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>> Hi welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE
conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders
driving innovation across the tech industry.
I'm your host Donald Klein.
As digital transformation continues to impact industries,
the application workflows employees rely on
on a day to day basis are becoming increasingly customized.
This trend towards customization is presenting new
challenges for the workforce of the future.
To talk about that challenge, I'm here today
with Gary Mahotra, VP of Product Marketing at WhatFix.
>> Hi Don, thanks for having us.
>> Glad you're here.
So this conversation is kind of following up on an earlier
conversation we did with Vara Kumar
about some of the challenges
for the workplace of the future.
>> That's right.
>> And of particular interest is you guys have done some
new survey work, right, around some of the challenges
or the new challenges that we have in the workplace
around using applications.
So I wanted to kind of have you talk
a little bit more about that.
But maybe before we do that, why don't you just refresh
us and just explain Whatfix does
and kind of where they fit in.
>> Great, so Whatfix is a digital adoption platform.
We provide on-screen guidance, self-help,
and automation capabilities to enterprises and employees
to really drive up adoption of the features
and their applications across
all cross application workflows.
>> And so the important point there,
this is what you call kind of in-application
guidance, right? >> That's right, yes.
>> All right, great.
So you're providing screens that help people navigate
these very complex apps that people are using on a kind of
day to day basis, right?
>> Yes, and the screens can be smart tips, pointers.
They can be interactive walk throughs and easy flows.
They could be better self-help across applications.
They take a variety of forms.
>> Okay, got it.
Now this is a super hot area, right?
You're with a company, you guys have seen fantastic
adoption of your solution.
I think you were mentioning to me that you guys
have an NPS score that's in the 100th percentile,
which is sort of unheard of for a software company.
So this is a hot area, but we want to understand why
it's a hot area.
So you guys have been doing some survey work
around the the future of the workplace.
Why don't you talk to us a little bit about that survey
and kind of what are the kind of,
some of the things you found?
>> Sure.
So you know, we surveyed 500 enterprises in North America
and we looked across areas, but also focused on the CRM area
and what we found is 75% of sales reps
in an average enterprise do not regularly use
the CRM system and we also found that
90% of these enterprises believe that digital adoption
and learning in the workflow technology would increase
their employee productivity
and increase the employee experience.
>> Okay, so let me understand why that number is so high,
that 75% of sales reps aren't using their CRM application
and then, I mean obviously, CRMs have always been
the bugaboo for a lot of reps, right?
Filling in the data, as you said,
but really in today's world,
it's even more of a problem isn't it because these CRM apps
are actually being sort of highly customized
to the individual kind of workflows of different companies.
Is that right?
>> Absolutely.
So you know, Gartner has the statistics
that an average company has 14 different CRM applications
or modules that a sales rep is using everyday
and these are heavily customized to organizations
and sometimes you know, within different business units
and geographies, within an organization.
Obviously, customers are different globally
and products that they're selling are different
so the CRM has to be customized
and I think you'll add to that the complexity
that up to another two, 300 cloud applications
that integrate with the CRM in and around ad
and then you know, the API, three API world,
there's so much across application web flow
that it's not easy for an average employee
or sales rep to keep up with.
>> Got it, okay.
So there's kind of two challenges here, right?
So the CRM application itself, right,
is going to be sort of specific to lots of different workflows,
even within business units, right?
That's a huge challenge for somebody working in a company
to kind of learn all that, right?
And now what you're saying is that actually,
it's even more complex, right,
because you've got a lot of other applications
that are integrating in and interfacing, right?
>> Gary: Absolutely, absolutely.
>> So it's kind of like a cross workflow challenge
to be able to understand all this stuff.
Is that right? >> Absolutely.
And you know, with the movement to the cloud,
all of this is rapidly evolving.
There used to be a time when product software companies
would release new releases once in 18 months.
Now it's twice in two weeks, right?
And so there's that infusion that, you know,
even a sales operation manager or IT manager
and learning and developing managers
have to keep up with and it's certainly difficult
for the average employee to keep up
with all this new functionality.
>> Great.
So APIs in the clouds are kind of driving
kind of just increasingly evolving applications
that are becoming even just a challenge
to kind of keep up with them as they're evolving,
kind of let alone kind of learning them end-to-end.
Right, yeah. >> Absolutely.
>> So this is kind of, what you guys are tackling
is really kind of almost a learning and adoption problem.
Is that right, more generally?
>> That's totally accurate and more specifically,
you know, we're enabling learning in the flow of work
because there is this whole megatrend of the merger
of learning and work together because there's so much
that an average employee has to learn.
There's so many applications that it is not practical
to expect an employee to attend a couple weeks of training.
They're going to forget 90% of that within a week
and then as they work, life progresses,
the statistics from LinkedIn and Deloitte,
you know, employees are only able to spare 1%
of their average work week toward formal learning.
So there's no choice other than you know,
enabling them throughout their workday,
throughout their applications with sort of
micro moments of learning,
in-the-app learning, like you said.
>> That's a fantastic comment there,
sort of what do you call it?
Micro learning. >> Micro learning moments.
>> Micro learning moments. >> In the flow of work.
>> That's fantastic, okay.
And so that's really what you're saying
is the people don't, you know,
the old school way was to attend a training class,
get up to speed, right, and then sort of
use that throughout the year.
Well, that doesn't work anymore.
>> Doesn't work at all. >> Okay, got it.
Right, so then talk to us a little bit about
kind of what WhatFix does to kind of do that.
So you're providing an application
that kind of provides kind of guidance screens,
is that right?
>> Yeah, so we basically provide three things.
The first is what you said,
we provide step-by-step guidance, content.
So if there's a new user joining the application,
they're guided as to where, a tour of the application
or what are the key high value things
they should be sort of interacting with.
The other thing we do is we're providing many elements,
or many learning task lists
that a user's required to complete and when they do,
they're actually clicking through the application.
This is not a YouTube video they're watching offline
and hopping where to get back into the screen at.
This is actually them clicking through the screen.
The second thing we provide is
you know, better self-help across the enterprise.
You know, when they're actually using our self-help widgets,
they're able to get personalized, contextualized content
based on who they are, where have they clicked before?
Which department do they belong to?
So they actually get relevant context right there.
The third area we provide is what we call automation.
So a lot of the processes that sales people and employees
will have to do is to click, you know,
empty clicks and navigational clicks
and a lot of times spent on data entry.
So we have a whole automation framework
where we just eliminate the manual processes completely
and we automate them and then we have bots
that you can use for data entry
so it's very easy for employees.
>> Understood, understood.
So then kind of walk us through what the typical
kind of adoption cycle for a customer who says okay,
you know, yes, we understand our whole kind of,
we've gone through a period of digital transformation.
We now have a lot of very essential applications
that kind of manage our day-to-day workflow
inside our company, but the challenge is
getting everybody to use them in the right way
and kind of populating them with data in the right way.
We'd like to look at your solution
for helping us kind of get better at that
or at least help our employees get better at that.
What is the journey that they go through
from kind of beginning to end
to kind of enable this using your system?
>> So great question, Don.
So I think the journey that we undertake together with them,
is to first understand what the workflows look like
across applications, where they're excessively long
or manual or nonproductive so we can apply
the right, you know, digital adoption platform, widgets
or right functionality so we have the maximum impact.
So that's sort of the first phase.
Second, what we do is we look at, you know,
the key workflow areas that their, you know,
departments or their functional heads
want them to use to have the maximum impact on productivity
or the maximum impact on business outcomes
and we basically authored our content on top of that.
Now the reason it is so fantastic is once you've actually
authored some step-by-step guidance, you know,
onto say, Salesforce, using our content,
that automatically is not only available in the application
when you log into Salesforce, but it automatically
gets converted into multiple formats.
It gets converted into a video, in LMS,
a course that you can take, a slideshare, a PDF,
an article, and these are automatically sent
throughout the enterprise.
So even if the sales person is not in Salesforce
doing work, they're on their mobile phone, perhaps,
you know, interacting with a chat bot
or maybe they're taking a LMS course,
they have the same in-app content
and guidance available throughout.
We call it adoption everywhere and then, you know,
maybe they're on the road, they see something, they read it.
In one click, they can see live
and they actually get back into the application
to really execute that process.
So you know, call it learning by doing.
So that's what's so unique about you know,
digital adoption platforms
and this takes six to eight months.
You know how hard it is to recall videos
or how to use every aspect of the application.
Now it takes you know three to four weeks.
>> Interesting, interesting.
So in a former life, I was once responsible
for developing the user manual for our application
which we sold within the enterprise, right?
And everything was all written out in text.
Well that's almost a bygone era now, isn't it?
>> It is because I'm sure things change so fast
and you know, not everybody likes to read text.
A lot of people are visual learners.
They want to see it in video.
Some people are kinesthetic learners.
They want to actually learn by doing
and so that's what visual adoption enables.
You don't lose the text, but you don't have to start there.
You know, we give you the text based on
how do you use the application?
>> Interesting.
So you're actually providing learning materials.
>> Absolutely.
>> For future consumption based on
how people are using applications today.
>> Absolutely, and then anytime you go back,
you know, a month or two later, within the application,
change the workflow, the process,
automatically, all of the learning materials
and all of the five or six formats
I mentioned, regardless of where they are,
is forever linked and automatically gets updated.
So you don't have to, you know, worry about, okay,
I made this paragraph change.
Where are the 100 places I now need to go and change that?
So that problem is solved forever.
>> Interesting, okay.
So let's just talk, you know, as we kind of wrap up here,
let's talk a little bit about so the survey found
that kind of 75% of you know, reps, particularly
with just an application on CRM, right?
I'm sure you got similar data for lots of other
application categories, but something like CRM
is a little problem point for a lot of companies, right?
>> Yes.
>> So people are, companies are adopting your solution
in order to kind of keep the teams updated
on how to use the applications, how to make sure
that the data's properly populated right
and even, you know, drive kind of materials
and intelligence from all that usage history, right?
>> Gary: Yes.
>> So where do you see this going?
What's the kind of workflow of future going to look like
once solutions like yours have kind of been adopted here?
>> Yeah, so I think that's a great question.
I think what we see is that you know,
the workflow of the future's going to have three things:
one, there's going to be more and more applications
in the cloud, connected in more and more ways
with each other through API's and more and more customized.
So you know, a future worker has to be digitally savvy,
up to digital kosher
and become comfortable navigating in this complex,
highly digital world across multiple applications.
So that's one.
I think the second trend is they're going to have to focus,
most employees and companies have the workers
and employees focus on the most critical activities
and be comfortable with bots and automation
doing the routine tasks and the data entry
and you got to be comfortable with giving up some work
and I think the third thing is you know,
these workers and employees have to learn to live
with these bots and automation and be willing to accept
hyperpersonalized you know, digital guidance
and be comfortable acting on it.
So when you log into your Salesforce,
you may be shown a completely different sale content
because you've been with the company for 10 years,
you're a rockstar seller and you need a different level
of sort of high-end learning versus you know,
I may be shown a totally different set of content
because I've been clicking
and searching a lot on some topics.
I'm a new sales rep or employee and I've not met my quota.
And that's surely the future
and I think companies and enterprises, you know,
who are comfortable with that, you know, will succeed
and we're certainly there to help with that journey.
>> Wow, so it's interesting.
So hyperpersonalization of application content.
>> Absolutely. >> Is kind of the new trend
that's going to be happening which presents
a whole kind of learning
and adoption problem in it of itself, is that right?
>> Well, it does, but it also solves the problem
because if you're presented content that's not
contextual to who you are, how long you've been
at the company, what you've been looking for,
most likely, you're going to get distracted
and not adopt the application or not do what you would do.
But if you do get that,
then your adoption really goes up the roof,
you're really happy.
You got the, it's like the application understood
what you were trying to do and guided you in doing it
and that's your best buddy, right?
It's actually going to solve the problem.
>> Okay, fantastic.
So love that story.
Like what you're talking,
understanding what the challenges are
for workplace of the future.
So on that, I think we're going to close out here now
and I'd like to thank everybody for joining us
for this Cube Conversation.
I'm Donald Klein
and we'll see you next time here on the show.
>> Gary: Thank you, Don.
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