Coveo Solutions Inc

TSX:CVO

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q4

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Coveo fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 financial results conference call. Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Nick Goode, Chief Corporate Development Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

[Nicholas Goode, executive]

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Louis Tetu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Coveo; and Jean Lavigueur, Chief Financial Officer.

Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this conference call are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, growth and expected performance, including our outlook for the first quarter and fiscal year 2023. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. While we believe any forward-looking statements we make are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Further information on these and other factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in filings we make with the Canadian Securities regulatory authority, including the section titled Risk Factors in the company's most recently filed annual information form, which is available under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Additionally, some of the financial measures discussed on this call are either non-IFRS measures or operating metrics used in our industry, a discussion on why we use non-IFRS financial measures and operating metrics and where applicable, a reconciliation schedule showing IFRS versus non-IFRS results are currently available in our press release and our MD&A dated as of today, which may both be found on our Investor Relations website at ir.caveo.com or our SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to any financial figures are in U.S. dollars.

Now I'll turn the call over to Louis to begin.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Thank you, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. We had a strong end to our fiscal year with continued traction in the market, showcasing healthy demand for Coveo's platform. Our ability to maximize business outcomes for our customers and enable them to deliver exceptional experience is resonating in the market and driving growth in each of our lines of business.

For the fourth quarter ended March 31, we delivered year-over-year SaaS subscription revenue growth of 52% and total revenue growth of 46%. Gross bookings came in ahead of plan, and we saw strong performance across each of our lines of business, with commerce bookings, in particular, up more than 125% year-over-year, including the contribution of Qubit, which we acquired in October 2021. Transactions with new customers represented approximately 60% of our total bookings. And our net expansion rate as of March 31, 2022, remains strong at 110%, demonstrating continued success in cross-sells and upsells.

I'm also pleased to report that we had a strong Adobe bookings quarter and also our largest SAP bookings quarter on record and are seeing meaningful traction and opportunity within these ecosystems. Lastly, our results came in ahead of our adjusted operating loss guidance for the fourth quarter, and we continue to implement changes to improve our operational efficiency, which we believe, when combined with our exceptional unit economics will accelerate our path to future profitability.

Our mission is to accelerate the application of AI platforms and enterprises to deliver great customer experiences profitably. For more than a decade, Coveo has been engaged in optimizing digital experiences with AI with many of the world's leading brands, creating an industry-leading platform. We believe that there will be an AI tsunami in the next decade that will change the world, possibly more than the Internet did. And we want to see Coveo as a leader in that wave.

Companies in the current business environment are laser-focused on maximizing value and business outcomes. They need to leverage strategic tools to help them achieve their goals while providing their customers with the best experience possible and an environment for their employees to thrive. Personalization is at the epicenter of the experience conversation and individuals expect to be served in a way that is unique and prescriptive to them.

As you've heard me say before, if you want to deliver a million different experiences to a million individuals, you need AI. And for many companies, that means you need Coveo. Coveo's platform leverages a business' rich data and provides the intelligence layer that injects personalization into any digital experience that a company offers across commerce, websites, customer service and their workplaces.

At its core, Coveo delivers a personalized search solution that works better, achieving results that cater to the individual, not just the content. In its mature form, it delivers a personalized experience that goes beyond search as Coveo's platform anticipates the user's need and produces the personalized information or product results that are most likely to lead to optimal outcome for both the individual and the business.

Our platform has helped many customers achieve their goals and realize a compelling ROI across each of our lines of business. In commerce, delivering personalized and prescriptive shopper experiences helps businesses convert customers while also maximizing margins and lifetime customer value. For customer service, the experience Coveo delivers where individuals can help themselves and gain access to personalized content to efficiently solve issues not only increases their satisfaction, but the business' Net Promoter Score.

And if they do need to contact a customer support agent, they get the answer they're looking for faster. All of this is achieved while maximizing cost reduction. For website, Coveo delivers improvements in site search to help companies ensure that their visitors always have optimal experiences required to engage more. And in workplaces, we use the same AI technology to make intranet intelligence and to provide relevant and personalized results, helping employees become more proficient and succeed.

The common thread required for success in these areas of business is the use of AI, which Coveo's sophisticated platform can implement with ease and drive near instance positive business outcomes and ROI. We continue to believe that we are in the early stages of a large and underserved addressable market for which we are well positioned to accelerate the application of AI platforms in enterprises to help them deliver great profitable customer experiences.

Before I highlight some exciting customers' additions in the quarter, I would like to take a moment to revisit the 3 compounding growth vectors that Coveo is employing to capture this market opportunity. The first remains growth within our existing customers. When Coveo acquires a new customer with a single use case, they become an opportunity for near-term expansion. And we've had great success with satisfied customers expanding use cases into additional areas of their businesses.

Second, we will continue to expand our footprint in the markets we currently serve to acquire new customers through both our established channels and other initiatives such as our product-led growth strategy. And third, we plan to expand into new markets and opportunities by bringing on new partners, developing new verticals and expanding geographically or via M&A.

In the quarter, we added a number of exciting new customers, including Roche, UiPath, Infinera and completed expand transactions with customers such as Coupa and Xilinx. Of note, we are beginning to see strong traction with cross-selling our broader search and recommendation solution into legacy Qubit customers. I would also like to share how some of our customers are using Coveo's platform to deliver relevant digital experiences at scale.

One customer I'd like to highlight is a large multinational beauty retailer in the U.K. that has been a commerce customer since 2015. We have since expanded the partnership across multiple continents and brands, delivering highly personalized experiences, AI recommendations and social proofing to their end users. Their strategic objective is to increase revenue, replicate in-store experiences online and build loyalty and trust with their customers, make Coveo the best partner to spearhead all of their website personalization efforts.

They're looking at future integration opportunities to enable multichannel personalization and also evaluating using Coveo internally for their employees. We also work with a large global financial and human capital management software company to enhance both their customer and employee experiences. They adopted our service, community and workplace use cases over the last 2 years and have deployed many of our different machine learning models to streamline support costs and increase content consumption across their community and 10,000 employees.

Their 2022 objectives to expand with Coveo are focused around creating a truly unified search experience for both customers and employees. Coveo has partnered with one of the largest publicly traded food and beverage companies in the world. This customer went live with Coveo as a workplace solution in February to power their custom-built workplace sites. As our largest ever workplace implementation, we are currently live across several of their primary European and South American territories and will continue to rollout through October.

In our initial go-live meeting, they acknowledge that their previous workplace offering was overly simplistic, contributing to employee dissatisfaction because of difficulties in finding content. Coveo has already been warmly received, helping employees search through vast amounts of internal content and find relevant information. And the numbers show the instant impact of Coveo with a surge click-through rate that has increased every week for the last 10 weeks and 50% in total and queries using our query suggestion capability having an 87% higher click-through rate. This customer is currently planning further optimization, leveraging Coveo's solution.

Finally, Coveo began working with a U.S. publicly traded public sector software provider in 2016 to deliver a relevant search experience to their vast network of support agents and enhanced self-service for their customers. Coveo's initial impact led to an expansion into this company's marketing resources in 2019, and we're continuing to elevate their service suite by implementing Case Assist, Smart Snippets and IPX in 2022. This customer has become an excellent advocate for Coveo over the years and looks to align with Coveo best practices as they continue to grow and serve the public sector to create smarter, safer and stronger communities.

Research and development remains a focus of our strategic investment strategy. And during the fourth quarter, we launched a number of exciting new innovations. The first is our intent-aware reranking that personalizes search behavior on a website even for the first-time shoppers or customers who haven't yet logged in. Coveo's machine learning algorithms capture intent after just a few clicks, resulting in product rankings that are truly relevant and adapt to each shopper's interaction.

As shopping becomes an increasingly digital experience, the more individuals want online interactions to field personal, intent-driven, session-based personalization not only allows customers to create relevant and personalized shopping experiences with minimal data, but also by definition, bypasses personal-based marketing by treating every visitor as an individual. We've started rolling out this feature to early customers and will continue the rollout over the coming months.

We also launched our Coveo for Slack app integration, which enables Slack users to find relevant content from any external source directly in Slack. With a simple slash command from any channel, employees can easily find the content they need while staying in the flow of work. The combination of our Slack app and Slack Connector allows support agents to fully leverage the power of Slack upon swarming a case. Agents can use the app to quickly search for external content to solve the case of that.

Additionally, swarm channels are automatically indexed as a source of content to help easily solve recurring issues. We've seen a great deal of excitement and engagement with these new features and are looking forward to the future of Coveo for Slack. As I mentioned earlier in my remarks, we had a fantastic quarter with some of our largest partners. Our strategic relationships with partners are an important part of our growth journey, and we continue to make focused investments to grow these partnerships. These investments help to drive our strongest bookings quarter on record with SAP and another strong bookings quarter with Adobe.

Finally, just as Coveo is committed to making a difference for our customers, we're also committed to making a difference in the world at large. Each year, Coveo conducts a major campaign to raise money for United Way Centraide Canada, which redistributes the funds to various nonprofit organizations in need. In calendar year 2021, we broke our own record again with a donation of CAD 385,000. We will also be making the first distribution from our 1% equity pledged to donate to a variety of charities in Canada and the U.S. at the end of June.

In closing, I am pleased to share these results with you today. finishing the fiscal year on our strong note as Coveo continues to bring the power of AI to the market, allowing businesses to participate and compete in the digital experience economy. We look forward to helping our customers, many of the world's leading brands, to create industry-leading platforms that optimize business outcomes and experiences for their customers and employees.

I will now hand the call over to Jean to discuss our financial results in more detail. Jean?

[Jean Lavigueur, executive]

Thank you, Louis, and good evening, everyone. As Louis highlighted, we ended the year on a high note, delivering strong growth across each of our lines of business. We had another solid bookings quarter, powered by our commerce side of business for which bookings grew more than 125% year-over-year and more and 75% year-over-year, excluding the contribution of Qubit.

It was a strong Adobe bookings quarter and our largest quarter for SAP bookings in our history. While EMEA bookings were not quite as strong as the prior quarter, they doubled year-over-year for the fiscal year 2022. We also maintained a strong year-over-year organic SaaS subscription revenue growth rate of greater than 30% year-over-year.

Turning to our results. SaaS subscription revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022 was $23.1 million, up 52% year-over-year. Total revenue came in at $25.5 million, growing 46% on a year-over-year basis. Self-managed licenses and maintenance revenue was $0.3 million and professional services came in at $2.1 million. For fiscal year 2022, SaaS subscription revenue was $77.9 million, up 41% year-over-year. Total revenue was $86.5 million, growing 33% on a year-over-year basis. Self-managed licenses and maintenance revenue was $2.4 million and professional services came in at $6.3 million.

Please note that all figures include the contribution from our acquisition of Qubit, which was completed on October 14, 2021. Current SaaS subscription RPO for the fourth quarter came in at $80.6 million, growing 52% year-over-year with the growth driven by our strong bookings performance and the contribution of Qubit. We ended our fiscal year 2022 with over 600 customers and increase from over 475 customers as of Q2 of fiscal year 2022. Our net expansion rate for the fourth quarter of 2022 was 110% as we continue to focus on our key growth initiative of retaining and expanding our relationships with customers.

Turning to our operating results. Our fourth quarter gross profit percentage came in at 73% compared to 76% for the same period last year. Adjusted gross profit percentage, which normalizes for the effects of share-based payment and related expenses and acquisition-related compensation was 76% for the fourth quarter, in line with the same period last year.

Our product gross profit percentage was 79% in the quarter, a slight decrease compared to the prior year and our adjusted product gross profit percentage was 81% for the quarter, a 1% increase compared to the year ago period. Our professional services gross profit percentage was 7% for the quarter compared to 17% for the same period last year. While our adjusted professional services gross profit percentage was 21%, a 1% decrease compared to the prior period. This slight decrease was driven by the lower professional services margins of Qubit, which we are continuing to improve as we work through the integration process.

Our fiscal year 2022 gross profit percentage came in at 75%, which was in line with fiscal year 2021, while our adjusted gross profit percentage for fiscal year 2022 increased by 2% year-over-year to 77%. Our product gross profit percentage was 80% in fiscal year 2022 compared to 79% for the fiscal year 2021. Adjusted product gross profit percentage was 81%, a 2% increase compared to fiscal year 2021 as we continually work to improve our hosting costs.

Our professional services gross profit percentage was 14% for the year compared to 21% in fiscal year 2021. While our adjusted professional services gross profit percentage was 24% for fiscal year 2022, a 1% increase compared to fiscal year 2021. Operating loss for the quarter was $19.4 million, and adjusted operating loss for the quarter was $8.6 million. Operating loss for fiscal year 2022 was $57.3 million and adjusted operating loss for the fiscal year was $28.1 million.

Net loss came in at $19.4 million or $0.19 per share compared to a loss of $384.9 million or $20.66 per share in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021. The weighted average share count used in calculating the fourth quarter loss per share was 103.6 million shares versus $18.6 million in Q4 of last year. For fiscal year 2022, net income came in at $418.3 million or $8.23 per share compared to a loss of $600 million or $32.64 per share in fiscal year 2021. The weighted average share count used in calculating the fiscal year 2022 loss per share was 50.8 million shares versus $18.4 million in 2021.

Looking at our balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $223.1 million in cash and cash equivalents. Cash flow from operations was negative $11.9 million in the quarter, partially driven by delays in the receipt of tax credits that have since been collected. For fiscal year 2022, cash flow from operations was negative $35.4 million. While we are continuing to strategically invest in our business and grow, we are focusing on improving our operational efficiency and accelerating our path to profitability.

We plan to continue to make disciplined investments in exciting areas of our business that will drive innovation and long-term revenue growth while also working towards profitability. Because of our attractive unit economics, we are optimistic that we will achieve operating leverage in the coming quarters while continuing to attack the significant market opportunity ahead of us.

Finishing with guidance. For the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, we expect SaaS subscription revenue to be between $23.1 million and $23.6 million representing growth of 42% to 45% year-over-year. Total revenue in the range of $25.1 million to $25.6 million, representing growth of 38% to 40% year-over-year. Adjusted operating loss in the range of $8 million and $9 million and between 103.7 million and 104.2 million weighted average shares outstanding.

For fiscal year 2023, we expect SaaS subscription revenue to be between $101 million and $103 million, representing growth of 30% to 32% year-over-year. Total revenue in the range of $109 million to $111 million, representing growth of 26% to 28% year-over-year, adjusted operating loss in the range of negative $32 million and $34 million and between 104 million and 105 million weighted average shares outstanding.

In conclusion, we are pleased with our results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022, which are reflective of our team's execution in capturing the large market opportunity to bring personalized digital experiences to businesses and drive successful outcomes. We are well positioned to drive long-term growth and momentum in our business as well as profitability.

And with that, operator, you may now open the line for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We will go first to Thanos Moschopoulos of BMO Capital Markets.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, analyst]

Louis, I'll ask the macro question. I mean, obviously you provided a strong guidance and some good momentum. But just given everything going on, are you seeing any change in the sales cycles, any change in behavior in any other geographies, in any other verticals from your perspective and sort of business as usual from time being?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

I'm sorry, Thanos. I was on mute. Hello, Thanos. This is Louis. So great question. No, we're not seeing any changes. The business continues to operate per the plan, and we continue to see strong demand. And we're not seeing any slowing down to your specific question associated with the sales cycles or the demand in our lines of business, which is good news for us.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, analyst]

I think I was going to have one question, but maybe I'll ask a follow-up if permitted, being the one question, which is just geographically, I mean, obviously, international EMEA has been an area that's been ramping. Any comment in terms of how that's been progressing over the past quarter as you build out your international business and leverage Qubit, you did cross-selling?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Well, we remain, obviously, very focused on a little heavier -- much heavier, I would say, in North America, but we're definitely growing in Europe. So we've experienced great growth, and we continue to build the team. Obviously, with the Qubit acquisition, we now have about 100 people on the ground over in Europe and a much broader European presence. If you look at EMEA, we're about 2x where we were last year. And so we're very happy with the growth over there. And we continue to invest in that region. In fact, we just appointed a Managing Director and are continuing to invest in the region. So we're very happy with the growth and we're seeing more growth there as well.

[Operator]

And we'll go next to Paul Treiber of RBC Capital Markets.

[Paul Treiber, analyst]

Louis, obviously, commerce has been a strong growth driver for the company, but then also you didn't spend a lot of time in our prepared remarks in terms of the other verticals. Can you quantify the growth that you're seeing in those other segments?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

We don't per se break it down per line of business, and there is a bit of and perhaps Jean will qualify, but there is a bit of movement from one quarter to the other across the board. Where we're seeing, what we're reporting is where we're seeing the strongest growth is definitely in commerce because there's very strong demand for our types of solutions as it ties to extensive ROI linked to increases in revenue and increases in increasingly monitoring increases in margin.

And so they're huge catalysts for that growth in commerce. But what we're also reporting, Paul, is that we're growing across the board across all of our lines of business. And in service, in particular, we continue to see very strong demand as companies are pushing for delivering better experiences but while lowering costs. And so because both commerce and service are high ROI solutions, this is where we're seeing the most growth. And frankly, that's driven by the fact that this is where we're investing the most in marketing to land new accounts as well.

[Jean Lavigueur, executive]

Yes, that's correct, Louis, and thank you for the question, Paul. So certainly, as you know, we don't -- while we don't break down the actual growth rate in each line of business, really pleased to report that, first of all, all 4 lines business are growing. They're all growing double digits. As Louis mentioned, commerce, definitely our fastest growing. We talked about the bookings for SAP being just a record quarter. Service is our largest line of business, and it keeps really growing.

And your website, we talked about how Adobe contributed with their search and replacement market contributed really very strongly this quarter. We talked about, again, the strong bookings from that perspective. And we're placed with again, great upsells and we're able to land some great accounts as we talked about one of those deployments in that large food and beverage company. So yes, very pleased with the progress on our 4 lines of business, Paul.

[Paul Treiber, analyst]

And just a quick follow-up there. I mean you mentioned Adobe and SAP as I think one was record bookings in the quarter, one was strong. Is that similar to the broader business, which is commerce driving that or is it those other verticals? I imagine SAP will probably be skewed to support, like you mentioned. But are you seeing it across all of their platforms?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Right. The answer is yes. We're seeing it across all platforms. I'd just like to remind the strategy of Coveo when we land new accounts has been all along because we work with large enterprise clients. And typically, those clients use popular applications such as SAP and commerce and or salesforce.com in areas such as commerce and customer service for Adobe in the websites area. So there's no coincidence here. This is the reason why we focus on the companies on essentially these ecosystems and the companies that use them and hence why, as essentially a distribution channel. And hence, why we land customers in those areas. So you can think of it when you look at the growth of e-commerce with SAP or the growth of a product like Service Cloud at Salesforce. Think about Coveo as being attached to these infrastructures, delivering the intelligence on top of it. And so that's really what's driving the growth here because these ecosystems are growing fast, we are growing fast as well.

[Operator]

And we'll move on to our next question from Taylor McGinnis of UBS.

[Taylor McGinnis, analyst]

So I think last quarter, you talked about commerce growing north of 200 and then this quarter, north of 125%. Since we don't have much context, I guess, into the compare, right, of that business from one quarter to the next. Could you maybe just talk about the performance of like commerce this quarter relative to last, there was any mix changes that you saw in terms of use cases? And then maybe how that might relate a little bit to the dollar base and expansion rate, which I think down-ticked a couple of points from last quarter?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Right. I'll start with the use cases and then I'll turn it over to Jean to get into the specifics. Thank you for the question. If you think about our business in commerce, so we think of it as essentially 2 areas. One of them is B2C, business to consumer. And that means essentially retailers that either cater to shoppers of things like fashion products, et cetera. And this is the world of Qubit and/or buyers think about customers like a Bass Pro shop or something like that when you go to buy products.

And then the other piece -- the other line of business for us is business to business. So we're basically growing across the board across all these 3 businesses. The world of business to consumer in areas such as fashion retail and so on, is the world of Qubit. And as we're integrating the Qubit platform and the Coveo platform, these numbers start to blend together. The headline is we're seeing very strong growth across all 3 areas. Now I'll let Jean comment on the movements quarter-over-quarter.

[Jean Lavigueur, executive]

So you're correct in mentioning the growth rate, certainly on bookings from commerce, while they're certainly very high and very pleased with the performance. Certainly, when you compare to last year, as you know, last year, when commerce being our most recent line of business that we launched in 2019. So we are comparing off of a smaller number, so you will have a little bit of variability in the percentages. But certainly, when you're growing those into triple digits certainly are very happy.

Now when you correlate this with net expansion rate, 110%, we're very pleased with the 110% when you compare it to last year, we were in the same range in that 110% range. So certainly, happy with the renewals and as well as with the cross-sells and upsells that we've done in the installed base and being able to maintain that net expansion rate at 110% when we compare year-over-year. Does that answer your question, Taylor?

[Operator]

And we'll go on to our next question from Koji Ikeda from Bank of America.

[Unknown Analyst]

This is [ Tanika ] on for Koji. So a great job on the new customer lines. I saw that you guys have now 600 customers. Is there any particular area of strength or any end vertical? I know you guys mentioned UiPath and Coupa. So is it technology and anything to call out there?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

We remain focused on the same core verticals. We've always been. So we're obviously -- we continue to be very strong in tech in the tech sector, mostly in the customer service area, and that vertical has grown very well. We're growing in financial services and health care as well in the customer service area. And within manufacturing, a combination of service and commerce.

And then finally, obviously, in retail with commerce. And there's nothing -- none of these -- we have a pretty balanced marketing and account-based marketing efforts that we're continuously enhancing across the board. And we invest reasonably evenly across these multiple verticals. And they're all growing, but that's really where we're focused. Does that answer your question?

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, it does. And just if I could follow-up. I saw the Salesforce announcement for your stock integration and as well as the app exchange chat functionality. Could this mean more brand acceleration of pipeline expansion from that perspective as well?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

We continue to be very pleased with the pipeline expansion and the level of activity working with Salesforce. The Salesforce is not only a customer of Coveo, but I mean we're an important partner to them and they're an important partner to us and to their customers. Slack has been obviously the most important acquisition that Salesforce made. It's a very important platform. That puts across the various Salesforce cloud. And so the -- for us, it became an important priority in research and development to deeply integrate into Slack and into those environments. And yes, that provides an additional lag obviously of interest on the pot of customers and to reach new customers. And we're clearly seeing the strength in that channel continually.

[Operator]

We'll move to our next question from David Weiss of Scotiabank.

[David Weiss, analyst]

Congrats on the quarter. So just a quick question. So back when you're doing your IPO, you mentioned just in terms of geographic expansion that you had added some cloud regions in 2020 in Ireland and Australia. Just was wondering if you had added any further cloud regions or if you were seeing any expansion as a result of those efforts?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

We did not add any other regions in the quarter. We certainly have the ability to add regions very efficiently within a matter of probably about 60 days, we can spawn a new region on our global cloud infrastructure. For now, Ireland has been key to continuing driving the growth in the European Union, and we've continued to sell in the Australia and New Zealand region, but we haven't announced expansion into any new country that would require a new region, David.

[Jean Lavigueur, executive]

And if I can complement a little bit, David. When you look at our product gross profit margin on an adjusted basis. You did see a little bit of a blimp when we did open those 2 data centers, right? But really pleased to report, again, this quarter, we did again have an improvement in that gross -- product gross profit percentage to 81%, was 80% the previous quarter. And again, we keep adding new customers in those regions and keep always optimizing our cost infrastructure in those across all of our data centers. So very pleased with how we're scaling that business.

[David Weiss, analyst]

Just one quick follow-up here. In terms of headcount, that says you're up to 725 employees, how is the firm thinking about hiring and headcount going forward? Also in terms of the proportion of employees is the hiring predominantly in R&D and sales and marketing. You previously mentioned about 40% of R&D after IPO and R&D. Is that still a good way to think about it going forward?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

So what we're doing right now, as we reached the scale at which we are is -- and obviously, we're not immune to the talent or out there and so on. We're still pleased with our retention numbers overall and so on. But talent is always the key challenge for any company in our space. So we're investing a lot in the efficiency overall of our organization and our employees.

And from that perspective, obviously, aiming at optimizing the business and gaining operating leverage potentially faster than originally planned by being more efficient. And as it relates to the proportion of talent, it's pretty much the same. I don't know the exact figure for this quarter, but it's in the same zip code. So we continue to invest in sales and marketing and R&D as we see. We continue to see strong demand and strong growth for the business.

[Operator]

And we'll go next to DJ Hynes of Canaccord.

[David Hynes, analyst]

Congrats on the nice quarter. Louis, I was hoping you could talk to what kind of payback period customers typically see? And maybe you could take that service versus commerce. I don't know if it's different. I mean, obviously, I think the focus on payback is pretty important in this environment. So would just love to hear your thoughts along those lines.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

I love the question because, in fact, this is what gives us great confidence in the growth of our business because despite the economy, and obviously, we are in a turbulent period and certainly heading into one that will last a little while in our view. When you bring to customers solutions that bring high and fast ROI typically, you continue to grow because companies continue to invest in digital transformation and obviously, when that digital transformation talks about the customer experience and how they can save money and bring more revenue that matters.

If you break it down into -- DJ into the 2 areas, we're seeing paybacks sometimes in the matter of a quarter or less, all the way up to a year, 1.5 years or so, but certainly not more than that all in. In the case of commerce, the payback is measured in terms of revenue and margins, typically, which is increases in conversion, increases in car size, which at the end of the day, is increases in revenue. But obviously, increasingly, customers are looking to measure how they make profits.

And in that case, we've seen even in the IPO deck, if you recall, we presented a case with hearts on fire, where we had paybacks, we had improvements in the range of 500%. That was off the chart, but those are the kinds of things we see. In the case of customer service, the payback is really in sort of 2 ways. One of them is softer, but yet very important, which is the customer NPS.

But the other one in terms of hard cost savings is the savings associated with self-service and customer service efficiency, first call resolution, reduction of escalations, ultimately, reduction of agent workforce and even some customers will measure things like reduction of agent turnover. And so all together, this is typically less than a year in the customer service area.

[David Hynes, analyst]

Jean, I just want to ask a guidance question. Just I feel like I might get asked this tomorrow. You're in the unique position of guiding Q1 with only 2 weeks left in the quarter here. You guided for revenue flat, largely flat sequentially. Is there something abnormal in the period or are you just trying to keep expectations measured given the environment?

[Jean Lavigueur, executive]

No, I think you're spot on. In that sense, DJ, we are being prudent. This is going to be our third quarter, next quarter, right, at this point. So certainly, when you look at the guidance, it is still -- when you look at total revenue, it is still fairly a significant growth, right? We are talking for SaaS subscription revenue, it's still 42% to 45% year-over-year, right?

And so -- but certainly from that perspective, you're certainly correct. We -- for the first 2 quarters since being public, we've been able to beat expectations. I want to make sure we do that again. And so we believe that a prudent approach given the macro that's going on out there is the right approach. But again, we like to remind you again of the fairly significant growth rate here that we're experiencing to that SaaS subscription level at total revenue.

[David Hynes, analyst]

And I think it's the right strategy.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We will go next to David Kwan of TD Securities.

[David Kwan, analyst]

You guys highlighted, I guess, you highlighted the strong Adobe bookings quarter and the record bookings quarter with SAP. I'm guessing Adobe, it sounded like there were some benefit from the sunsetting of search and promote and SAP, I'm guessing just general strong commerce demand there. Does that sound about right? And -- or was there maybe something else that was driving the good performances there? And as a follow-up on that, have you seen that strength that you saw in Q4 spill over into the current quarter?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes. Well, first of all, as it relates to Adobe, indeed, the sunsetting of search and promote in what is one area. The other area is that Adobe has an extremely large installed base of a product named Adobe Experience Manager that typically runs the software of most large enterprises, and we're very well integrated into that platform and marketing into that customer base. And there's a strong need for greater intelligence and personalization in this area. So that's one.

And so both products at Adobe, yes, the sunsetting is driving some of the growth, but also the AEM. As it relates to SAP; SAP, just to give you some approximate figures, the SAP installed base of whether it's legacy commerce product named Hybris or customers that have transitioned to SAP Commerce Cloud is in the neighborhood of 1 trillion processes, in the neighborhood of $1 trillion of gross merchandise value.

This is by contrast, if my numbers are correct, by contrast, Shopify at an aggregate process is about 150 billion. So SAP has a very, very significant installed base, and we are an amazing complement to that installed base and customers can really realize back to the former question. So some very high and highly visible revenue increase and ROI essentially and performance increase out of our platform. So this is -- we're very excited with that opportunity as part of the commerce opportunity.

And as we market in that installed base, I think there is starting to be increased awareness of the capabilities of the Coveo AI platform and what it can do to those customers. And that's what fundamentally is driving the -- we're driving the growth with the help of SAP, essentially in that installed base. And that's where that comes from, and we don't see it slowing down. Does that answer your question, David?

[David Kwan, analyst]

Yes, it does. It sounds like this wasn't some of the stuff that kind of wasn't a one-off type of thing that you expect some of the strengths that continue into Q1 and at least the balance of fiscal '23?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

No. We don't believe that this is a one-off. There's definitely, as I said earlier, there's definitely strong fundamentals to believe that this will continue.

[Operator]

And I show no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn the call back over to Louis Tetu for closing comments.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Well, thank you all for your time today and for joining us. In closing, I'll say that we continue to believe that Coveo is well positioned to capture the large growth opportunity ahead of us, and we look forward to continuing to share our progress with you. And with that, operator, you can please end the call.

[Operator]

And this concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.