 Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate here in Miami, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, analyst, Shelly Kramer. Shelly, this is the first time theCUBE has ever been at Commerce Tools Elevate. It has been an incredible show. We've had so many great guests, so many great customer stories, telling the stories of the partnerships and how they're improving the customer experience. Well, and the evolution of the world of commerce. I mean, there's nothing not to be excited about there, right? Exactly, because it affects all of us. And that is the perfect segue to introduce our next guest. She is Jen Jones. She's the CMO of Commerce Tools. Thanks for having me here today. Yeah, no, it's been a lot of fun. So we've had, we've had Derek Horig, we've had Kelly Gage, Dan Murphy, all talking about the Commerce Tools journey and what composable commerce means. But I'd love you to break it down from the CMO hat. Yeah, I think from the CMO hat, I really look at it more from the customer experience standpoint. That's ultimately what any good technology should be enabling. We can talk about the tech all day long, but what it really comes down to is, what does it do for the end-end user? Our customers, customers. And so for us, it's about creating those flexible customer experiences for our customers so they can build engaging, meaningful, personalized experiences for their end users. And why, how do you think this approach differs from your competitors in terms of, as you said, thinking about the end-end user and what customers are expecting? And in fact, demanding today. Absolutely, they are demanding it. I think there's two real things that differentiate us in my mind. One is many of our legacy competitors, e-commerce is not a new thing, digital commerce is not a new thing. We've been shopping online for 20, 25 years now. And many of the solutions that are out there were built in those days for those of us who used to browse up and down physical store aisles and websites were built to mimic that. And now we're in a new era where either we've been trained or many shoppers have grown up in the digital era and they just have higher expectations for customer experience. They did not grow up browsing physical store aisles, pushing a shopping cart. They're used to search, they're used to personalized deep experiences. So we really differ from those legacy systems in that we are a digital native company. We were built for this world. So all of that flexibility and scalability of today's digital experience is inherent in our platform. So when we look at that and then combine that with the flexibility that we do enable, I think what differentiates us is we can create those experiences. We're not looking at predicting what's going to happen. Who knew that Audi would come to us and ask to sell things in the car, right? That's not an existing thing, but we enable them to do that right off the bat. I think that's a really exciting time. And one of the key statements that I honed in on from one of the keynotes was just talking about how this is the last sort of re-platforming. Think about this as never having to do this again when you make the move to composable commerce. And it's really about understanding that change and evolution are givens and technology that allows you to meet you where you are but allows you to continually evolve and grow at the pace that you are comfortable with and the pace that meets your customer's expectations is really what it's all about. So you're not ripping and replacing. You're not re-platforming. You're using this technology that is extensible, that is changeable, that is composable. And I think that that's a huge part of the value proposition and there is no way not to find that attractive. Yeah, absolutely. I think that we talk a lot about incremental innovation that you might do this one re-platform but then you can consistently build onto it. It's not like when you need to make a change to your house and you rip the whole house down. You might push your wall out or add a new kitchen or whatever you're doing. And it's similar here. It's similar with your commerce platform now. It's infinitely extensible, cloud-native, so it's infinitely scalable. And so it really is the last re-platform we expect our customers to ever have to make. So we had on the show, we had executives from PetSmart and also Ulta Beauty but you mentioned Audi. Can you tell us, tell our viewers a little bit more about the problem that Audi came to you with and the solution that you came up with? Yeah, it's one of my favorite things about this job is the problems that customers bring to us are things that I might not imagine, right? So Audi wanting to sell in-car. You can buy services in-car by upgrades in your car from your car screen. So that's not an existing channel that old legacy systems have built in, right? So they needed something completely new that could integrate with that and we were able to help there. I think another of one of my favorite examples is an Ulta one where the pandemic talked about something nobody could see coming and all of a sudden their entire business model needed to shift overnight and with us they were able to launch buy online pickup in store in seven days. So talk about responding to something that nobody really saw coming. Well, and when you look at that from a revenue perspective, when you're talking about navigating a global pandemic and revenue pretty much shutting down, I mean, this is sort of business mission critical. This is business resilience, you know? Well, one of the things you had said earlier is that Commerce Tools is a digital native platform and yet, and you made this point about how so many of Gen Z never had the experience of browsing aisles, but so much of commerce today is Omni-channel and so they do want the experience of looking things up online but then also going into an Ulta store and having their browse done after they practiced it online or trying out that mascara that looked so interesting to them and clicked all the boxes of it's vegan and cruelty-free and the right texture. So how are you, as the CMO, how do you think about solving those problems and always meeting the customer where they are in their buying journey? Yeah, I think one of the themes we heard a lot about today at the conference so far is this idea of unified commerce and we've been talking about Omni-channel for 20 years now, so I think everybody's waiting to see is this finally it? You know, I think we finally do have the tools and technologies, I think that cloud native aspect of it enables a lot of this, it just did not happen years ago, was not, we couldn't do it years ago and that is a theme that's coming out because to your point, I think we saw that coming out of the pandemic where there was this big question mark of will people return to stores and I think we all know absolutely so there is something there but it's more of that experience that customers are looking for and PetSmart Ulta Ticketmaster earlier today all spoke about that's core to their business that they're creating for their customers, they're really looking at that experience of how do you create one branded experience and not have here's your app experience, here's your online experience, here's your in-store experience, you want to have one customer experience so it's really important that we give our customers the tools and technology to support that. Well, it's tools and technology but it also has to do with the culture and mission of the company too, I mean that's one of the things that was so striking from the executive from PetSmart, he said, we come at this thinking that pet parents, they want the best for their pets and pets are just as important as the rest of us and how that is then, that is the mission that underpins all the technology too. Absolutely, I think I love his talk, I have pets as well and I love that they refer to their customers as pet parents, right? But one of the things I loved about his talk track is this is a technical person, right? This is a technical executive who was talking all about customer experience and brand and brand identity and to me as a marketer, hearing technical leaders speak that after all these years just makes me happy. Yeah, it's a human to human experience and I think that really understanding that at the deepest level what drives your customers is so incredibly important. I really enjoyed Frank from PayPal, I enjoyed some of what he talked about and PayPal is very much the gold standard and has been for a long time in terms of trusted e-commerce, right? And so listening to what they are doing, even though they already sort of own this gold standard, right? But listening to what they're doing to make the platform even more trusted, the experience for guest checkouts. I mean, I raise my hand all day long, please let me check out as a guest, just let me get this over with. Understanding the desire on a customer's part to go this route and making it be an efficient journey but also a journey that I can trust I think is incredibly important and I love, he also shared the stat about email and when you make a transaction using PayPal you get an email receipt and okay, well we all get receipts, right? But the fact that they noticed this massive open rate of 45% or whatever and said wait a minute, we don't have this kind of open rate all the time. I mean, that's off the charts, right? Like would that be great to have it on every campaign? But what can we do to leverage this gigantic open rate and be able to help serve our merchant customers and our end users even more efficiently? Can we provide personalized offers? Can we provide other information or tracking or something like that? So I think that thinking about ways to solve for customer experiences in ways that customers were not thinking about, but when you get one of those emails and it's like, oh wow, I can track my package or oh wow, I guess I may need to buy something else. Whatever, but that's really smart and that impacts the bottom line and I think that's what we're all in the business of doing when it comes to solving for customer issues is really help delivering an impactful benefit to the bottom line. Definitely, I think when things don't work, we notice as end users, but when they work well and they start to slide in these extra things that just make it that much easier, more seamless, more value, it almost becomes a subconscious, you don't notice it as much, but you definitely have more of that affinity towards that brand or more trust that they're building because they are making it easier and you're experiencing less of those friction points in the process. And driving the loyalty. So how do you recommend or what's your approach to investing in technology today and how do you share that approach with your customers too? Yeah, I think the innovation that happens today just seems to be increasingly more and more so every day. So that's no difference for us marketers as is for our end customers. There's more technology to evaluate. I mean, the Gen AI revolution that happened last year turned marketing upside down and we had to quickly figure out and adopt things. So I think it is a little bit of listening to your team, listening to the people around you, having a good network. So it's not just you as an individual making a siloed decision, but understanding the community around certain technologies and then knowing where, how it can help. Because at the end of the day, if you're just implementing technology for technology's sake, what's the point? Really have to think about what's the end use case that you're trying to solve and is that a big enough business pain point that you want to prioritize it? Yeah, I mean, so many of the executives that we've had here at Commerce Tools, but on other shows that we do, it is this chasing mentality of, oh AI is this new shiny thing. We want to make sure we're showing an ROI on it, but it is hard and it is a process. It does take time. Any new technology, it's not a magic switch that you flip. It's getting your team to learn how to use it and embrace it and learn how you're going to measure and track your own success with a new piece of technology. It's like launching a campaign. You have to decide what, set the metrics in place, learn what works and then make adjustments. It's the same with adopting new tech. Absolutely. So here at Commerce Tools Elevate, and this is the first time theCUBE has come and we're having a great time, what are some of the things that you're taking away? What are the conversations that you're having with customers and with partners that you're going to take back with you? I love talking to customers. I could do that all day long. So this is like being in a candy store here because we have some of our just incredible customers here who are sharing with each other. And I think that is one of the big takeaways for me is how open our customers are in sharing their experiences, their journeys, their goals, their business goals with each other. And that's one of the things that other customers have said to me is make this a valuable trip for them because they're connecting with the community. They're hearing like-minded people who are trying to be at the forefront of digital innovation. And they're just like-minded peers. So I think all of that sharing has just made my day. Well, no, it's quite clear on the main stage that this is a company that wants feedback, that they want to get together and talk about how to solve problems together. So what's on your agenda after having these conversations and hearing from customers about what have been their pain points and what they need you to solve for them? So what is on tap for the rest of this year and into 2025? Yeah, so I think one of the things that we definitely think about is how do we continue to make this easier for our customers? How do we make this easier to adopt, easier to see quick returns? Again, that idea of incremental innovation, right? Sometimes you can just replace your countertop and not replace your entire kitchen, which by the way, takes a year. So I think it'll always be twice as expensive as I say. So thinking through those ideas of incremental innovation, helping it for our customers to be just easier to adopt and move down this road. And then the other thing too, I think is looking for other opportunities to foster this community, this user community that we have. They're really passionate. They're very open. They love connecting with each other. Obviously we'll be planning Elevate 2025 after everybody gets a week off, but beyond that, how do we create more user touch points throughout the year? Well, that was a big announcement today as well. The Commerce Tools community and it's for customers and prospects and experts and developers and all of that really designed to help one another. And I think that's a really valuable part of what you offer as a whole. Yeah, I'm excited to see that really start to take hold. We launched it here for a reason. And I think that again, our users are so open and excited to share with each other. It'll be a great online space for them to do so throughout the year. Great, great, great. And so many other incredible product announcements too in terms of Foundry and other things as well. Yeah, we're excited about B2B Foundry. I think whenever we talk about e-commerce, everyone naturally tends to think about the things that we buy online as consumers, which is of course a popular use case. But the reality is B2B is such a big, big industry and it is being disrupted by online commerce and digital commerce. Many of the buyers in their day-to-day jobs, they're used to having really- They're digital natives. They're digital natives now, yes. And they've moved up into management roles and they have high expectations. They don't want to fill out a spreadsheet and email it or fax it in. Nobody does that anymore. And honestly, they want to have easy, quick checkout and payment and invoicing options. So I think that the consumer expectations that we've seen for years on the B2C side have now made their way over to B2B. And we're just going to see more of that next couple of years. So Foundry for B2B, we're really excited to bring to the market. Excellent. Well, Jen Jones, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely. I'm Rebecca Knight for Shelly Kramer. That has been theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage.