to a highly proven suite of ready-to-deploy CX applications, such as advanced analytics and cybersecurity solutions, among many others. The second component is our Humanify integration and API platform, leveraging TTEC's prebuilt connectors and enterprise-grade deployment platform, including Humanify's intelligent administration, orchestration, analytics, and automation solutions. This deployment platform brings together entrenched legacy systems and advanced SaaS applications, empowering customer experience teams to enable contextual and personalized customer engagements, providing increased customer satisfaction and deployment speeds that are typically three times faster than point-to-point integration alternatives. And the final component of our Humanify Cloud is the intelligent automation platform which delivers TTEC's proprietary AI, ML, and RPA solutions to drive our clients' customer experience technology to new heights. We leverage our proprietary digital worker factory to infuse and orchestrate advanced AI and big data and a mix of other hyperautomation solutions to deliver the customer experience centers of the future today. Our Humanify Cloud business, inclusive of proceeding solutions, grew 57.4% in the second quarter over the prior year period, one of the fastest areas of organic growth inside our company. The Humanify Cloud is enabled by our technology services team. Within this team, we have distinct practices to each of the three main areas of the cloud. We help clients design the ideal experience and corresponding technology stacks for formulating CX transformation roadmaps. We provide integration and orchestration services between CX applications and common business systems to deliver on our clients' roadmaps. And we determine our clients' optimal mix of AI and automation, delivering a full range of those capabilities needed in today's digital world. To sum it up, the TTEC Digital value proposition is delivered to clients through our Humanify Cloud. With our Humanify Cloud, we are architecting a full customer experience technology ecosystem and managing them for our clients at enterprise scale through an integrated multi-cloud environment. Humanify Cloud solutions are structured as multiyear take-or-pay contracts in which our clients pay us in a fully SaaS format on a per-user, per-month basis. From conversations with clients, we anticipate as the world attempts to emerge from the continued impacts of the pandemic, client focus will be even more concentrated on adding next-generation CX technology, enabled by our Humanify Cloud. The digital imperative forced on to the CX landscape by COVID-19 has become a permanent state of business, creating an even more favorable long-term demand environment for TTEC Digital. Although our clients have not lost sight of the strategic importance for transformative CX capabilities designed to fuel their longer-term growth, at this moment in time, they are acting with great urgency to stabilize their operation and financial performance. Our significant client success during the pandemic is a function of our Digital and Engage business enhancing one another in unique ways. Unlike Engage competitors, TTEC was able to leverage digital solutions to seamlessly move over 40,000 of our Engage workforce to a fully virtualized environment with zero downtime and without interruption to our clients and their customers. This agile shift to at-home allowed Engage to execute on a significant amount of new revenue opportunity. During this process, we leveraged our Humanify Cloud engineers to rapidly build and release our new dramatically improved remote worker platform. This solution, now operational and with general availability to both our Engage and Digital clients, equips over 40,000 remote CX team members with a full range of intelligent automation, analytics, and omnichannel collaboration technologies, among others. The platform meets the highest standards of enterprise-grade security requirements, including multifactor authentication, biometric security, and environmental monitoring. The remote worker platform can be seamlessly deployed from our Humanify Cloud to thousands of associates in a matter of hours. The impact of this new platform can be exponentially amplified when combined with our new digitally enabled approach to the remote hiring, training, managing, and coaching of our human and digital workforce. We are currently testing the full scope of the new ecosystem and initial client results indicate greater team productivity and customer satisfaction in the virtual environment than what we were achieving in our physical contact centers. We will be launching this new operating model in the coming months. If initial results are any indication, we expect this new approach will not only improve our client outcomes but will also fundamentally shape the future of customer engagement. Digital and Engage further enhance one another. By providing multiple go-to-market avenues, we are building our pipeline of client opportunities. Exemplified by the Volkswagen example shared earlier, we see greater demand than ever for the full complement of both Digital and Engage as one TTEC which delivers on the promise of true end-to-end CX-as-a-service, while preserving the highest quality experience at the lowest cost to serve. This is our preferred go-to-market approach. Our growing strategic partner ecosystem is also ripe with new opportunities to serve large enterprises right now. We have been purposeful in executing our partner roadmap, creating an ecosystem to enable a framework for enterprise-grade public and hybrid cloud CX application deployment. The extension of the channel partners continues to be a key component of our growth story into the future. Today marks another big step forward in the future proofing of these capabilities as we welcome Amazon as our newest key strategic partner. Through the acquisition of VoiceFoundry, this acquisition extends TTEC Digital's Humanify Cloud to now include Amazon Connect as well as access to the full suite of services offered by AWS. This acquisition also diversifies our Humanify Cloud solution with VoiceFoundry's AI and machine learning capabilities while also adding another industry-leading omnichannel platform alongside our long-standing and highly successful Cisco partnership. TTEC's global scale and large enterprise client footprint will result in compelling synergies. Top of mind for us is extending our reach into AWS's embedded client base. And through AWS's strategic partnership with Salesforce, an opportunity to tap into yet another massive channel of customer acquisition. We can now offer both AWS and Salesforce customers the opportunity to rapidly set up a fully integrated customer engagement ecosystem, with their enterprise-grade security and best-in-class suite of CX applications that scale to support millions of customers. Finally, we would also like to warmly welcome the entire VoiceFoundry team into the TTEC family. In order to protect the unique value we have built over a decade of delivering best-in-class client outcomes with Cisco, we will be maintaining separate and dedicated Cisco and Amazon sales teams, focused on driving client value through their respective partner ecosystem. Leveraging strategic partnerships like we have with Cisco, LivePerson, Pegasystems, and now Amazon is central to building our world-class approach to delivering CX-as-a-service enabled by our Humanify Cloud. This strengthens the TTEC ecosystem and opens up additional points of access into the $640 billion CX marketplace. There is a fundamental shift happening across the industry. Rather than relying directly on individual customer experience SaaS providers, clients are turning to TTEC as the CX orchestrator and journey partner of choice to build end-to-end customer-centric solutions into the cloud. We are just scratching the surface here. You can expect many more announcements to come about this in our go-to-market initiatives in future quarters. We are very excited about the path we are on. Our expertise in future-proofing our clients' CX ensures that they navigate an increasingly complex and remote workplace while keeping customer experience intuitive, personalized, and authentic. For these reasons, TTEC will be there to convert a long tail of healthy demand related to the adoption of cloud, omnichannel, hyperautomation, and digital technology. Our longer-term strategic initiatives have not changed. We are relentless in our pursuit to increase our market share by adding differentiated customer experience-as-a-service offerings, expanding our channel partnerships, and executing strategic and accretive acquisitions. This gives us several avenues to leverage profitable growth and a well-capitalized balance sheet to increase shareholder value. In closing, our strong execution and capitalizing on the wealth of new opportunities brought to the forefront by COVID-19 is a testament to the humanity and resiliency of our people. On behalf of our executive team and our Board of Directors, I want to personally thank each and every one of our over 50,000 team members across the globe, over 80% of whom continue to work from home, for your hard work, your unwavering positivity, and your relentless passion for client service during this historically trying time. We thank all of our shareholders for your continued support and we look forward to updating you on our progress in the months ahead. And Regina will now cover the key financial highlights to the quarter as well as share our stronger growth guidance for the full year. Thank you.

Thanks Ken. Good morning everyone. I hope you are well and remaining safe and healthy. I will start with some highlights on our record second quarter performance, go through our financial results, and then provide some context regarding our 2020 guidance. We had an exceptional quarter. Our strong financial performance is attributable to a handful of factors, including our deep hands-on experience and tech-rich assets, the strength of our client relationships enabling us to be a partner of choice in times of crisis and transformation, the speed at which we securely and efficiently shifted to our work from home platform, the rapid design and deployment of COVID-19 offerings, and the early actions we took to safeguard our profits, cash flow, and liquidity. Turning to our second quarter results. We closed $214 million of new business compared to $122 million in the prior year, a 75.4% increase. We had a healthy balance between business as usual and COVID-19 volumes. Engage grew 118%. Digital included a three-month extension on the large government contract. 67.5% of the booking dollars were in multi-capability deals. We had noteworthy bookings in our financial services, government, automotive, insurance, and hyper-growth sectors. We added 17 new logos. We signed nine deals, which included our messaging and automation platforms. Our robust pipeline for the remainder of the year is approximately $1.1 billion, providing four times coverage on our forecasted second half bookings. On a GAAP basis, we recorded a 15.4% year-over-year increase in revenue to $453.1 million, of which 9.3% was organic. GAAP operating income was $49 million or 10.8% of revenue compared to 5.8% in the prior year period. GAAP earnings per share was $0.67 in the second quarter, up from $0.25 in the prior year. The remainder of my comments are on a non-GAAP basis, which exclude restructuring and impairment expenses. A full reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP numbers is included in the tables attached to our press release. On a consolidated basis and excluding the impact of FX, revenue increased 16.3%. Operating income increased 96.2% to $49.8 million, an 11% margin compared to 6.5% in the year ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA increased 58.4% to $71 million or 15.7% of revenue compared to 11.4% in the prior year. Earnings per share increased 120.6% to $0.75 in the second quarter compared to $0.34 in the prior year. Our double-digit topline growth is attributable to essential and surge work tied to COVID-19, the acquisition of FCR and Serendebyte and increases in our high growth, high margin offerings. On an LTM basis at June 30, these high growth, high margin offerings, consisting of our cloud, systems integration, at-home, fraud detection, customer growth, and automotive and hypergrowth sector solutions collectively grew 44.2%. The increase in our profit and related margin expansion is a combination of topline scale, vertical mix, SG&A and depreciation efficiency, and an increasingly greater percentage of our revenue in the high growth, high margin offerings previously noted. At the end of the second quarter, total cash was $482.3 million, with $700 million borrowed under our $900 million revolving credit facility. Net debt was $231.7 million compared to $172.8 million in the prior year quarter and $195.2 million sequentially. The sequential increase in net debt is due to the buyout of the remaining 30% minority interest in Motif, our fraud detection and prevention business, in addition to paying our semiannual dividend, offset in part by positive cash flow. Cash flow from operations in the second quarter was $43.1 million versus $41.3 million in the prior year. DSO was 71 days in the second quarter of 2020 compared to 75 days in the prior year quarter and 66 days sequentially. Capital expenditures were $15.1 million or 3.3% of revenue in the second quarter compared to $15.2 million or 3.9% of revenue in the prior year. Our reported tax rate in the second quarter of 2020 was 24.8% compared to 35% in the prior year. The decrease is due to a combination of jurisdictional mix, the tax income impact of accounting related to acquisitions and dispositions, and changes in tax rates and credits in select areas. Our normalized tax rate was 24.2%, relatively unchanged from 24.7% in the prior year. Capacity utilization was 68% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to 72% in the prior year period and 73% sequentially. The reduction in capacity utilization is a result of new business signings, predominantly leveraging our work from home versus brick-and-mortar platform. We are in the process of reshaping our facilities footprint to align with our clients and prospects' changing views on geographic diversity and work from home versus brick-and-mortar mix. Turning to our second quarter 2020 segment results, which are presented on a non-GAAP basis. Digital revenue was $77.1 million in the second quarter 2020 versus $78.5 million in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 34.6% to $18.7 million or 24.2% of revenue versus 17.7% in the prior year. Operating income increased 49.2% to $14.5 million or 18.8% of revenue, an increase from 12.4% in the prior year. Excluding the non-core consulting practices now fully exited, planned declines in our product and managed service offerings as clients convert to cloud-based services, and removing the larger shorter-term government contract, Digital revenue grew 15.9%. Our cloud offering, net of the large government contract, grew 40.5%. We realized significant improvement in Digital's profit, an increase in our high margin cloud-based revenue mix from 35% to 56%, the elimination of subpar profit margins related to the exited non-core consulting practices and a more efficient SG&A are the key contributors to our 24.2% adjusted EBITDA margin. In our Engage segment, revenue was $370.9 million in the second quarter of 2020, an impressive increase of 19.7% over the prior year period. Organic revenue grew 12.4%. On a constant currency basis, Engage revenue grew 20.8%. Adjusted EBITDA increased 69.2% to $52.3 million or 13.9% of revenue versus 9.8% in the prior year. Operating income increased 125.3% to $35.3 million or 9.4% of revenue, an increase from 5% in the prior year. The accelerated improvement in our Engage profit and margin expansion is attributable to topline scale and an increasing percentage of revenue derived from Engage's high growth, high margin offerings. In the 12 months ended June 30, 2020, these offerings comprised 46.3% of Engage's revenue versus 36.7% in the prior year period. Our overperformance to date, strong 2020 revenue backlog, and growing pipeline have enabled us the visibility and confidence to reinstate and raise our guidance. Before I jump into the numbers, I would like to provide some context. While our pipeline provides ample coverage to our bookings estimates, financial uncertainty related to COVID-19 persists in many of the industries we serve. As a result, the timing of closing deals is more difficult to predict with reliability. Our second half bookings primarily impact 2021 topline volumes. Our full year 2020 revenue backlog is 99% of the midpoint of our guidance as of June 30, 2020. Our fourth quarter 2020 guidance is intentionally conservative pending additional insight on our seasonal volumes, finalization of the HEROES/HEALS Act, volumes related to the extension of large government contracts, and the general state of the economy. We intend to continue a rigorous management of our cost structure and working capital to optimize profitability and cash flow, maintaining a strong balance sheet to support continued organic and inorganic investments that will reliably lead to a sustainable high single-digit profitable revenue growth rate. The midpoint of our reinstated 2020 guidance, as laid out in our earnings press release, which includes the VoiceFoundry acquisition and excludes restructuring and impairment charges, is as follows: Revenue of $1.775 billion, a year-over-year increase of 8%. Adjusted for the items in our Digital business previously called out, revenue is estimated to grow 10%. Adjusted EBITDA of $253.3 million, a year-over-year increase of 21.1% and 14.3% of revenue compared to 12.7% in the prior year. Operating income of $161.9 million, a year-over-year increase of 25.3% and 9.1% of revenue compared to 7.9% in the prior year. Earnings per share of $2.40, a year-over-year increase of $0.51 or 27.1%. Other relevant guidance metrics include capital expenditures between 3.1% and 3.3% of revenue, down from 3.7% in the prior year, of which approximately 70% is growth oriented. A full year effective tax rate between 23% and 25% and a diluted share count between 46.9 million and 47.1 million shares. To obtain our third and fourth quarter 2020 mix of revenue, operating income, adjusted EBITDA, and EPS at the consolidated and segment levels, please reference our commentary in the Business Outlook section of the second quarter 2020 earnings press release. Before I close, we know that you are increasingly focused on what will come in 2021 and beyond. The evolution of the pandemic as well as when and to what extent the economy will improve, remain as open-ended questions. We will address 2021 in greater detail in future quarters once we have greater visibility to our third and fourth quarter bookings, including business as usual and COVID-19 volumes. In the meantime and as shared previously, it is important to note that our Digital business, excluding the large government contract which ends in 2020, the non-core consulting practices exited and the declines in our product and managed services for reasons previously discussed, will result in a revenue base as we exit 2020 of approximately $225 million. We continue to estimate this base of revenue growing in the range of 15% to 25% in 2021 and beyond. In closing, it's the strength of our client relationships, CX technology prowess, operational know-how, and resiliency of our global team that has mattered most in successfully navigating the Coronavirus pandemic. We see the benefits in the advancement of our digital agenda and the evolution of our work from home platform and the improvement of our financial performance and in the retention of our people. Most importantly, we see it in the new logos who engage us in a time of crisis and the way in which we championed surge growth volumes in existing client programs. In doing so, we have created lasting relationships, relationships with business leaders for whom we are top of mind. As a result, we are already seeing in-crisis wins, transitioning to out-of-crisis business opportunities. We are optimistic about our competitive position, our growing addressable CX market, and the increased speed at which clients are modernizing their customer experience platforms. I will now turn the call back to Paul.

Thanks, Regina. As we open the call, we ask that you limit your questions to two at a time. Operator, you may now open the line.

Speakers, for questions, we have George. George, your line is now open. You may proceed.

I assume I am the George you are referring to. So this is George Sutton. Congrats on the great results. The VoiceFoundry deal looks outstanding from our perspective. Given its attachment to the Amazon and Salesforce ecosystems, along with all the other partnerships that you mentioned, Cisco, LivePerson, Pega, you are obviously getting a lot of touches, given all of these relationships. Can you talk about how that's influencing that pipeline of opportunities?

Hi George. I will begin to answer that question and then I really would like Jonathan Lerner, our President of Digital, to chime in and this will be his first time on our conference calls. What I would just simply tell you is the following. If you look at the OEM today and the smaller ones like Five9, et cetera, they not only have a direct sales force, but they also have an agent sales force. And although their model is very robust and doing extremely well, we have a very different approach. Our approach is a partner approach. And it's an approach of basically becoming the largest and most valuable and important partner of theirs, where we partner with them and have access to their pipeline of many of their strategic deals. This is how we have gone to market with Cisco. It's been very successful. And it's how we are going to market with Pega. It's been successful. It's how we are going to market with LivePerson and it's how we will continue to go to market with Amazon and others. So what I would just simply say to you is that these organizations have dramatically larger sales forces than we have. And therefore, they are out there doing the hard rock mining, while our direct sales force is doing hard rock mining. And we are both coming up with deals. And because of our expertise in CX, we think we have a unique ability to help them close these deals because we bring so much more to the table than just the actual capabilities of integrating this all together. So what I would say to you is that there's a myriad of touch points that are added, a myriad of new channels that are added to bring forth a lot more additional opportunities. And I think you will see over time, as we continue to build out our partner ecosystem that it will give us the best opportunities to have access to the largest deals in the marketplace since that's the part of the market that we are focused on. Jonathan, you want to take it from there?

Sure. Thank you Ken. Good morning George. VoiceFoundry is consistently the go-to partner for complex and high-touch Amazon Connect engagement. I am sure you have seen that. They have also been highly engaged as a partner with AWS in planning the aligned Salesforce Service Cloud Voice go-to-market effort. So they are right in the thick of educating, aligning, and enabling this corral of 3,000 sellers on the AWS side and complement that with now tremendous interest and access to the Salesforce sales team. It pumps up the pipeline tremendously, George. And there are tremendous synergies around how this diversifies our Humanify Cloud solution offering with the industry-leading omnichannel platform alongside, as Ken mentioned, our long-standing and highly successful Cisco partnership. What it also does, as Ken mentioned, is it addresses the reality that consumers are looking for CX-as-a-Service end-to-end system. So we have gone from point solutions to building systems with CX as the sustainable differentiated strategy. And this combination, not only of the VoiceFoundry acquisition in the AWS ecosystem, but layer on Pega and the trend towards automating and augmenting both agents and customers, we see tremendous potential to accelerate and scale and reach a broader audience of customers and satisfy consumers and citizens as a result, George.

Perfect. A quick one for Regina. Just definitionally, when you talk about 4x coverage with your pipeline coverage, can you just give us a sense of what that represents in your mind?

Yes. I mean as I said, we have a total pipeline for Q3 and Q4 of over $1 billion. And if you kind of look towards our view of being able to predictably do between $100 million and $150 million of bookings a quarter, when you look at the second half, right, we have done $300 million in the first. And just again, making sure that we keep the context of the Coronavirus pandemic in the room, that creates some different uncertainty than previously. We believe that that pipeline, based on conversion rate should, outside of potential delays because of the pandemic, give us really good coverage. And what I mean by that is that pipeline is growing. It is equally strong in Digital as in Engage. Depending on the quarter, Digital will be anywhere from 35% to 40% of that. Within that, the amount of pipeline even beyond Q3, Q4 is growing and very strong against Webex CCE. So hopefully, that's a little bit more context than whether that conversion happens, in Q3, Q4, or Q1, Q2, it is there and it is real and there are tailwinds like the acceleration of digitization, where the logos that we work with, both existing and prospects really have seen what's possible and they seem what's possible because in that surge of work it is not humanly possible to get the number of humans in place in time to cover all these engagements. And so we saw a pretty rapid movement from voice to more digitized options like messaging.

Perfect. Ken, I just wanted to note the irony of talking about the most fast and forward of technologies, and you get impacted by an old line printer.

Well, it's 100% my fault. I should have done some quality assurance last night. It was late and I just assumed that the printer spit it out and it missed page four. So I apologize to everybody.

Very good. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Our next question is coming from the line of James. Your line is now open.

Hi. Good morning. You guys did a fantastic job, obviously, responding in a very dynamic environment and taking advantage of the opportunities, but probably at least as importantly, helping your customers get to what they need to do for theirs. I wanted to ask, as you are looking at kind of that pacing of new business and the like, obviously, some big response in the June quarter, how are you or what are you being told in terms of urgency and that kind of thing from your customers as the pipeline is developing? And are there things that you need to do from a hiring perspective or other resources to be able to match what the pipeline is asking of you, at least what it could be for the time being?

Thanks for your question. That's not the easiest question in the world to answer. So you did not throw me a softball, only because it's all over the board. We have clients that are trying to stabilize their own business and are rapidly shifting from a person-to-person business to a virtualized business and we are there to help them and ramping them up and getting them so that they can operate in this new modality. We have clients that have built their business digitally from day one, and their business is growing by leaps and bounds, and they are capitalizing off of the fact that they were always virtual. So you can think of whether it be streaming companies, gaming companies, in-home exercise companies, et cetera, those end mill companies, all those companies are growing very rapidly right now and seizing the moment and capitalizing off of it. And then you have more institutional-based companies who are trying to figure out what's around the corner and are frankly having difficulty in expressing what their long-term future volumes are going to be. That said, those companies, in many cases, are also seeing surge volumes because of whether it's unemployment issues or insurance issues, et cetera. So I would love to give you a pat answer. What I would just simply tell you is that we are seeing a mixture of opportunities. We are seeing what I would call pandemic opportunities. We are seeing companies repositioning themselves opportunities and we are seeing people thinking about post-pandemic opportunities. I mean when you just think about every aspect of society has been impacted, think of what's going on with universities and how they are going to bring people back to schools and we are getting involved with that. Or how they are going to trace and do contact tracing when kids get sick and quarantine them, to insurance companies that are being overwhelmed by coverage questions of COVID. I could go on and on and on and on. But what I would just simply say is that we are seeing all different forms of demand. And as it relates to our ability to hire, we are definitely in a hiring mode right now and we believe we will be in that mode for quite some time, just based on the pipeline that we have and the opportunities that we have in front of us. The other thing I would just say is, especially on the Digital side. The one thing that this pandemic has done is, as we all know, I don't want to sound like a cliché here, but it has definitely compressed the time for companies to digitize. It has definitely compressed the time for them to figure out how to operate virtually. And so that in itself is creating a whole new opportunity set. It also is, I would say, getting a lot of companies to realize that if they were not omnichannel, they have no choice but to be omnichannel now. They can't just simply offer a retail in-person solution nor can they only offer a voice-only solution. They have to offer all channels, SMS texting, chat, co-browsing, live video, et cetera. And this is what we have been experts at for many, many, many years. And so our ability to help these companies very quickly move to these new channels and serve these new modalities is clearly benefiting us as well right now. So I am sorry I am not giving you a quick, concise answer just because it's varied out there.

But let me just back it up a little bit with some quantification. So I think when all is said and done or something like maybe what we would have said at first, 25% to 30% of our bookings for the year and COVID-19-related, whether that's surge for the industries that have spiked in volumes or it's for essential work. The reality of it is, we believe that at least 60% of that definitely moves into next year. And a piece of that just becomes ongoing for the reasons I can't just talk about. But more importantly, to your question, at this point, when we look at, right, our highly probable pipeline for the second half, in Digital, 97% of that is non-COVID-19, right. It's business as usual. And it's about 82% in Engage. And so we see a dramatic change from the first half into the second half, which I think is definitely a sign from our clients, that they are starting to pick up their pencils on what I would say more generic transformation, improvement initiatives in and around CX.

Great. Well, thanks for the color there, Ken and Regina. Regina, quick follow-up questions for you. First, it looked like DSOs ticked up a little bit in the quarter. Is that just the linearity in the quarter and business being reflected on DSO?

No. It's a function of a 20% increase in Engage. As you know, as companies who have high growth, they also have increased working capital needs. And so it's really purely when I analyze time to bill, when I analyze, right, the kind of days sales outstanding or average days sales outstanding, it's really a function of the tick-up in our revenue. And it also affected our cash flow, which you would have thought was higher given the growth rate, but in reality, you will see it spike up in the second half. It's just really a timing.

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. I appreciate that. And then lastly, how is attrition trending? And is that benefiting your margins at all? And should we expect some variance on that as the world normalizes?

Yes. I mean our attrition is definitely up. Depending on the month, you are talking about seven to 10 percentage points of improvement. Our absenteeism is very low. Two metrics that, as you know, when they spike, can eat at your margins. I would say that if everything was equal and we come out of COVID-19 and unemployment goes back to a reasonable level, of course, that will change. But we are not waiting for that. We have multiple stokes in the fire working on that. And then I would say we clearly are seeing a very different mix, geographic mix and importantly, a brick-and-mortar versus at-home mix and we do not believe that we will be back to probably anything less than 50% on the work at home. Work at home has a lot of financial advantages. The margins are higher for a variety of reasons. The TA is more efficient. You can go anywhere in the world, if you will. Training is more efficient because you have less churn. So back to your point, people who work at home, we see less turnover in general outside the pandemic. And then obviously, you have the facilities costs, the real estate costs and that includes not only the operating costs, but importantly, that capital deployment that comes back in depreciation and interest costs. So we feel that we are doing the things to keep that improvement through a variety of channels.

That's great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. For our next question, we have Mike Latimore of Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Yes. Congratulations, impressive across the board there. In terms of VoiceFoundry, can you give a little more color on just how much activity they have had with Amazon Connect, maybe the number of customers or seats that they deployed and then like typical deal sizes you are looking at there?

Yes, I will.

No, go ahead. I was just going to say, hi Mike, some of that we can answer, some of that I think we feel is proprietary. So I will let Regina and Jonathan click in on that.

Yes. I was actually just going to pivot to Jonathan to do a high level on that. Sorry, Ken.

Thank you guys. So complementary to what we do, we see their ASP, their average selling price, is very similar to ours. They traditionally, about 90% of their implementations involve integrations to, for instance, CRM and Salesforce. So from a fit, they are very similar. They are the leading independent partner to Amazon Connect. And as I have said in my earlier question's response, they are looked to as the roll-up-the-sleeves partner and they provide that white-glove support much like we do and have built a significant brand inside of the Amazon ecosystem to deliver on-time and on-budget deployments of Connect and beyond into the full suite of AWS. So it's an excellent accretive acquisition. It's a great complement to what we do and what our customer-driven inorganic activity has been and will be in the future. And it really complements what the market is demanding, right. And that's not only choice, but cloud-first choice.

Great. And I noticed Salesforce Service Cloud now has Amazon as basically the preferred out-of-the-box contact center. I guess I think it just came out last month. Is that something that you think sort of accelerates opportunities there?

100%. We have been working on this deal for almost a year. And this is something that we have been very well aware of and very focused on. And we think that, again, for the large enterprise-class customers, we think that this will open up a whole new pipeline. Again, we already have people from VoiceFoundry that are literally training large portions of the sales force, training salespeople. And so we do absolutely believe that this will be a good opportunity for adding to our pipeline.

Yes. They do bring a rich set of clients with, let's say, 15 to 20, what I would say extra-large enterprise clients, in particular in insurance, financial services, e-commerce, and a couple of others. So we do see a huge opportunity through their relationships to cross-sell into their client base. And then importantly, this is a very important asset for us to provide optionality to our Engage-embedded base as well as our Digital-embedded base.

I am piling on here, guys, but not to mention their presence in EMEA and ASEAN and their strength globally. So this is, again, extending our reach not only in the Americas, their reputation for that roll-up-the-sleeves, white-glove delivery extends into EMEA, ASEAN, especially in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks.

Thanks very much.

And then on the Engage business, how much of the sort of incremental demand you are seeing comes from companies with sort of internal call centers? Everybody has to go home, these companies are just not technologically savvy enough to handle kind of remote agents and so they may be now outsourcing more to you guys. I mean how much of that dynamic is sort of occurring right now?

Well, first of all, you should know that on the Digital side, we are helping those clients with their at-home solutions. So clients of ours who are struggling, the first thing we are saying to them is, if you like we can put you on a platform and we will help you do this yourself. So we think that that is an important aspect of huge opportunities as well as future opportunities. As far as how much of it is clients with captives, I think there's just, when you look at the overall outsourcing marketplace, not according to TTEC, but according to the third-party analysts, they claim that only 25% to 30% of the marketplace is actually outsourced. Even if you think, that number to me feels a little on the low side. I think it's maybe more like 35%. But regardless, there is a tremendous amount of work that is yet to be outsourced. And I think that this, in itself, has been a huge wake-up call because so many of these clients have really, they were caught flat-footed. And even though they had all kinds of disaster preparedness plans, they weren't prepared for this. And so I think you are going to see over time that the mixture of internal versus external is going to change, and I believe you are going to see it increase pretty significantly, that more and more clients are going to realize this isn't their core competency. They don't have all the agility and they don't have the fault tolerance capabilities that we have built in globally to our systems and technology. And so I think you are going to see just overall, not only in this business, some of which is temporary shifts, I think that more and more are rethinking how much of this business they want to permanently place in an outsourced situation. And we are definitely having those conversations as we speak right now with many clients about their interest in increasing the amount of business and decreasing the amount of captive. Let alone, we are more cost-effective. And I don't want to sound like I am bragging. But in most cases, we significantly outperform our clients' captives. And so at some point, I think many of our clients are going to realize that if we are operating at a lower overall cost to serve, we are delivering a higher quality, it makes more sense for them to continue to distribute more business to us as a partner as well as others.

Yes. Great. And just last one. Ken, did you say that the bookings strength has continued in July? Is that what you said?

Yes. Our booking strength across both bookings and pipeline continues. I apologize.

Whatever your timing was, I thought you said something about July.

Yes. We had a comment in Ken's script that indicated strength in July. And it was a strong month.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

We have ways to go, but a strong month.

Thank you.

Thank you. For our next question, we have Bhavan Suri of William Blair. You may begin.

Hi everyone. And let me echo my congrats. It was a great quarter. Given who's on the phone, I would love to just touch on the Digital segment for a second. Better margin, more sustainable revenue, and then sort of when you think about sort of it growing 15% to 25% and the Cloud business growing really fast, I guess the question I have is that you have got essentially lower sales versus competitors and you are relying on partnerships, why not sort of say, okay, we might invest a little more in sales, kind of own the customer relationship as opposed to partners owning them and drive growth that way? Just trying to understand the philosophy that you guys have on that side given sort of the traction we are seeing?

Yes. Let me just kind of add a data endpoint and then maybe hand it to Ken or Jonathan. But I think you will see if you kind of, the SG&A second half to first half is up about $2 million. And that's specifically in Digital. So to your point, we are very much stepping up the investment in the go-to-market. Ken or Jonathan?

So yes, we are stepping up the investment in go-to-market. One of the things that is probably we do to a fault is we are a conservative company. So unlike some of the other tech companies that, it's growth at any cost, we appreciate the fact that we are a public company and that we need to deliver consistently on the promise of being a profitable company, et cetera. And we don't have the luxury of pivoting, like other tech companies, where you are expecting us to basically lose money or breakeven just so that we can put up very high growth numbers. What we are doing is kind of riding that tightrope, so to speak, of balancing the investment and the return on investment and then also being able to deliver the profitability, the EPS, the cash flow, et cetera. What I would say to you is that, first, understand that Jonathan has a direct sales force and he also gets to capitalize off of the TTEC Engage sales force as well that's in the market every single day. And as it relates to partners, yes, in some cases they are bringing us business and in some cases there is margin that they are benefiting off of, et cetera. But what I would say to you is that at the end of the day, we still think that it helps us reduce our overall SG&A. And I am actually going to take it a step further and tell you that not only do we want to be the prime and we want to also work with prime, but we also want to be the subpartner. And what the marketplace doesn't really know and I can't really say who they all are, but let me just say this to you, some of the largest systems integrators in the world and you could imagine who they might be, use us as their subpartner to implement CX because we are viewed as the experts in doing so. So they might win a massive contract that includes 100,000 unified communications seats and 30,000 or 20,000 omnichannel seats and what they will do is they will say, look, every time we try to implement the contact center, the technology is way too complex, therefore we have had failures in the past. You take command and control of that aspect of the business and we will do the UC portion. And so whether it's major telcos across the country that do that with us today or major systems integrators, we are happy to be there for them and we still think we can drive a very acceptable profit margin. But that said, I will just close by saying that we are encouraging Jonathan to prudently invest in sales and marketing and to prudently add more salespeople. And I think over time, you are going to see a continued increase in investment on the SG&A side of the Digital side of the business. Jonathan, you want to add anything? Sorry for waxing on so long.

I will echo. Predictable and profitable revenue sales growth is what our commitment is to the shareholders and to you, Ken and Regina, in the Digital business. But additionally, if you peel back to our recent acquisition of VoiceFoundry, for instance, we are expanding our reach both directly and indirectly, right. And I will also comment that in Q2, we also signed up a global SI as a means to distribute and work together in addressing citizens' requirements for contact tracking and tracing. So our reach, as we have been given the rope, is to both manage the business profitably, but look for the opportunities you described, right and do so by expanding our reach through partnerships, through direct adds to our sales force and through our aggressive growth with VoiceFoundry, expanding another dozen people to represent our brands, both indirectly and directly. So I think we are very much accomplishing that and taking advantage of scaling the volume and the hot market in CX right now.

Got you. That's very helpful. Just one quick one and I will actually going to end here and maybe for Regina here. How are you guys monetizing customer rep calls vis-à-vis digital interactions? If you look at that math, it just moved to 35% digital interaction. I guess, how the monetization works? And is that sort of why gross margin is kind of flat? Just trying to understand those two components. Thank you.

Yes. I wouldn't say that the improvement in margin we get by virtue of putting our revenue at risk on an outcome basis is the reason why Digital revenues. We are more and more pricing to outcomes, making commitments on the deflection rates as well as conversion rates. So much of our messaging and automation or in general, engagements now are including that. But what you are seeing in this quarter doesn't have enough of that to be the cause to profit. That said, at a 24.2% EBITDA, probably sooner than we had anticipated, we believe that we have got, again, multiple stokes in the fire on the things that we are going to do. Not necessarily cost-cutting or restructuring our costs, but importantly extracting the value that we are bringing to our clients in terms of our topline, albeit some of it may be fixed fees and then some of it tied to the outcomes that we drive for our clients.

Hi. Yes, it's actually Jared Levine on for Bryan. Congrats on the strong results. In terms of bookings, can you kind of help us parse the mix between Digital and Engage within bookings? And then were there any notable large deals within the bookings this quarter?

Yes. From a quarter point of view, of our $214 million, just under $45 million of that is Digital and the balance is Engage. It's a typical mix. And in both of these businesses, yes, we had some very significant bookings. Jonathan, I don't know if you want to cover a couple of noteworthy bookings on the Digital side.

Sure. Well, let me begin, Jared, with just the strength of our Humanify platform solutions for the public sector, mainly in the federal space. We have got really the Cisco ecosystem market's only FedRAMP and IL4 pending certified solution on the market today. So we had great growth in strength, expanding in the public sector in all three of federal, state and DoD. So that was the highlight. We also, as Regina commented, we expanded our global footprint with a top insurance company in the quarter. And what I would say is that that success continues into the third quarter as well, contributing to not only a nice start but a linear start to month one. And we see that continuing around our unique solutions and how we have actually orchestrated a lot of those solutions for an increasing mix of the global brands that rely on us to power better experiences at lower overall total cost of ownership.

Yes. I mean I think the other thing about bookings is, we had a new logo in auto, a big deal there. We had two new insurance companies come into the fold. We had three new public sectors now getting into state, five new hypergrowth. We did, as Jonathan said, we closed 10 government deals in the quarter. And very interesting, if you look at auto, right, auto, year-to-date we have grown our order bookings 4.2% and we have grown our retail 2.9%. So even the verticals where we felt we were maybe going to be negative this year are positive. And as I said in my script, I think one of the things that we are most proud of is the nine deals that we did in Digital relative to automation solutions. And just the percentage of our bookings, 67.5% of our bookings had multi-segment capabilities in them. So I would say those are some of the most noteworthy things from a bookings point of view in addition to the volume.

Thank you for your questions. And that's all the time we have today. I will turn the call over to Paul Miller.

Yes. That concludes our call today. Thanks, everyone, for joining.

Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes TTEC's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. You may disconnect at this time.