 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 Mhotra, 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 a particular interest is you guys have done some new survey work around some of the challenges, 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 what 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 application workflows. And so the important point there, this is what you call kind of in-application guidance. That's right. Right, okay. 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 that could be interactive walkthroughs 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 know, you was a company, you guys have seen fantastic adoption of your solution. I think you were mentioning to me that you guys have an MPS score that it's sort of in the 100th percentile, right? Sort of unheard of for a software company, right? 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 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 things you found? Sure, so you know, we surveyed 500 enterprises in North America and we looked across areas and but also focused on the CRM area. And what we found is that 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 flow of work technologies would increase their employee productivity and increase the employee experience. Okay, well, so let me understand why that number is so high that 75% of sales reps aren't using their CRM application to end in. I mean, obviously sort of CRMs have always been the bugaboo for a lot of reps, right? Feeling in the data, but really in today's world there'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 every day. And these are heavily customized to organizations and sometimes, you know, within different business units and geographies within organizations. Obviously customers are different globally and products that they're selling are different. So the CRM has to be customized. And I think you 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, in the API, free API world there's so much of cross application workflow that it's not easy for an average employer 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 of 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? Absolutely. So it's kind of like a cross workflow challenge to be able to understand all this stuff. Absolutely, and you know, with the movement of the cloud, all of this is rapidly evolving. There used to be a time when software companies would release new releases once in 18 months. Now it's once in three weeks, right? And so there's that infusion that, you know, even sales operations manager or IT managers and learning and development 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 cloud 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. Absolutely, yeah. So this is kind of what you guys are tackling is really kind of almost a kind of a learning and adoption problem. Is that right more generally? That's totally accurate. And then more specifically it's, you know, we're enabling learning in the flow of work because you know, there is this whole mega trend 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 of weeks of training. They're going to forget 90% of that within a week. And then as their work life progresses, there's statistics from LinkedIn and Deloitte that employees are only able to spare 1% of their average work week towards formal learning. So there's no choice other than enabling them throughout their work day, throughout their applications with sort of micro moments of learning in the in-app learning, like you said. That's fantastic comment there. Sort of micro, what do you call it? Micro learning moments? Yes, micro learning moments. Flow of work. That's fantastic. Okay. And so that's really what you're saying is is that people don't, you know, the old school was attend a training class, get up to speed, right? And then sort of use that throughout the year. Well, that doesn't work anymore. That doesn't work at all. Okay, got it, right. So then talk to us a little bit about kind of what FIX 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, you know, step-by-step guidance content. So if there's a new user joining the application, they're guided us to wear 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 mini LMS or mini learning task lists that are users required to complete. And when they do that, they're actually clicking through the application. This is not a YouTube video. They're watching offline and hoping 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. So 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 they've, you know, 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 salespeople and employees have to do is to click, you know, empty clicks or navigational clicks and a lot of time 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 make it kind of walk us through what's the typical kind of adoption cycle for a customer who says, okay, you know, yes, we understand our whole kind of art. 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 workflows 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. You know, 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, you know, what their workflows look like across applications, where they are excessively long or manual or non-productive. 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 workflows 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, on, 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, an LMS course, you know, that you can take a slide share, a PDF, an article, and these are automatically sent, you know, throughout the enterprise. So even if the salesperson is not in Salesforce doing work, they're on their mobile phone, perhaps, you know, interacting with a chatbot or maybe they're taking an LMS course, they have the same in-app content and guidance available throughout. We call it adoption everywhere. And then, you know, they may be on the road, they see something, they read it. The 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 would take six to eight months. You know, how hard it is to record videos and, you know, 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 results into the big 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 kind of static learners. They want to actually learn by doing. And so that's what digital 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 to use the application. Interesting. So you're actually driving 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 of 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've made these paragraphs change, where are the hundred other places I don't need to go and change back. So that problem solved forever. Interesting. Okay. So let's just talk, you know, as we kind of, you know, wrap up here. Let's talk a little bit about, so the survey found that kind of 75% of reps, you know, particularly with, let's say just an application at CRM, right? I'm sure you've got similar data for lots of other application categories, but something like CRM is a real 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 of that usage history, right? Yes. So where do you see this going? What's the kind of workflow of the future going to look like once you've, 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 is going to have, you know, 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 APIs and more and more customized. So, you know, a future worker has to be digitally savvy, up their digital quotient and be comfortable navigating in this complex, highly digital world across multiple applications. So that's one. I think the second trend is that they're going to have to focus both employees and their companies, have the workers, employees focus in the most critical activities and be comfortable with bots in automation doing the routine tasks and the data entry. And so you've got to be comfortable with giving up some work. And I think the third thing is that, you know, these workers and employees have to learn to live with these bots and automation and be willing to accept hyper-personalized, you know, digital guidance and be comfortable acting on it. So, you know, when you log into your Salesforce, you may be shown a completely different set of 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 really 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 that's interesting. So hyper-personalization of application content is kind of this new trend that's going to be happening, which presents a whole kind of learning and adoption problem in and of itself. Is that right? Well, it does, but it also solves the problem because, you know, if you're presented content that's not contextual to who you are, how long you've been with 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. It's like the application understood what you were trying to do, it guided you in doing it, and it'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. Thank you, Donald.