(funky music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Donald Klein. Today, we're here to talk about digital transformation, and the challenges many enterprises face in helping employees adopt the new applications that drive their business. To have that conversation, we're joined by Vara Kumar, CTO and co-founder of Whatfix . Vara, welcome to the show. >> Thanks, thanks Don for inviting me to the show. >> Great, so looking forward to this. Tell us a little bit about Whatfix, what you guys do and a little bit of the history here. >> Sure. Whatfix is a digital adoption platform. So essentially it overlays on top of applications and makes employees to use applications faster and better. So, we are five years old company, so we have offices in four different countries, and we have 500 customers, and 60 Fortune 500 users, including companies like Amazon, UPS, Facebook, Microsoft, Western Union, Western Digital. The users are a variety of applications like CRMs, VRPs, SCMs. >> Great, fantastic customer base, that's really good. So when you say you're a digital adoption platform that kind of provides an overlay, what specifically you're talking about? You're talking about notifications inside of an application? Tell us a little more about that. >> Sure, sure. So Whatfix helps employees through all their journey in their applications. As they onboard to the applications for the first time, Whatfix welcomes them and holds them to the application. So we provide these, what we call as flows, so these are step-by-step guidance to the users for using the applications and processes and not only within the application, Whatfix guides the users across applications that the employee is faced with, so for example-- >> So cross-application workflows, that kind of thing. >> That's correct, that's correct. For example Anaconda executive, so they have to manage opportunities in the CRM, and then to create a code they have to go to the CPQ and then to submit a purchase order, probably they will have to go to a digital workplace to maintain the code and proceed to the contract. So Whatfix can guide the users through all this and that process. >> Great, so it's not just about the challenges of learning about one particular application, it's actually learning an entire workflow that might stretch across multiple applications. >> That's accurate. >> Some sort of end to end process that gets very complex because you're moving from one interface to the next. >> That's accurate, that's accurate. >> And I guess another challenge would be that, many, in a large enterprise, right, many of the applications that come from the well-known vendors get highly customized for that particular business environment is that correct? >> That's completely true Don, so, Salesforce instance of UPS looks very different from Salesforce instance of Western Union because it's completely customized to the organization business workflows and the nature of their business. So this customization also brings in lot more adoption challenges because even though I'm an account executive who has seen Salesforce in my past experience it looks very different from my current job. So that's more challenging for the enterprises to train their employees and make them use. >> Great, understood, okay, very good. So the problem that you guys are really trying to solve is around this challenge of getting employees to adopt the new applications as part of their overall digital transformation journey, is that right? >> That's true, it's not only new applications now with the so much of cloud movement. So the applications are actually getting updated more faster as you must have heard so much about as well being used in the enterprises for the IT rollouts and IT deployments. That means changes are constant so because you are reinventing your business process as you're learning. So now employees, actually, it impacts more the employee experience because every update employees have to be on top of those. So Whatfix can help them with these updates and making sure that employees are self-served. >> Understood, okay, very good. So now, this has become really such a widespread problem across many of these large enterprises that it's now become quite a mature category of software solutions, is that right? >> That's accurate, Gartner called this category as digital adoption solutions, DAS. >> Digital adoption solutions, okay DAS. >> That's correct, and then they coined this term only a quarter back, and they published reports, in terms of seller productivity and how it will influence the digital workplace, and such kind of things. >> Great, okay, great. So this category now is becoming more widespread, and people really see these types of solutions as being key to enabling digital transformation in the enterprise, right? >> That's accurate. >> Okay great, so then what are the trends that are driving this problem, what is it that's making this such a problem area that companies really need to focus on dedicated solutions to solving? >> Yeah, so one primary is the cloud migration. Yes, more and more the companies, wants to move to the cloud, for example you no longer hear CRM being on-prem, so people are using all the cloud CRMs. So the migration to the cloud, and then the digital, overall the digital transformation of these business practices to suit this cloud migration, that'll also, it's all putting pressure on employee experience. So impacting and making sure that employees are getting used to these new applications and the constant rollouts. >> Got it, got it, okay. So with all this happening, right, more and more applications moving to the cloud, the applications themselves are evolving much faster, the interfaces are changing, and then moreover they're getting more complex, because they're getting more interconnected, right? And so you have this step by step kind of work flow that helps people navigate all of these integrated applications to actually perform a single workflow. >> That's accurate, that's accurate and at the same time given that Whatfix is on top of these applications we are learning a lot about the user, this particular user and what they are doing, what they are good at, what they're not good at, this is helping us to make our content more personalized to the users, just like Google, you search for the same keyword, I search for the same thing, we both see different results. Because it's personalizing to our taste and our knowledge and expertise. So that's exactly it's getting into. And it's not only guidance, we are also helping users to be more productive by automating certain steps. Let's say you do a certain activity every day, then Whatfix can do that automatically for you so that you're becoming more and more faster in your job. >> Interesting, that's interesting. So it's not only helping provide guidance for people moving through these applications but it's actually collecting data about how users are interfacing with it, right, and then delivering a more kind of personalized experience in terms of the guidance that it offers. >> Accurate, accurate, that's accurate. >> Great, so that's really kind of, I guess that would really be the main kind of area of innovation I would imagine for a system like this, right, the ability to capture data about how users are interfacing with the application and then provide recommendations on how to do it better. >> Yes, that's definitely one of the area there's several reasons why customers choose us. We believe in the concept called adoption everywhere, so that adoption everywhere, that means employee need not be on the application all the time, they may want to interact with the application when they're outside of the application. So be, maybe you're on the wiki, you're looking for something then you wanted interface with application, so Whatfix is present across all touchpoints wherever the employee may decide and guide them to the application and help them use the application. And second, we are very easy to deploy and maintain, so we invested heavily on this, because we realize that we don't have to, we shouldn't be providing a platform which is technically more complex for the business guys to create these kind of process flows, we kept them very low tech, and our authoring environment is very easy for them to use and maintain. And then we are, we are very open in terms of how our API is just like Salesforce, which is very open in terms of integrations because we do understand that enterprises are, wants more of interconnected applications so, our allowed APIs are open and we work well with the enterprise ecosystem. And our customer success is highly regarded, so we are best among in the software vendors in terms of the highest customer satisfaction. And we care a lot about real user privacy and security so we don't really collect PII information for the recommendations and personalizations as I spoke about. >> Okay, very good. And so then the, tell us a little bit more about which kind of applications are you guys finding, which categories of applications really kind of benefit most from this kind of guided, walkthrough capability? >> Sure, so the applications are widespread so but more commonly people use us on CRMs, ERPs, and SCMs, and digital workplaces. These are the kind of applications where customers commonly use us on. >> Okay, so ERP and CRM would be the kind of core, would you say? >> Yeah, CRM, ERP and SCM. So these will be the core I would say. And, it's not only the applications that the customers are purchasing from outside, but Whatfix can work on any application that is internally built, any applications that are their IT team is customizing, Whatfix can work on those. >> Great so, bespoke applications developed internally inside companies are equally suitable for this, as are the the packaged applications they might be customizing for their business processes. >> That's correct. >> Okay, that's great. So I just, on the kind of conclude here, let's talk a little bit about maybe some of the customer success stories, that you guys have had. And I'm not asking you to necessarily name names, but maybe talk about some of the areas where you've seen some real value creation from implementing a system like this. >> Sure, sure, our customers have seen that our onboarding time of employees into the applications have reduced one third, because of using Whatfix, because now employees are learning in the flow of work, you no longer have to train them to use the applications, and we've also seen that organizations telling that their content creation times and their amount of planning preparation time has reduced 85%, because of our easy to use authoring environment, and easy to maintain authoring environment. And we've also seen organizations have reduced internal support tickets by 60%. Yeah, so we have also seen that the overall productivity of the employees increased by 35% because they're able to find things and be able to self serve, and do more faster in the applications. >> Got it, so the old days of sitting down and sort of expecting the employees to read the user manual page by page, right, before they dive in, is kind of gone now right? >> It's gone. >> What people want to see is they want to get into the application and then they want to be able to be guided through what they need to do to solve their particular problem. And they want it done in real time. >> That's true, that's right Don. >> And even better they have that whole guide through maybe customized to their particular problem. >> That's accurate Don, that's the digital option solutions for you. >> Great, well that sounds like a fantastic solution, understand the role it plays fantastic, I think you guys are doing great work. So, want to maybe just kind of touch on this last point, where do you see this kind of industry going in the future? This is fantastic innovation but how do you see this trending as digital transformation becomes more widespread? >> Yeah, sure. So adoption as the problem statement more and more organizations understand, and more and more software vendors understand today, we are at Dreamforce now, so if you see the number of sessions around adoption is phenomenal. So, when the Gartner called out that only six to 7% of our enterprises have adopted to the solutions like Whatfix, so there has to be more awareness, some people, enterprises understand that adoption is a problem, but they are not aware that there are solutions that exist to tackle that problem. So we see that's going to be the future for us as we go forward, having more and more enterprises adopt these kind of solutions. >> Great, okay, well if you happen to be at Dreamforce, folks, stop by and talk to Whatfix. So, Vara Kumar thank you for coming on TheCUBE. So thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation, I'm Donald Klein and we'll see you next time. (funky music)

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