Hyper-personalizing the buying & sales experience for success

ALEX SCHMELKIN: This is the dirty secret about large enterprise software and IT: 80% of budgets go towards keeping the lights on and maintaining your old software. So you’re a software developer, and you wake up, you look at your budget at the start of every year and you say, you mean to tell me that eight out of ten dollars is just maintaining my old you-know-what? And I'm only spending two dollars out of ten dollars on innovation?

INTRO:

You're listening to CX Confessions, brought to you by Khoros. I'm Spike Jones, General Manager of Khoros Strategic Services.

And I'm Staci Satterwhite, Chief Customer Officer at Khoros. In each episode, we'll share the customer experience stories and insights you need, straight from the sharpest minds in CX, so you can better connect with your customers

And make them customers for life. Let’s start the show.

SPIKE JONES: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of CX Confessions where we delve into the customer experience world, talking about what works, what's amazing, and sometimes, what doesn't work so well. My name is Spike Jones and as always, I am joined by the incomparable, the amazing, the stupendous — I've run out of adjectives, but she's awesome. Our CCO at Khoros, Ms. Staci Satterwhite. Hey, Staci.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Hi, Spike. Wow, that's quite the introduction. Not sure I can live up to that, but thank you. Very excited to be here today.

SPIKE JONES: Yeah, well, I mean, it's, I'm excited about the show today, but like what's been going on with you? I mean, we haven't chatted in a while. What's up?

STACI SATTERWHITE: Yeah, we have a really, really cool show today, near and dear to my heart as, again, a former engineer and software programmer. I usually say, try not to hold that against me. But from a life and industry standpoint, it's exciting to see us getting back to some of the things that we used to do pre-COVID.

Here at Khoros, we just had our first customer live Engage conference in London with hundreds of attendees and it went great. Super exciting to get people together again physically and get some of that energy going. So yeah, no, things are great.

SPIKE JONES: That's great to hear. I missed that. And my invitation must have been lost in the mail to London, one of my favorite cities in the world. But hey, that's okay. I'll talk to the marketing kids about that. That's great.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Next time, next time, Spike.

SPIKE JONES: Next time, next time. But I do love that people are getting together face to face. I mean, you just, that interaction, it just can't be beat. So that's really exciting to hear and I'm glad we're getting back at it for sure.

STACI SATTERWHITE: We are. In fact, I'm about to go on my first journey to several customer sites around Europe, and I haven't done that in years. So yeah, kind of exciting. Good times.

SPIKE JONES: Take me with you. Take me with you. But anyway, let's get to it. Would you like to introduce our guest today?

STACI SATTERWHITE: Oh, my gosh, I would love to. We have such a cool guest today. Our guest today on CX Confessions is Alex Schmelkin. He's a founding member and chief marketing officer at Unqork, a low-code or no-code application platform that helps large enterprises build complex custom software faster.

Again, as a former software programmer, I've been in the software business for my entire career. This is near and dear to my heart. Prior to Unqork, Alex was founder and CEO of Cake and Arrow, the award-winning customer experience agency that focuses on the insurance and e-commerce space. And his clients included the likes of MetLife, Prosight, Citigroup, Bose, and Saks Fifth Avenue. I'm sure no brands you've heard of at all.

Alex finally has won numerous industry awards, including being recognized by Ad Week in its Young Influencer’s edition. And he’s a three-time recipient of IMAs Agency of the Year.

Welcome, Alex, to the show. As a former engineer and former software programmer, very interested to hear about all the success you're having with Unqork. Welcome to the show.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Thank you, Staci. Happy to be here. Thank you, Spike. Excited to chat about things today.

SPIKE JONES: Yeah, man. Let's jump right in. So Unqork has been around for about five years, coming up on that five-year anniversary, which is awesome. Such a cool, dare I say, disruptive idea. Where did that idea come from?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: You know, I've always been involved with the design and building of software — really my whole life — technology. And I was one of these kids in the mid-nineties who taught myself how to build websites. And if you knew how to do that back then, we all started web design agencies. Then we kind of grew up and we called them interactive shops, and then digital shops, and eventually we got really fancy and we called ourselves customer experience designers, developers.

And as I started and ran a number of these agencies over the years, and the work got bigger and more global and more expansive, we became involved in kind of very large, high profile, big budget projects for big companies. And invariably, what would happen over the years working for big banks or insurance companies is we as the designers would go in and we would create what we believed to be the most perfect experience. And we would research the software with users. We would figure out their pain points and create an experience that is truly going to change their world. Even if they were, you know, in finance or in banking, it didn't matter what industry.

And all too often, at the end of these amazing software development projects, the actual software would never get off the ground. It got completely busted up through the development process, through the coding process. And invariably we figured out what the culprit was.

The culprit, in large enterprise IT projects, is code. It's the writing of the millions and billions of lines of code. And ultimately it's from that that Unqork, which is a no-code visual software development project, platform rather, that's where the idea came from.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Wow. That's awesome. Again, super excited. As a former software programmer, I've been on many of those large enterprise projects.

So Unqork is big on personalizing the buyer experience using customer-specific industry needs and use cases. What do you think, or why do you think personalization has become so essential to that customer experience?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Well, you know, we grew up, and I'll speak from the perspective from Unqork, and then maybe we could talk about software more broadly. But we grew up and we created this company hyper-focused on a number of very regulated industries. So we started in financial services and insurance and then expanded to the government and health care and other sectors which rely on deep industry expertise, as well as the ability to handle the regulations and the security around the software built to these sectors.

So for us, personalization, it's just kind of been built into our emotion from day one. So this is what we learned early on, Staci. There was no one, at least five years ago, who was waking up saying, I want to buy myself a no-code platform. No CIO at a large enterprise felt that their challenge when they woke up that morning was: I need to completely upend my IT department and change the way I do software.

But instead, let's say you are an insurer, you have a problem with your policy admin system, or you need to get an insurance policy issued to a customer more quickly. So from the very beginning, we organized our go-to-market motion around these industry problems.

Now, behind the scenes, we would solve them with the industry's first visual no-code development platform. But we found success and we learned that we were relevant to these industries by hyper-focusing our solution.

You know, the other way we did it, other than just telling and showing them that we understand the pain in their industry is we really, particularly in the early years and a lot of it continues to this day, we don't respond to RFPs. We don't make outlandish or, you know, overly complex proposals.

Instead, the way we personalize the buying and the sales experience is we just show them the software. That's the best part about having a no-code platform. It doesn't take us weeks and weeks to show you something. We could just jump in and immediately hyper-personalize and customize and show you what it's all about.

SPIKE JONES: You had me at “don't participate in RFPs.” We're now, you're my best friend now, Alex. You're my best friend. Can you teach me how to do that?

STACI SATTERWHITE: I was thinking the same thing, Spike. Same thing.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Oh, Spike, it's thankless. And the, look, the procurement partner departments certainly don't like when we say that. And there's, there are sectors of our work, you can imagine our federal work and our government work, where RFPs are actually an important and necessary part of the process.

But they never actually show the value of the software. And back to the question, Staci, of like, how do you customize the buying experience? There's no way you customize the buying experience through a thousand-question RFP that you deliver back in an Excel spreadsheet.

So we try to adapt our go-to-market and our buying journey to be as not RFP centric as possible.

SPIKE JONES: We could have a whole show just on that, just based on the RFP process, which we probably should.

So, the hyper-personalization. So I love that concept, and I love that you can just jump in and show them. Can you talk about some of the just the tangible results that you have seen taking that approach?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Yeah. I'll pick another industry. Maybe we'll just go to banking this time. So a big part of the solutions that our customers like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs and State Street, other kind of very large global banking enterprises, they build customer onboarding solutions.

So essentially if you're a bank, you need to open bank accounts for people. You need to open institutional accounts for large traders. And it's actually a somewhat convoluted and backwards and ancient process, and it relies on legacy systems and all sorts of integrations. And it's frequently why these regulated sectors don't attempt a lot of these projects, because they're expensive and they're error-prone.

So here's how we've tangibly been able to find success. We attack a problem like customer onboarding in banking. And again, rather than just describing and making pretty marketing pages around our solution, when we come across someone that we know has this problem, we jump right into the platform and we invite them into the platform.

And the way Unqorked works is you just start dragging and dropping the elements needed to build software. So in order to open a bank account, I need to know who you are. So what's the best way to know who you are? Maybe to take a picture of your passport or your driver's license. Well, that would take two thousand lines of code for a developer to go do that.

Well, we already have a driver's license scanner, so you drag it in from the left bar, you bring it into your application, and now you build the rest of this onboarding flow right in front of the customer or with the customer. You drag in all the different pieces. And at the end of it, you click publish, and all of a sudden in front of your customer is sitting a pretty functional, ready-to-go-to-production onboarding solution.

And you spend another few weeks and you integrate it into their backend systems and they’re actually live.

So tangibly for us, the speed with which we've been able to move and the way that we've been able to adapt the whole selling process around this great asset we have, which is, you know, the fastest way to build software, has certainly been a great key to success.

STACI SATTERWHITE: I have so many questions, Alex. I almost don't know what direction to go in next. Okay.

So you alluded to it, maybe a little bit about the software industry as a whole and obviously Unqorked and what you are doing there are total disrupters to that.

What is a commonly held belief or industry practice that you passionately disagree with?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: So we come across this a lot, given the fact that we call ourselves a no-code platform. Really, what we are built upon is this idea that software can and should be built codelessly. Based upon a codeless architecture. Based upon a way of capturing all the different complexities of software in a definition rather than capturing it in code, which takes years to build and years to write.

So ultimately, when you describe that to someone, and I'd be interested, Spike and Staci, to hear what you think, people go to a place and they say, well, that's pretty cool, but you must have built Unqork. No code must be for simple things. Like I get it. So you probably do visual software development to build a survey, or you probably do it to build like a small little website.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Content.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: But for us, it's — right — it's actually the exact opposite. So the commonly held belief is that no-code is for simple things, is for non-technical audiences.

But it truly is the opposite of that. Our platform is used for the most complex, the most rigorous workloads. At these large, highly regulated global institutions.

So the first few years of our life, we kind of had to break down this myth that, oh, no-code, I know about you guys. You're used for online giveaways and surveys. And instead, that was the force in the industry that we've had to battle and maybe still have to convince and battle, you know, a little bit to this day.

SPIKE JONES: So do you see the industry then starting to shift to where you're going? I mean, do you ever see the huge waves of change moving in your direction, or you think it's always going to be the same?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Oh, it's moving, Spike. There’s no question.

SPIKE JONES: Great.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Not everyone's moving yet, and there's reasons for that. I'm happy to go into all the reasons why I think.

But the development techniques that come with codeless software, with no-code styles of development, are so economically attractive that you can't ignore it. It’s 70% to 80% cheaper and faster. We're getting rid of half a trillion dollars worth of lines of code that are written every year. Hundreds and hundreds of millions lines of code.

So you look at this, you're a CIO at a large organization or working at the federal government or, you know, at a bank somewhere. And you have certainly your old-fashioned way of doing things, you have to, otherwise, you wouldn't be this massive global company. But you can't deny once you start seeing the productivity gains of the software, how effective it is.

The other thing we're able to really attack is the maintenance of your old software. This is the other thing. The dirty secret about large enterprise software and IT: 80% of budgets go towards keeping the lights on and maintaining your old software. Now, so you're a software developer, you're a CIO, you're a CFO. You're the CMO, you're anyone in the C-suite at a company. And you wake up, you look at your budget at the start of every year and you say, you mean to tell me that eight out of ten dollars that I'm going to spend this year is just maintaining my old you-know-what? And I'm only spending two dollars of ten dollars on innovation?

And that's another reason, Spike, that I think we're seeing adoption is we flip that and we say when you build codelessly, you don't have to worry about maintaining code and upgrading old code. You're able to focus on the things that actually move the needle for your business. That's why we're seeing some pretty fast adoption.

SPIKE JONES: That truly is a game changer, especially when you break it down to ten dollars. The eight and the two. That's a no-brainer. Absolutely. But I'm sure some people are stuck in their ways and this is the way we've always done it. But you make a compelling argument for sure, and you are passionate about it, which I love.

You've been telling us some data points, and data is important. What gets measured gets done, right. But for you, what are the important data points that you collect or you want to hear from your customers? What are those things that matter most?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Well I just touched on one big one. It's: how much do you spend building new software and maintaining your old software? It's actually, and it's a wonderful question. There are some public sources as a marketer that we can go and we can find this data on large companies and governments that we sell to. And then there's the private sources through the sales process, through getting to know your customer, through your account-based marketing efforts.

And then you ask the questions Spike, say, how much do you spend every year building new software? How much do you spend maintaining old software? It's a wonderful data point and that you feed it into not-too-complex a calculator and all of a sudden it shows you how little money you're spending on innovation.

So that data is critical to us because it's able to show the value prop. The other thing that we measure — and this has been a fascinating stat that we've seen over a number of years and at Unqork — we measure how many bugs is your software development team putting into production using an old method, like a low-code platform or coding, or a new method like a codeless platform. And we see that it ranges from many hundreds in some cases to a thousand times fewer bugs using codeless development.

The reasons should be obvious based on the way I've described it because although we love creativity, you don't always love full creativity and writing code. And it's the creativity in code that leads to bugs, that leads to security problems.

And when you use these very powerful frameworks, they help you avoid bugs. They help you find bugs before you go to production.

So another thing we ask is: what's the quality of your software deployments? How often do you have to roll back? This data is so critical to us because then we again plug it into not-too-complex a calculator and we say, well, what if that were a few hundred times less? How much happier would your customers be that the software wasn't going down? How much more money would you save because you're not fixing old bugs and you're advancing your commercial priorities?

STACI SATTERWHITE: For sure. As a leader in the space, there's definitely attractiveness, for lack of a better word, to focusing more of an investment on moving the needle in strategic initiatives versus maintenance. I can definitely relate to that, Alex.

Okay. Now the name of the podcast is CX Confessions. So it is confession time.

Do you mind if we ask you, Alex, what's the hardest lesson you've learned on this journey? And it can be with Unqork or obviously your entire professional journey with your customers.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: I'll tell you the hardest lesson we've learned here, and maybe I've learned it in other places, is: we're not for everyone.

And what, and that's meant a few different things to me over my career. But we fundamentally have changed the economics of software development.

And it's too apparent, and it's too obvious, and it's too proven given how quickly we've grown and the market success.

So you say to yourself, and here was the thing that we had to confess to ourselves. You say, well, this is so amazing. Why wouldn't everyone want it, Staci?

But you come up against some very strong institutional forces that exist within governments, that exist within large companies, global 1000 businesses. And we like to say they all come back because even when maybe there is that rare loss or we don't actually move forward with an initiative with the customer, most often they're just not willing to abandon preconceived notions about how you're supposed to write software.

And don't get me wrong, I want to make one thing clear: we love code. I love code. I'm a hacker. I'm a coder. I teach my kids how to code. But code should be used for very, very limited things where you really know what you're doing and you're trying to do something so special and so unique.

And so the lesson is it's hard to rip code away from people that love it. Perhaps they love it too much. And, you know, eventually, though, they all come back, even the ones that we weren't perhaps right for the first time through.

STACI SATTERWHITE: To make any major industry change, I suspect it'll take lots of time and for sure there are the leaders and the laggers and all of that with the standard technology evaluation and progression curve.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: We see it. Definitely.

SPIKE JONES: And I've never liked the answer whenever I talk to a potential customer, a customer, and ask the question like, who's your audience? Everybody. Like, really?

And I think it's not a bad thing that you're not for everybody. I mean, I think even great brands are loved or hated. Like great brands are not liked.

So, you know, as a company and in what you do, I would imagine people either hate you because you are disrupting an entire institutionalized industry or they love you because of the ease that you bring into their lives and freeing up those dollars to innovate too. So, super cool.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: That’s a great point, Spike. I love that. Thank you.

SPIKE JONES: Absolutely. So this has been fantastic. I actually, I know Staci does, I have like 20 more questions but I know we're running out of time.

STACI SATTERWHITE: So many.

SPIKE JONES: But thank you for sharing your story with us.

But before we let you go, we want to learn more about you, Alex, the person. So we have what we like to call quick-fire confessions.

Please, tell us, Alex, what was your first concert?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: I am a good Long Island, New York boy. So Billy Joel. But that's turned into a much better obsession in later life with the band Phish.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Oh!

SPIKE JONES: Oh a Phish Head. Nice, nice. I got to see them once. And my wife's from Long Island. She has some Billy Joel stories as well. That's great.

STACI SATTERWHITE: That's awesome. Okay, cool. Next, what profession, other than your own, would you attempt if you could?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Kids’ robotics instructor. Oh, I love, okay, you know, like Lego robots and and then like the larger robots that kids use in middle school and high school? Yeah, if I could just sit around all day and just work on robots with kids, I think it would be my dream.

STACI SATTERWHITE: You are a little bit of a hacker technology. I love it. I love it.

SPIKE JONES: This one's a twofer. I would love to know your first job. Like the first job, you got paid dollars to do. And then your first job-job, like your first professional job.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: So my first job, I was hired to be an office assistant, summer intern at Hofstra University on Long Island. And it was like a folding paper kind of thing. Although quickly, I saw that they were using a mail merge software to generate these papers that had to be folded. I went into that, I made changes to it, and I moved beyond the office admin database program that first summer.

SPIKE JONES: Holy moly. That's fantastic.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: But my first job-job, I worked for one of the first web development companies that launched really anywhere. And this was here in Manhattan as a coder, as a programmer of building websites.

STACI SATTERWHITE: I love it. I love that you're disrupting an industry that you spent so much time and energy and passion and your heart in. Obviously, it's incredibly authentic in that way. Love it. Okay.

Next question. And I'm not going to put any boundaries on this one, whether they be personal or professional, whatever way, whatever comes to mind.

What is your biggest indulgence?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: So it's got to be working on the backyard roller coaster that I built with my kids during deep COVID.

SPIKE JONES: Oh, man.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Are you in a TV commercial with, like, the bowling pins? Have you seen that one?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: So I've seen that. I just saw that one that made it into my feed. But no, it was during deep COVID. And my middle son came to us and said, hey, can we build a roller coaster in the backyard? And that was — we all remember that period. And you don't say no to your kids.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Especially when there's nothing else to do.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Yeah, we could build a roller coaster. And fast forward now, two years later, we have 100 feet of roller coaster. The kids ride it. I could ride it. It's. It's the greatest thing. So that's my indulgence. Any time I could spend on it.

STACI SATTERWHITE: So block parties at Alex's house.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Yeah, yeah, totally. That's right.

SPIKE JONES: I’m on my way over.

STACI SATTERWHITE: No, I want, I want to ride.

SPIKE JONES: That's super cool. You're a cool dad. You're very cool, dad. Okay, if you could listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would it be?

ALEX SCHMELKIN: “Harry Hood.” “Harry Hood,” by Phish.

SPIKE JONES: Nice.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Ah, of course.

SPIKE JONES: Nice. It's, you know, those jam bands. I mean, first of all, you know, they can make that song into like a 12-minute song if they wanted to.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Or even 20 or 30 minutes. And it's different every time.

SPIKE JONES: That is true. That is true. Love it.

But yeah, that's awesome. Alex, thank you so much for sharing the story of Unqork and your story today. I learned a lot about you, learned a lot about a very cool tech that is disrupting an old industry. For sure it is. Again, I can tell you're very passionate about it, but we really appreciate you coming and spending some time with us. And thanks again.

ALEX SCHMELKIN: Spike and Staci, thank you so much. I had a good time today and a great discussion. Thank you.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Thanks, Alex.

SPIKE JONES: Man, I love that guy. And not just because he has a roller coaster in his backyard, but that's, I mean, that's very cool. You got to admit. I couldn’t build a roller coaster in my backyard. That's, first of all, the Austin city would just come after me. But that's super cool. And he's so passionate.

And I do love that he just grew up just bucking the system. But it is, what a great guest. There are so many wonderful nuggets of goodness and truth in there. And I mean, I've got 20 things I can talk about, but like what really stood out to you about the conversation, Staci?

STACI SATTERWHITE: Yeah, really, really cool question, Spike. I think what stood out to me is a combination of Alex's experience in the space. Like he's a hacker at heart. His first job, it sounded like, was he was intended to be an administrator, but he ended up making it be a programming job because that's his bent, that's his nature. And now he's in a space where he's truly transforming an industry that he spent so much time in.

So there's so many takeaways there. But of course, the net of it is just how knowledgeable and passionate he is about what they're doing at Unqork and how his background sets him up perfectly to be in this very, very disruptive space.

SPIKE JONES: Yeah, for sure. So for me, there's two things.

First of all, I mean, again, I can talk about my hatred of RFPs, the bane of my existence, just for hours. But a long time ago, I had a mentor, his name's Blair Enns and he has a company called Win Without Pitching. And his whole thing was about, I can go into it, but it basically is like how to get out of RFPs and take control back.

But I love that they're just like, RFPs, no. We're not going to do that. Let me just show you how cool this is.

That was the number one, and the number two, the data that he has to back up. I mean, the dollar data. I mean, you can't argue with that, that you are only spending two dollars out of every ten on innovation. That, first of all, blows my mind. Second of all, I always knew it would be hard to be a CTO, not that I ever would, or CIO, but like, I mean, you can't argue with that. I mean, in those facts, when you come to the table with this disruptive technology, it's just, again, a no-brainer.

STACI SATTERWHITE: Yeah. And for sure, even in my seat, you know, the chair I sit in as chief customer officer. One of the things we're always concerned with, even internally for the way we get things done, but also externally for our customers, is total cost of ownership. And so for sure, the data he has on how expensive it is truly to just maintain software and enterprise platforms for an organization versus really truly transforming the business on strategic initiatives.

So, a really great episode with Alex. Thank you, Spike. Very, very happy to be here with you for CX Confessions today.

SPIKE JONES: Always a pleasure. We'll see you next time.

OUTRO:

Now more than ever, your customers expect to be understood on a personal level. Their likes or dislikes, their history with your brand, and their communication preferences. But so many companies struggle to connect the dots of interaction across their own teams and channels, which can lead to customer experience challenges and disasters. That's where Khoros can help. The award-winning customer engagement platform was built to turn those siloed interactions with your customers into enterprise value.

Khoros works with more than 2,000 of the world's leading brands powering more than 500 million digital interactions every single day. Learn more at @khoros.com.

Thanks for listening to CX Confessions brought to you by Khoros. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app and give us a rating.

See you next time.