(soft music begins) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm joined by Jeremy Swift, the CEO and co-founder of Cordial. Jeremy, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to have you on the program. >> Hey, thanks so much Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> Making this conversation's work very socially distanced, but I'd love to understand a little bit about Cordial. What do you offer and how do you help customers? >> Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the question. I guess for starters Cordial is a cross-channel messaging and data platform. Our clients, let me tell you a little bit about what that actually means. But I would say our clients can collect all of their unstructured, kind of disparate customer and business data from wherever it lives within their tech stack. And then ultimately use that data to build audience segments, gather insights about that data and about their customers. Kind of discover some trends on that too and then ultimately automate and orchestrate hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. And when I say experiences too, to define that a little bit. I really am talking about, frankly, kind of a wealth of interactions that a customer might have with a brand. So, that could be things like transforming your promotional, your triggered and your transactional email, communications to your SMS and your MMS messages, to your push in your in-app messages, targeted direct mail, all the way, actually, frankly, to things like in-store devices like clienteling experiences and things like that when you're physically going into the store, whenever we can get back into that, a little bit more consistently, I would say. And then even things like sending targeted audiences to third-party social platforms like a Google Adwords or a Facebook or whatnot. So, in short, I would say we're the underlying data platform and the activation layer that helps brands better communicate with their customers because they ultimately understand their customers better. Um, yeah, go ahead. >> You mentioned hyper-personalized and we've been talking about personalization for a long time. And especially as the more demanding we consumers get, we expect brands to know who we are, offer us the right things that are in sequence and offer me something I've already purchased. But define hyper-personalized customer experiences. >> Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. You know, I think this is a significant piece that when we think about kind of the marketing language or lingo that gets used out there, this is probably one that gets used a little bit flippantly. It really is this idea of taking the individualized behaviors of you, Lisa, of me, Jeremy, and looking at those in a full view, not just what I did in this moment but what is my history with your brand tell me? And how do also some of those behaviors now also, maybe predict future behaviors as well. And using that data to ultimately drive and derive the content that is being put into the message. So, hyper-personalized meaning truly, one-to-one, like very, very discreet or descriptive pieces of data that ultimately tie to unique pieces of content that are going to drive a great experience or a particular behavior. So, some examples of maybe how we deploy that with folks, we work with brands like Backcountry or Revolve Clothing, Eddie Bauer, 1-800 contacts, we work with brands like that to help them drive revenue growth through things like, again, hyper-personalized messages drives higher revenue per message. It helps them significantly increase their customer lifetime value, again because the experience that they're creating for them is very tailored, very unique to that individual. So, some things that we measure ourselves on with respect to that and things where we're really proud of are things like our clients are generating a 250 X ROI. And typically they're achieving triple digit revenue growth within their first 30 days using Cordial, our platform, because of the data layer that we have there, we built a transformations product to that just last year alone for our clients transformed and activated over 110 billion customer data records, again for our clients there. And probably the thing that I think excites me the most and frankly kind of gets back to some of my roots in my history of why we started this business too, but, it really is our implementation process as well. So, brands want to hyper-personalize, they want to do all these things that we talk about. But often they think, man, the process to get there is going to take me a really long time. Again, one of the things we really pride ourselves on is that implementation process. It's 90% faster than the legacy marketing clouds out there within the market. To give you an idea of how incredibly fast that is. Our enterprise clients are up in sending typically in less than seven days. That really is unheard of to nearly all enterprise brands but we really pride ourselves on the flexibility of cordless technology coupled with our incredibly talented services team that really helps unlock that for many of our brands and customers. >> So, big numbers that you mentioned, customers achieving impressive metrics-based business outcomes. You talked about the 250 X ROI, triple digit revenue growth very quickly. You also talked about your implementation process being 90% faster than legacy marketing clouds. Talk to me about the actual data platform. And I'd like to kind of unpack that into some of the things that differentiate it. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I guess first and foremost, on the data platform side of things, that really is a significant differentiator. And I guess even before I jump into that though, too. I would be remissed actually if... I think that's natural to probably jump right into product as being the key differentiator at the end of the day. But when I really do honestly think about what differentiates Cordial in the market and what are the things that we really hang our hat on, I can honestly say Lisa, like first and foremost it really is our people. Again, I know it's really natural to go straight to product and talk about the features and the functions or how you thought about building a particular thing. And again, those things are highly important in this kind of digital transformation era that we're in. But I would say in a market that is incredibly saturated with a lot of players across it, within marketing technology and brands, trying to differentiate who does what and who they should work with, at the end of the day we really do believe that creating and enabling a culture of world-class human beings that live out for succinct values. Those for us are things like communicate better than the rest, being tenacious about our clients and the problems we solve for them, acting like owners and then really being kind of on-mission, if you will, to be Cordial, we think that those things are differentiated and frankly really necessary, especially in today's society and culture that we're in. I'm happy to talk about some of the product side of things there though, too. But I'll pause in there for a second-- >> I love that you've said that about one of the key differentiators is the corporate culture. That's one of the things that a lot of companies, legacy companies struggle with. Especially in dynamic times like this, but I would always thought for all the tech shows I've been to, over the many, many years that the customer experience is dependent and inextricably linked to the employee experience. It sounds like you've kind of built the company with that in mind. >> I think you have to. Again, robots have not taken over the world yet, right? And so, this really is still about people combined with technology and how those two things married together. Not just on our side, in terms of what we're bringing to bear for our clients but the experiences our clients are having too, you know. Our clients are working with their IT department or with their engineers and their marketing teams, and they have to figure out how do you make all those things very harmonious together. I just think that at the end of the day, the experience that your people are bringing, the empathy that you're bringing to people, especially in this environment where we've been virtual and you don't get that face-to-face contact, you don't get to maybe delve deep into understanding people, relationally. I just think it's really important. And we, as a business, again, I have this said to me often, and in turn, I said often too, is you can't name your company Cordial and be a jerk at the end of the day. So, there really is a level of empathy that I think needs to be brought through in everything that we do. We're not just out to be, you know, a world-class technology company for our clients. We know our clients expect that from us but we really want to be great human beings at the end of the day, which I think that's really the kind of the link that creates really great partnerships at the end of the day. >> I completely agree and I think especially now more than ever, that infusion of empathy is so critical for businesses in any industry. I do want to unpack the data architecture. You talked about customers being able to get to unstructured customer business data from wherever it lives in the stack. How do you enable that? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Again, that product side is from a differentiators perspective, it's significant. I would say we purposely built Cordial with a data architecture to accommodate just that, to accommodate any number of channels but also an infinite amount of data sources. And then in turn I alluded to this earlier but the ability to manipulate and restructure or transform that data coming in, or going out of Cordial to maybe other systems within a client's tech stack. This differentiation really is significant compared to the legacy clouds, but it is also significant, I would say relative to other kind of next gen options within the market. Investing in Cordial for a brand is... it's a huge step forward in terms of digital kind of future-proofing themselves and how they're setting themselves up to meet the needs of a really rapid evolving consumer and the experience the consumer expects to have with the brands. So, brands collect daily more and more information about users' behaviors and patterns, and we've frankly just see an incredible opportunity for our clients to learn from their customers and the massive amount of data that that client is kind of showing or exhibiting to them. And then putting that to action, putting that to work in terms of the experience that they're creating for their customer, you know, this kind of ties that word of empathy back to it as well. Even though we're talking about digital communications for a brand, it's still a human interaction, it's still a relationship. And so, if we can help brands really understand their data, again through a data architecture that's really purpose-built to really ingest all of that in and then activate that in terms, of their messaging that they're sending out to folks. That can create a level of empathy, that might sound altruistic, I don't believe it is. I think we as human beings, as a professional, if my job is to communicate my brand or my products to my end customer, I would want to do that with a level of empathy, with a level of sincerity, with a level of understanding and knowledge that tells that end customer I know who you are, I'm paying attention. I'm not being creepy and big brother-ish about it, but I'm paying attention. I want to show that I understand you, no differently, frankly than the relationships that we all have as human beings. I mean, if I walked into a conversation with you, Lisa, and I've known you for two years but I started asking you all the same boilerplate questions of like, hey, can you tell me your name again? And who are you? And where did you come from? And what school did you go to? You would kind of think that's so odd. You don't... I thought you knew me but you're not acting like you know me. I think we're all about creating an opportunity for brands to be able to do that with their customers and do it with a level that the customer goes, you know me, you get me, you understand what my desires, wishes, or patterns are with your business. >> Right? No, I think that's so interesting. And I agree with you. The opportunity is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not just more data is born and created, more data sources are born and created. The consumer demand is only increasing. So you mentioned, I want to talk about customer tech. You talked about, you mentioned Eddie Bauer being a customer. Eddie Bauer is a legacy organization which has been around for a long time. But I also know you guys work with, with younger, fresher, maybe more cloud native companies. I wonder, though, how an Eddie Bauer goes about fast implementation, you said 90% faster than legacy data platforms. I wonder how an Eddie Bauer goes through that. 'Cause I imagine they replaced a legacy marketing platform with Cordial? >> They did, they did. They actually replaced a handful of kind of legacy platforms and systems that they had in place. And Eddie Bauer is just like, I would say, many other kind of mainstay brands that you and I grew up with to where if they want to compete, if they want to really be on the cutting edge, they need to innovate quickly. They need to evolve from maybe legacy systems to newer systems. Like you said, maybe what more digital native or digital first brands are starting out with, when they launched their business. Eddie Bauer is a really cool story though. Again, it's kind of an iconic brand at the end of the day but they came to us with a really clear set of challenges. And the first and foremost, again, kind of goes back to the point we were talking about, which was Cordial help us consolidate our data from multiple sources that we have. Online, offline order data, loyalty information that they had, a disparate unique customer IDs that they had across all the different databases they had. They had geolocation data, they had product data, customer behavior data, a lot of data all sitting in different places. So first and foremost, like help us get that organized in one central place, being within Cordial's data platform. And then from there they wanted to use those data sources, right? It's not just about bringing it together. It's about now, what do you do with it? How do you activate that? And in the case with Eddie Bauer, they used Cordial to dynamically render... This is a cool example actually, dynamically render a message to each individual customer containing their rewards balance, the expiration date of that reward, a unique bar code specific to that individual to eliminate fraud there... what was it? Nearest store address that they had as well as a map of the store location. All within the message that they were receiving. And by clicking on that message it immediately activated kind of an API sequence behind the scenes, transparent to the user, but something that Eddie Bauer had never been able to do before. And that API sequence that initiated, generated a personalized pass for that particular customer that loaded directly into their wallet, on their device for them to be able to redeem in store. By doing that, it actually then enabled the ability for, if I'm near an Eddie Bauer store, let's say within a mile of it, Eddie Bauer can immediately push a notification to my phone without even having a branded app on the phone, saying, Hey you have a $20 rewards certificate in your wallet, it expires in seven days. You're a mile away from your closest store. Click here and we'll navigate you to that store. Some really cool use cases that really helped them kind of take some big steps forward in that digital transformation for them as a brand. And I would just say kind of going back to even the AWS piece of this too. All of that might sound easy at the end of the day. It's incredibly difficult to do that across millions of customers in minutes, it's very difficult. And I can genuinely say that our experiences and the work that we've done with AWS cloud services is a huge piece of making all of that a reality. And oddly enough, Eddie Bauer actually is an AWS customer as well. And some of those synergies in terms of how we're able to sync up data via Kinesis Streams and S3 buckets and things like that, and be able to make that data very operable was a huge advantage, I think for us, especially in terms of speed to market and the ability to get these kind of programs up and live for a brand like them. >> So, when you were looking at building Cordial and co-founding it back in 2014. Were you drawn to AWS right away? Because you just had this sense that we have to go this direction to enable this complexity to be achieved at scale? >> I mean, yes. I mean, unequivocally 2014 feels like eons ago. It's not really, I guess at the end of the day, but there was... I mean there was no other even remotely viable competitive option at the time to even consider. There are obviously are plenty of cloud services out there now, but I mean that was probably the shortest negotiation we had as co-founders about what we should do with respect to that. It was immediately, I mean that was part of our thesis, was all of the legacy clouds were in co-lo centers and trying to figure out migration plans to even get some of their infrastructure into the cloud. And we said, let's just start straight in the cloud right from day one, it's a huge competitive advantage. It gives us speed, it gives us scale. It gives us all sorts of things that we can immediately start unlocking value with. And so, yeah, when we started Cordial, AWS was, I mean that was day one. We initiated that and they've been an incredibly strategic partner for us ever since then. >> One of the things that are wrapping up here that I always find interesting when you're looking at new technologies like yours, you're right. 2014 does seem like eons ago, but it really wasn't. But you working with legacy, iconic brands like an Eddie Bauer that was probably at one point all paper-based transactions, having to digitize and digitally transform to meet their customers where they are now that need to marry online and offline behaviors to deliver that hyper-personalized experience. I know you guys also work with companies like Revolve as well. So, this is the technology that any type of business, historic, new, can use and implement, sounds like fairly quickly to make big impacts. And I think nowadays being able to deliver information in real-time that's hyper-personalized, it's going to be a make or break for companies that survive this new era that we're living in. >> Yeah, it, it really is. And again, for us, fundamentally goes back to again, why we set out to build Cordial? My co-founders and I actually had history in building one of the first gen, what I characterize as kind of a legacy platform now in this space. And frankly, after seeing or 15 years of seeing marketers struggle to get those platforms to scale to the level of data and sophistication out there, we knew there was a better way for marketers and technologists to work together. And we intimately then knew the way that this should be architected. So, as you said, in 2014, I mean, we set out to build Cordial to really transform the way marketers and technologists, you know, how they collaborated to fundamentally change the experiences their customers were having with their brands. Again, it was very, I guess, heart-centered on some level as the way that I would put that, this was never monetarily driven for us. It was all around, I think our own personal frustrations of not being able to meet those needs of our customers. And it wasn't a fault of the previous kind of legacy platforms. It was just technology had evolved and frankly consumers and digital devices had evolved enough to where there needed to be somebody and some brand or some companies who said, let's rethink this, let's rebuild this from the ground up. You mentioned Revolve, which Revolve Clothing is just a really cool example. They've been a Cordial client now for four years, they're going on their fifth year with Cordial. And they really are an incredible success story. One of the stories that I just, it's kind of like a crown jewel that we take a lot of pride in. I know our teams do with respect to Revolve is, when they came to us, they had, gosh! Two automations in place that it took them roughly about two years working with the legacy cloud, even to get those in place. And in a matter of their first eight months with Cordial they had nearly 30 new automations live using Cordial. And those 30 automations had generated eight times more revenue than they had previously generated with automations. It was an incremental at the time roughly almost $12 million in net new revenue that was unrealized for the business prior to that. And, you know, that's something we take a lot of pride in. We take a lot of pride in again, the speed of how quickly we can help a brand be able to do this, but it's not just a matter of getting something up and running. It's about the results that we can drive for them. We hold ourselves accountable to that and we expect our clients to hold us accountable to that as well. Next gen technology or new technology or modern technology for the sake of just new is uninteresting, unless it is actually... not just incrementally moving things forward for your business but I would say it needs to be an outsized set of results that you're driving for them to frankly make that even just the mental hurdle to get over that, make that worth it at the end of the day. >> Yeah. I was looking at some of the customer stories on your website and was very impressed seeing those metrics-based business outcomes. 'Cause that's what it's about. It's about that and delivering that at speed and with agility. Jeremy, I wish we had more time 'cause I know we could keep talking, but I really enjoyed understanding more about Cordial and what you guys do. And I look forward to seeing what's to come. >> So good, thanks so much, Lisa. It was wonderful. >> My pleasure, for Jeremy Swift, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (soft music ends)