MarTech Edge Interview with Tibor Vass, Chief Marketing Officer, Eccentex

Congratulations on being appointed as Chief Marketing Officer at Eccentex. What are you most looking forward to in your new role here?

As soon as I joined Eccentex, I started to learn about our products and services, and it seems our offer is really great, and we have many happy customers. So, I have nothing to fix, and this is very good news. My first priority is to gain more visibility in our competitive market and attract new audiences based on new messaging. In the past years, Eccentex mastered how to position our products and services to technical buyers, and now I want to do the same by creating simple but powerful messaging for business buyers.

As a CMO, what’s your approach to planning marketing strategies?

My marketing strategy is all about simplification, visibility, and awareness. In our SaaS market, many companies fall into the same trap by creating far too complex offers, too technical messages, and complicated pricing structures. This limits the potential buyers to quickly understand what they’ll get and how much it will cost. I prefer to introduce our solutions to our customers and prospects in short, easy-to-understand terms and sell them through simplified pricing.

How do you wish to implement marketing best practices at Eccentex?

Unfortunately, marketing is not an exact science. There are no magic tricks that work in every company, especially if you have a limited marketing budget. As we learned from some marketing gurus, 97% of the marketing budget never converts, so the “only” challenge of a CMO is to figure out which 3% does. Luckily our conversion rate is industry-leading already, so the question is not how to convince our prospects to consider our solution but how to let them know we have these great solutions. We can’t build a brand that is known by everyone, at least not in the short term, but we may be able to leverage the recent trend that Gartner described—as it seems B2B buyers are getting more open to considering less-known, smaller brands as long as they can expect lower-cost and higher-value solution from them. I can’t reach out to all potential buyers without wasting 97% of my marketing budget, but I may spend our marketing budget more efficiently to influence how they can find us.

How does Eccentex help transform customer service journeys and digitize back-office workflows?

Eccentex solutions are truly unique in the SaaS market because we can help our customers satisfy competing, sometimes controversial, KPIs at the same time. Increasing customer and employee experience at the same time while you need to decrease your operation cost does not sound like an easy task. Automating workflows without sacrificing the easiness of using human-assisted services sounds similarly challenging. The good news is this is not difficult if you use the right product, which is built to automate, digitize, and simplify complex processes based on the customer-experience-first approach. And we have that product in use for many customers across multiple verticals with a proven track record.

You have recently spoken about focusing more on hyperautomation & case management. What are your plans for the same?

Hyperautomation—as a concept—is like a system of systems. We automate components (like workflows, business processes, and customer engagements), then put these automated micro-engagements into a system that can orchestrate the entire customer journey across the business automation ecosystem. Customers can benefit from shorter response times and quicker resolutions through self-service portals and hybrid-assisted (AI/human) services, while brand employees are equipped with all the data and tools they need to resolve customer requests in the quickest and easiest possible way.

In the ever-changing CX landscape, please tell us about your methodology for promoting the new CX transformation.

Customer Experience is probably the most demanding technical capability today’s software vendors need to satisfy. Demands and expectations are changing rapidly and evolving across all innovation components that exist in the market. Solutions that are considered industry-leading can be outdated based on a single shift of customer preferences. Whatever solutions you have, the ultimate capability that can allow you to follow these changes is flexibility. No time for coding, no budget for year long IT projects, no patience to wait for developers to come up with a new release that supports the new demands. Having a platform that can be adjusted by the users itself is the key to adopting these changes instantly.

More than ever, enterprises are inclined towards a low-code platform, so how does AppBase® stand out?

Our AppBase® platform is designed to support all possible development concepts and tools, from absolute No-Code/Low-Code to Deep-Code methodologies. It can even enable business users to create their own solutions without IT knowledge based on intuitive drag-and-drop graphical designers. However, if you need to add some more complex steps or non-standard procedures to your application, a business analyst can quickly add these elements based on standard code snippets. When you need to do something really special, the platform also supports standard code libraries to add your customization by using computer programming languages like C#.

Amongst the looming economic disruptions, what are your forecasts about the technological landscape change and the major focus points in the fiscal year for Eccentex?

Our new platform capabilities are in the final development phases, and I think we can announce them soon. Our new offer will pull together all the latest features and product capabilities in one solution bundle that can enable our clients to hyperautomate their business process automation and customer engagement needs with an end-to-end customer journey focus. As I see it, this new offer will enable our future customers to radically speed up their digital transformation initiatives with lower cost and effort.

What do you think about the future of low-code platforms and customer service journeys?

I think even with the decade-long experiences we have, predicting the future of low-code application platforms is not easy in this market. We already have capabilities similar to ChatGPT, where the AI is able to substitute quite a lot of human work, e.g., in content authoring. We have our “Builders” that can write code on behalf of an IT engineer from graphical process representations, so we feel we are already shaping up the future.

Can we even further automate how our customers design and implement and make their business applications easier? Yes, for sure, we can; however, we can’t be sure about whether certain things will happen just because the trends are suggesting that. We do not want to put all our bets on something that may or may not come. That’s why we are developing our platform in a way that can be flexible to adopt all potential changes that the future may bring.