BLAKE ADAMS:
The email’s like, “Oh, no, you know, it looks like you messed up and forgot your password. We're here to help get you started,” right? Well, that's really fun and playful, which works great for research sites. For a pharma exec, that was like, okay, who are you guys? Is this just a small tiny company that doesn't know what they’re doing? So we had to kind of create experiences that mimic the needs of both audiences.
INTRO
Welcome to today's episode of CX Confessions. I'm Staci Satterwhite, the Chief Operating Officer here at Khoros, and I'm super excited to be joined by Philippe Mesritz, who I work with every day, and I've had the privilege to work with every day for two and a half years. A little bit of background on Philippe before I tell you a little bit more about my personal thoughts on why I enjoy working with him so much.
Philippe has worked for more than 20 years to ensure customers are successful in the way they want to be served. Throughout his career, he has led support services, customer experience, customer operations teams, as well as technical and customer success organizations. At Khoros, he now leads — because I just asked him to — our professional services organization, and he's also been named a CX Leader of the Year finalist for two years running. So having given that background, I think I hope our listeners understand now why I enjoy working with Philippe so much and the wide variety of things that he has helped me with in my career here at Khoros. So, Philippe, thank you. A joy to have you here today.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Thanks, Staci. I'm definitely looking forward to the conversations. I appreciate the invite. The CX, and how it works, and how the integrations with technology, everything else is absolutely this personal interest of mine, and I don't say a lot of things are a passion, but CX is definitely one of them, too. In applying that wherever that looks like.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, I remember when I first took this job two and a half years ago. My title then was the Chief Customer Officer for an organization whose tagline is, “We create customers for life.” And that was a little intimidating at the time, to be candid, and I remember you were very instrumental in helping me understand I got this. I know CX. We're gonna do this great. And you did.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Appreciate it. Yeah, no, it's – it's fascinating to be able to do all of that. There's so many different ways to look at it. And I think today's conversation will be really interesting, whether it's about data or about interactions of different forms and different ways to deal with businesses. It'll be a good conversation to get into with the CX side of things.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
So our guest today on CX Confessions is Blake Adams. He's the senior vice president of marketing at Florence Healthcare. He has over 13 years of experience building and leading high-growth marketing and strategy teams to balance metric-driven performance with long-term brand equity growth. He has several specialties. They include accelerating predictable revenue, increasing customer retention — as we know, that one is near and dear to my heart — and he increases customer retention through loyalty and expansion, and customer experience.
He also has a background in creating and dominating categories through brand and public relations strategies. He's a believer in building teams to create strategic plans, and then of course execute that vision. He's also a believer and has experience in maximizing business value through aligning sales, customer success, and product — also something that's near and dear to both Philippe and my hearts. The concept of value, right, Philippe? That sounds familiar.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Absolutely. I hear that every day.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
And then, finally, scaling companies through data-driven experimentation. Blake is passionate, like I said, about building teams, finding and leading impact players, and maximizing their potential for sustainable, scalable, and repeatable growth.
A couple of final things about Blake — he’s the first person that we will have interviewed — or I will have interviewed — here on CX Confessions. That's a fellow podcast host. He has a podcast the host of Florence Healthcare's specific podcast called The Next Phase: Exploring Innovation in Clinical Trials. Finally, in his free time, Blake sits on several nonprofit boards, consults with small and startup nonprofit organizations, and enjoys spending time with his wife and two young boys.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Awesome. Thanks, Staci. Stick around to hear what Blake has to say about creating a more inclusive, accessible, and agile customer experience in the healthcare industry. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Welcome, Blake, to the show. We're super excited to have you on CX Confessions today.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Thank you so much for having me today.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
I think you may be one of our first guests that's also a fellow podcaster. So that's exciting. Makes me a little nervous. But that's all right. Another fun fact about you is you were employee number eight at Florence Healthcare. For those of us, or those of our listeners that may not be familiar, do you mind telling us a little bit about Florence?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Of course, Staci. I'll do it. Yes. So Florence Healthcare is a SaaS company that focuses on eliminating fragmented workflows in clinical research and clinical trials. And so our platform is used by about 12,000 research centers or hospital health systems in 45 countries, and also used by most of the leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world to manage their clinical research and clinical trials. For instance, we were used for most of the COVID vaccine studies and in most of those different platforms. So yeah, we're kind of sitting in the middle there and enabling document workflows between all those stakeholders and linking the world of clinical research.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Wow, important stuff.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Yeah, it's a lot of fun, Staci. We get to see some really cool people get to meet some incredible thinkers and scientists and research professionals and patients. And it's a really neat, neat space to be in for sure.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Yeah, I was gonna say that blending between healthcare and technology is always a fascinating area. Right. So kind of to continue that theme. You've got this experience, background, in healthcare, especially healthcare technology.
So how can technology help the healthcare industry become better connected, patients, trials, really what you're focusing on at Florence, so how do you think about that?
BLAKE ADAMS:
For sure, so, you know, the clinical research industry is really made up of four core areas. There's the patients — so the people enrolling in the clinical trials. There's the hospital health systems that are also called research sites that are managing those clinical trials and have that direct connection to the patients. And then there's the pharmaceutical biotech companies that typically have the drugs that they're trying to get tested and push to market that are having to link to those sites and patients. And then often in the middle sits a group called contract research organizations, or CROs, that are outsourced services for the pharmaceutical companies oftentimes running those clinical trials.
And so when you think about leaking all those stakeholders, the experience is critical because you have on one end of the spectrum really smart scientists and professionals in the pharmaceutical companies who have medicines they want to test and get to market — the average clinical trial lasts anywhere from three to five years and costs several, several tens of millions of dollars.
Well, then on the other end of that spectrum, you have doctors and nurses and hospitals and health systems who know very little about technology and so they have to have an easy-to-use experience.
And then you can go to the far extreme of that, and you've got patients who maybe were just diagnosed with terminal cancer and have opted to enroll into a clinical trial. And so now they're trying to sign consent forms, and they're trying to fill out documents and paperwork while they're also dealing with the realities of this major disease. And so you're kind of doing this full spectrum of individuals that all have to collaborate on the same platform.
It's incredibly complex, and everybody has their own thoughts about how it should all work and how it should all move forward. And it's interesting to live in the middle of all that for sure.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah and obviously, what incredibly meaningful work. To your point, about all that the patient is probably going through at that point in their lives itself. That's a lot to try and bring together in order for the common outcome that everyone's trying to drive for — a potentially successful trial.
So speaking of getting a lot of things to work together, interoperability is something that I think you've championed. So just these integrations we've been talking about between systems at the research sites, and sponsors and vendors — it sounds like a little bit maybe equivalent to some of the stuff we tried to do here in the customer engagement industry where we're integrating our platform with all the various digital channels and trying to create a seamless experience for users.
Talk to us a little bit about the challenge there and how your company helps combat that.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Absolutely. Yes, so ours is similar to customer engagement. Ours is site enablement is really where we spend our time is helping research sites do their best work because we believe that helps the industry move forward.
The average clinical trial site for every study that they're running, so let's say it's a cancer study, we found that they had to log into about seven to nine different platforms for every study. So that's seven or eight different passwords they have to remember. And typically, when you get to a large academic medical institute or a large network or large pharmacy network, they're running four to six hundred studies. And so if you started doing the math, right, six hundred studies times seven to eight different platforms per study — you're in the thousands of logins.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
I'm not a mathematician, but that just gave me goosebumps.
BLAKE ADAMS:
It gives me goosebumps, Staci, all day. The biggest challenge we see is those technologies were built for the pharmaceutical companies because, unfortunately, or fortunately, that's where the money is.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
That’s where it comes from.
BLAKE ADAMS:
That's right. But what ends up happening is the research sites get technology forced upon them that was not built for their workflows, and now they're having to work in thousands of different platforms and ecosystems. And so we really sit in the middle of that and focus on integrating all the workflows at the research site. So, A) the research sponsor, pharmaceutical company, has a single point of access into that health system, but B) so that the health system doesn't have to duplicate workflows across different platforms and they can do what they do best, which is spending more time with the patients. Because we believe, you know, opposite of maybe some social media platforms, the less time people spend on our platform, the better. And so for us, if they can get their work done really fast, it means that they're spending more time with that patient who's going to the clinical trial, which is really important to us.
So I think that's where integrations and interoperability, Staci, comes in. And I think on the flip side, I'm sure we'll talk about this. You know, healthcare is a heavily regulated industry, both from the government side as well as at pharmaceutical companies. And so there are some realities and limitations as well to how we can think about that which creates for me a really interesting space to play in for sure.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
The HIPAA technology side of things, so it's interesting, you're playing on like more research and pharmacy space, but you're gonna have to really collaborate around what makes sense, what is the law required, and all those kind of things. And it's obviously a complex space to be in. But being able to collaborate across these businesses, being able to really think about how everybody works together is a key component of ways that you do business. And so, not only you, every organization out there has the same challenge.
But so how do you think about Florence championing those clinical research that are faster, more accessible, more inclusive, but also in terms of, how do we get to a more accessible, inclusive customer experience, not just around the healthcare side, but any other industry that has a customer space?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Sure, what a great question. You know, there's big pushes right now from the FDA here in the states, EMRA, and other organizations globally. The average clinical trial typically only has about 3 to 4% of the patients are from a diverse background. And so if you're trying to get your drug, right, into a very diverse patient population, you want it to reflect the population that is actually using that drug.
And so what's happening right now is a big push from the FDA to make clinical trials more inclusive and diverse. I love to use those words. And what's happening to make it happen is the engagement of what we call frontier sites, and these are research sites who are brand new to clinical research and live on the fringes. You know, historically it's been major academic medical centers and city centers that have run clinical research. Well, if you're living in, and I live in Georgia. If you're living in extreme south Georgia, driving four hours twice a week when you're dealing with cancer, to come into downtown Atlanta, navigate a city, navigating complex work is really difficult.
And so thinking about that patient experience, which are the customers, right, in our case, thinking about that patient experience, not only in how they interact with technology, like Florence, but in how they interact with the providers. How they interact with the pharma companies, how they interact with the various people in this group. And you know, typically when somebody enrolls in a clinical trial, especially if they're dealing with something like cancer, they are expecting a higher level of care than they may have with a standard of care. And oftentimes technology gets in the way of that, right, and so we want to create that experience for them.
And I think this translates, when you think of diversity in the user experience, is really there's very few technologies today, or platforms or SaaS platforms that are not used by extremely different groups of stakeholders, right? Even social media. I think it goes from me up to my grandmother who's still you know, pretty active on social media. And so they have to cater to that entire spectrum, not only in age but in demographics, when we think about clinical research and all in here. You know, not only are we dealing with that, but if you think of a patient who's got Alzheimer's as an example or dementia, and you're asking them to put in information on their cell phone, right, well A), there's the act of actually doing that. And B), a lot of time patients are having to do that three to four times a day and if they live in a really rural area with no internet, like how are you going to think about connecting to those people? And so it gets really interesting to start thinking about diversity and inclusion in clinical research in multiple areas for sure.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
And I'm sure that in your particular space, because of the age ranges, there's a huge complexity. It's as simple as — not a clinical research trial, but my mother-in-law went to go get a dental appointment, and they handed her an iPad and said, “Fill this in.” She immediately walked out and made a new appointment where my wife went with her to the appointment to get it scheduled up because she's like, I know how to push the buttons, but that's about it. And what if I run into a problem and I don't want to look like I don't know what I'm talking about, and all those things. So that inclusion is really important. And then you add to that layer of terminal illnesses or other things that just makes it very difficult.
BLAKE ADAMS:
It's so true. You know, so we have an e-concept platform, which I love that you just talked about it, is the ability to do that consent electronically. And what we've seen are, you know, healthcare, and I think every industry goes through this, but healthcare and especially clinical trials, you have to match the pace of innovation with the pace of the patient or the population, right?
So we could go as far as having animated videos and interactive environments. But what we found is our consent is designed very simply where it's literally a paper version, or an electronic version of the paper version, which seems, for somebody that loves technology, is like oh my goodness, we could do way better than this. But like you just said the reality of somebody moving, you know, they're signing a multi-page document that’s very intense and often very emotional. And they could be on a full spectrum. It could be a mom who's signing on behalf of their kids, which happens a lot of times. It could be somebody signing it on behalf of someone who's in a coma, right? And so you're trying to navigate that experience.
And so even down to thinking of customer experience, even down to the way that we designed the interface, we had a lot of back and forth on kind of these really fun type graphics. But then the reality that somebody who's doing a consent document is probably not in a place that they want to see a smiling, jumping individual like clapping because they signed their document, right?
So when you think about yay, you signed your document, you could do fireworks and those kinds of things, which works great, you know when you buy a stock. When you just signed a document that you want to participate in a clinical trial, maybe not fireworks, right? And so you got to kind of think about that experience across the spectrum.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, absolutely. About the patient experience, and to Philippe's point, a wide variety of demographics and everything. It definitely sounds like a design challenge, which I'm sure you've, it sounds like you've thought through.
Okay, a crystal ball question before we dive into some more specific questions to get to know you the person. Our crystal ball question is: where do you see healthcare technology going in the future? And is there anything that you'd really love to see happen? Or something you see trending right now?
BLAKE ADAMS:
That's a great question. You know, where I see it going is, and you said the word earlier, interoperability and integrations. You know, right now, there are ideas that we should have a unified platform, right, where everybody's using the same platform across every ecosystem. And the reality is, as much as a vendor, we would love that. The reality is, that's not going to happen. Every research site, every hospital, every system really has unique needs and unique capabilities. And there's also benefits to having competing vendors out there.
But, the ability to integrate competing systems is really critical, because ultimately, we all want to make the patient's life better. And so I think that's a big part is interoperability.
And I think the second big thing happening is patient ownership of their data. And so you see this happening a lot more now where even clinical trials are very hard to enroll in if you have a certain type of cancer, and I keep going back to oncology, but if you have a certain type of cancer, unless your doctor or provider is aware that there's a clinical trial that is targeting you you're not going to know about it, right. Like you're not going to be able to find it unless you're really savvy and you know to start calling Pfizer and all these companies. You're not going to know that those clinical trials exist.
And so I do see a future too where the patient has more control over their own data and is able to self-opt into maybe searchable databases, where they can be identified for clinical trials or identify clinical research. And so I think that's a big push as well is, you know, really democratizing the ownership of data. When it comes to your patient data. And even simple things, Staci, like you mentioned the dentist earlier, Philippe, you know, if I'm at the dentist, and I change dentists, right? Gosh, I've got to get paper binders that I take to my new dentist of all my historic records, and there's no connection of these things, right? Where if I had my own ownership of all my data, it would really create an awesome experience for me, the patient.
And so patient centricity, I think Staci, is the big push right now. And we'll see some big changes there in the next five to 10 years.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, I think that there's some element of ownership too from a patient standpoint, right? Each of us needs to own that, and that's, and that's a little bit of a change for maybe where we grew up from, you know, just listening to providers. Be a little more prescriptive versus, to your point, take a bit more ownership about that. But then there's also that element of availability, right? Today, I can only imagine how hard it is for a patient to find any kind of information about trials that might benefit them. So the coming together of those two things seems to be pretty powerful.
BLAKE ADAMS:
It does, Staci. You know, as I mentioned earlier, right now, what you have to do is you have to get lucky that your provider knows about the clinical trial. You know, imagine a future where you're in the clinic, and they've identified some blood pressure issue and it automatically then shows you five or six drugs that are being tested that can help with that, right? Like that's, that's a really great area where you're not relying on the network of your provider who has to know about these people, but you're really relying on the network of the technology. So I think there's a lot of exciting things going on there for sure.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
I think that network of the provider is that critical piece because a lot of our providers, they're specialists in their own space and they don't know everything. Expecting a doctor to know everything is just never going to happen. And so how do we help drive that, and I don't know if there’s some e-commerce version of clinical trials or whatnot, but something that allows that. But, kind of to throw a little bit of a curveball at you when you think about the standard beliefs, the standard practices that you're, that exists in your industry, what is something that you passionately disagree with? Something that you go, this is wrong, and this is what I believe?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Gosh, what a great – what a great question. You know, I've got to be careful here because my director of compliance might listen and come by. You know, I think that the big thing I probably disagree with is the interpretations of regulations. What do I mean by that? Right? We often hear that the FDA is obviously very, has extreme oversight of clinical research, for good reason. But what we often hear is that the pharmaceutical companies will limit the innovation of technology, and they throw it back on the FDA, and they say, “hey, well, the FDA said we had to do this, right?” And then what ends up happening, inevitably, almost every time, is the FDA or other regulatory bodies saying no, we never said you had to do that, right? You interpreted our guidance in that way.
And so we see, we see biopharma, pharma tech companies, and even research health systems, limiting the pace of innovation because they believe it goes outside the bounds of governmental regulations when in reality, the regulations are not as strict as a lot of people think they are. So we see that manifest itself in ways like documents, the way documents can be exchanged, the way documents can be shared, which aren't actually regulations, but because the industry is so scared of breaking what rules there are, because if you break them, right, you do potentially go to jail, and you get multimillion-dollar fines. And so there are good reasons there. And so the industry is so scared of breaking those more narrow regulations that they broaden it to kind of have a degree of a variable of, you know, 40% or 50% on either end, and that prevents a lot of innovation in this space.
I think really spending more time understanding what canwe actually do is an area that I think we need to do more of as an industry here in the research healthcare space.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Your comments on ensuring interoperability where each provider has their own thing, going to multiple doctors, same idea, in a much more broad statement, you have to manually transfer, to do all these things. Can we have a single database? Well, because of HIPAA laws, because of this. The question I always ask is that really the case? Sounds like potentially the answer is no.
BLAKE ADAMS:
For those who can't see, because we're on audio, I'm nodding vigorously, but I'm also not saying a lot there. But yes, I completely agree with you.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
That's why I said potentially.
BLAKE ADAMS:
That's right. That's right.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
One final thought on that. I did spend some time at an EHR, electronic health records company, and yeah, same thought. I mean, it's hard when you're, you know, the head of compliance or the head of product at a company like that to make sure that you are complying with regulations, because to your point, Blake, the implications of not are steep.
So yeah, for sure. It's interesting to think about when the cost of those decisions are taken to the extreme then you're over-protecting and then limiting advancements that we could probably all benefit from. So wow, how cool would it be if we could find that balance maybe a little bit better?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Yeah. And Staci, I love that you spent time in EHR. They're often in the news for things like this, where you know there's also the business side, right, if a business case is we want to limit how our data is shared outside our ecosystem, because we're more likely to maintain that business, right, if I work for any other company, I probably don't want to be super interoperable because it creates a moat around my business. And I think it's balancing that fine line of the business needs with the needs of the healthcare industry, where then you kind of gotta say, well, gosh, if we're not sharing data, and we're not opening APIs, and we're not creating connectivity, are we limiting the pace of scientific innovation? And I think what we often see, and this is my final example here is you know, the pace of scientific innovation is absolutely phenomenal right now.
You hear CAR T therapy, you hear all these things Moderna and others are doing. But the capacity of clinical research to test all of that innovation is only about 38% of what's needed. So you see about 60% give or take of these medical advancements gets stalled because there's not enough capacity from patients and from occupational capacity to actually run those clinical trials. And we saw this amazing glimmer of hope during COVID where a lot of that was broken down, and you saw barriers get pushed aside, you saw collaborative ecosystems happen, and connectivity, whatever you may believe about some of that like you saw this collaboration happening, that — imagine if that same level of collaboration and connectivity happened for cancer research or for diabetic research or asthma, like what would that look like for the industry?
And so I think there's some glimmers of hope out there of what connectivity can look like while also maintaining the reality of a business organization. So.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, interesting stuff. In fact, you talked a little bit about data and some of the complexities there. Since we're here talking about customer experience, tell me a little bit about what kind of data is most important to you, and maybe that's patient data and not customer data, but talk to me a little bit about the data that you'd like to see that's important to you and what you do.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Sure, so there are some great patient data companies out there, Staci. I'm glad you mentioned that. We are not one. We don't focus a lot on patient data. We do focus on customer data. And the reason for that is we want our customers, who are primarily research sites, to be able to do their best work, right? And that means identifying things that are slowing down their process.
So for instance, when an organization, prior to Florence, was a major academic in the Midwest, they were averaging about 16 days to get an electronic signature on a contract, right? Well, if you need about 40 electronic signatures to get a clinical trial started and you need to wait and do them in sequence and in order, the average clinical trial takes about nine to 10 months to get started. Well, that's nine or 10 months that a patient who maybe needed a cancer therapy and was in their 10 months of terminal illness like didn't get it because the organization couldn't get set up and running, right. So there's real life implications of inefficiencies.
And so what we help organizations do through customer data is identify those inefficiencies and nail them down. And so for instance, that same organization which was averaging 15 to 17 days, dropped it two to three hours, right?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Oh, nice.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Now a lot of the reason for that is prior to electronic with Florence, they were literally having to put people on shuttle buses around their health system, to go find the doctor to get them to sign the piece of paper, and then the doctor inevitably would have moved on to another class if they were a teaching doctor, or moved on to another clinic. And so it would take 15 to 17 days to finally track down the doctor to get them to sign the document. And so now they can push that out.
So our data, Staci, really centers around operational data when it comes to how the sites are operating, and how the sponsors or pharmaceutical companies are operating, and where we can eliminate some of those barriers to increase capacity. The other example I'll give is, and this is going to sound archaic, but pharma companies, what they do traditionally is they have what's called a CRA, which is a Clinical Research Associate. And let's say they're running a clinical trial at — I live in Atlanta — at Emory here in Atlanta. And that CRA will literally get on an airplane about three times a quarter to travel down to Emory to spend three days at Emory going through all their paperwork to make sure it was done right. And then they'll fly home, they'll come back in three months, they'll do it again. So there's no proactive operational insights into what's actually going on. So our mission is to get data that helps eliminate those.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
It’s drawing a lot of lines and chasing people. It's like spy work. Gotta go find these things.
BLAKE ADAMS:
It 100% is. It 100% is.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
All right, confession time. What's the hardest lesson that you've learned on this journey through your time with your customers and patients?
BLAKE ADAMS:
That's a great question. You know, the hardest lesson, I'll give two. The first is that, as we mentioned earlier in this episode, the revenue, fortunately, or unfortunately, is primarily centered at pharmaceutical biotech companies.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Meaning they’re the buyer?
BLAKE ADAMS:
And so they're the ones that — they’re the buyer. They're the buyer, either directly or indirectly, so it's either that they're buying it or that research side is getting reimbursed for the cost of our software. And so they have the money, right? And so any business is typically and is smart to build for the buyer.
But the reality is, the research site, which is where the work gets done, we mentioned this earlier, is who is benefiting from the workflows and who can have the most efficiency gains from the workflows, but the needs of the site and the sponsor are different. And so it's navigating that reality of, how do we maintain our site-first posture, and that's how we've won is by building the best customer experience for research sites. We’re number one rated on G2. And how do we maintain that while also realizing the needs of the ones who are spending the money and buying the software solutions and trying to create that connection? And that's really what we spend a lot of our time doing is trying to bridge the gap or link those two ends of the ecosystem in order to figure out how do we build for one while getting the funding from the other. So yeah, that's kind of where we spend a lot of time, and I think it's the hardest.
I think the other, Staci, you know, the other confession there is we started our journey — and you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I’ve been with Florence for a really long time since we were a small company — and we started our journey building for just research sites, and they were the ones buying our software. And so we built a lot more emotionally focused content and experience because a lot of times the people in the buying role at a hospital health system moved up from research nurse to — to head nurse to then overseeing clinical research and so they are not always focused on the numbers or the finances or the revenue. They're focused on the experience of the patient.
And when we moved and started selling into pharma and biotechs, we kind of started with that approach, which was let's make it emotional. Let's make it storytelling driven. But what we found is biotechs, and pharmas often have more business people in these roles. And so they want and expect the ROI, the hard metrics, the cost savings, the efficiency savings.
And so we had to really start figuring out how to create two experiences when it came to our marketing strategy as well as our experience within the platform itself. So sites want a little more fun. We have — and this is getting really deep — but within our platform, when somebody loses a password, right, or they forget their password, the email’s like, “Oh, no, you know, it looks like you messed up and forgot your password. We're here to help get you started,” right? Well, that's really fun and playful which works great for research sites. For a pharma exec that was like, okay, well who are you guys, right? Is this just a small tiny company that doesn't know what they’re doing? So we had to kind of create experiences that mimic the needs of both audiences. And I think that's the other confession, Staci, is what worked well for one may not work well on the other side.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
I mean, I think that aligns with a lot of the way that Khoros does business, right, because you’ve got the customer and then you have their customers and users. And so thinking about it in a broad picture perspective of whose lives do you make better? And how do you make sure that you balance both simultaneously?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Right, always about, you know, the end user may not align with the ROI for the buyer. Definitely, it's a challenge even more so in a highly regulated space, right?
BLAKE ADAMS:
That's exactly right. How do you, and I think, Staci, how do you make the buyer care more about the experience, right, because if you go to any conference in this space that has both parties, the sides are always griping that the sponsors don't — don't care about our experience, right? And so how do we be the broker of that relationship and create the passion at the sponsor or pharmaceutical level for the experience of the sites that are, they’re running that clinical trial?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
All right, it's time to get to maybe the most interesting and fun part of our podcast. This is where we get to know you. So we do something we call Quick Fire Confessions. Again, the name of the podcast is CX Confessions. So Philippe and I are going to just quick-fire some questions at you. I will start first.
Our first question for you is: what was your first concert?
BLAKE ADAMS:
What was my first concert? Gosh, that's a great question. My first concert I remember was Jason Mraz with my wife. Yeah, I grew up in the country, Staci, that did not have concerts. So concerts for us were like you know, out in the backyard. My first real city concert was Jason Mraz with my wife — or then, my girlfriend I guess you could say — gosh, 12 plus years ago, but yeah, that was it.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Wow, that’s fun.
How about the first profession, or the profession other than your own that you would want to try out if you could?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Gosh, Imagineering. Designing stuff for — if you can't see my screen, there's Disney stuff on the back. Imagineering. Being an engineer designing things for Disney or one of those type of companies experiences. My background’s mechanical engineering, which I know is odd, but that's what I went to school for. And yeah, I love stories. I love meshing storytelling and experience into a live environment. So definitely.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
That makes you a great marketer.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Let's all hope so, Staci. We'll see what my team says when they hear this if they agree with that statement or not.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Love it. Okay. Hey, speaking of where you spent time in your past, what was your very, very first job and it could even be the job you had in high school just to, you know, buy some stuff, or your first professional job?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Sure. So my first professional job was running media for college athletics. So I helped Georgia State University here in Atlanta start their football team way back in 2008. And so I spent three years there just starting a new football program. I was the media person that made the videos and created the graphics and did all that and had an absolute blast, Staci, doing it. But gosh, it burns you out. For anybody listening, if you ever worked in college sports, it's constant all day every day. So that was it.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Cool.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
So to keep from burning out — the most inspiring book you've ever read?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Great question. Gosh, you're putting me on the spot. I like it. The most inspiring book I've ever read. You know, I just finished one called “Greatness,” but it's all about how do you move from success to greatness in your life and what really matters, and I think it was a really cool read.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Okay. All right. Last question for you in Rapid Fire Confessions. You mentioned you lived in Atlanta, but you were maybe born and raised in something a little bit more rural. If you had to move somewhere other than Atlanta, where would it be?
BLAKE ADAMS:
Gosh, great question. I would, we may one day move back up into the — so I was born in extreme northeast Georgia in the mountains of the foothills, and we could go back up that way, especially with remote technology. We also spent a month and a half in Tuscany this year in the summer with our family, and gosh, it's just incredible. So I think between those two my wife would say north Georgia so we can be near family to take care of our two little ones. I would say something like Italy, so we can have a little more fun. So we'll see. We'll see, but one of those two for sure.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Well, Blake, this has really, really been amazing. So good to get to know you. So good to hear about all the great things you're doing to help advance healthcare in our country and our society. Incredibly meaningful work. And we're really happy to have had you on the show today. Thank you.
BLAKE ADAMS:
Thank you both. This has been a lot of fun and thank you for inviting me to be on.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Thanks, Blake.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Wow, Philippe, what an interesting interview and the intersection of all things we think about from a customer experience standpoint that they have to think about from a similar kind of diverse user lens. I know one of the things I've had you do for me is lead CX here at Khoros. I would love your thoughts on what Blake shared with us today.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
You know, for me, it was fascinating to hear the perspective of how it works in healthcare, a more regulated environment. Obviously, most of our customers don't live in that regulated environment. So it's a different perspective, but there are a lot of synergies, similarities.
They were talking about diversity and how you think about the age groups and how you present information. And I think the quote that he said was 3% to 4% of the patients are diverse. And so obviously trying to get more, but including them and making sure that it's effective, right? And we do the same thing for our customers and have to think about accessibility and all these other areas of making sure that all types of people can interact with the brands. And it's just a very interesting way to think about it. And making sure that user experience makes sense for them.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
And then he also talked a little bit about how different it is to design for a buyer or design for ROI versus design for the end user. It's definitely a difficult challenge I think they have.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
No, absolutely. It's a completely different experience. Think about a pharma company wanting, here's my data. Here's the information that I get from the trials versus a research team who's like, just let me do my job. And then you have the end users who say, just get me healthy.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Well, Philippe, I think I could talk about this at length more, but it's time to wrap up this episode of CX Confessions. Thank you so much for being my fellow co-host. This has been super fun. I know I get to work with you a lot on a daily basis and what a joy it's been to do this episode with you. Thank you.
PHILIPPE MESRITZ:
Anytime. I appreciate the invite and the offer.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Thanks, everyone, for listening to us on this episode of CX Confessions. We'll talk to you next time.
