The Future of Marketing and User.com with Mike Korba, CCO and Co-Founder of User.com (Special Offer Inside)

Yes. In terms of our market—like the CRM market and the marketing automation market—I believe all tools are becoming all-in-one. That’s where marketing in general is heading. I think in the near future, there will be channels and conversions, like messaging platforms. Right now, it might be WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, or, depending on the market—like in China—it could be Telegram. We have chat, etc.

So it’s like the interface where you have conversations in many places. You see what’s going on with an email—like “hey.com,” for example. This conversation is like marketing—was that promotion tool, yeah? So promotion is only one side of communication, like from sender to receiver. That was old-school marketing. Right now, you’re not just sending messages; you’re interacting with them.

This is where marketing is heading, and I believe businesses understand automation at some level, but you still have to listen carefully. A human understanding of needs is where businesses will truly grow, yeah? So, being closer to clients, that’s what marketing will be in 10 years, I hope.

Yeah, and I think that’s about the quality of customer support—like having a human person on the other side. It shouldn’t be low-salary positions either, so they should be experts in their field. I believe that, in growing customer support or customer service, sometimes people think, “Hire a cheap sales force or cheap human force to do it,” and right now you can automate all the repetitive tasks. But if the person is really trying to solve an issue, a real expert should be on the other side to help with that.

So this is, I think, not only about marketing, but about interacting between customers and companies. It’s a crucial aspect. Sometimes, when I’m using services or tools, I feel like I’m being passed from one department to another. First, I see remarketing ads, so marketing is taking care of me. Then, if I leave some data, somebody from sales is reaching out, asking me to buy something. Then, when I sign the contract or pay the bill, I’m told to go to support. From a customer perspective, that’s not a good experience.

We’re talking about the customer journey and customer experience. When I’m interacting with a brand, a tool, or a service provider, I’m reaching out to, say, Shane Barker or user.com—I want to be treated as the same person from day one to the last day. So I think that’s where marketing technologies are heading.

Yes, so some features are pretty simple, but we haven’t built them until now. For example, we didn’t have a landing page builder. When you’re doing Mailchimp pop-ups and all those channels, it’s quite a big feature, but we didn’t do it before. Now we’ve decided, “Okay, so many customers want it,” and they have all-in-one solutions but still have to build their website on some other platform. So, yes, we’re keeping integrations with landing page builders, but we’re also building our own—just to have everything in one place.

We’re also working on our forms, which you can embed on your website. It’ll be much easier to do—really simple, not like some super fancy feature. As I mentioned, we’re planning to implement video calls inside our chat—hopefully ready by the end of maybe September, or in the middle of October, we’ll show our new chat widget. It’ll be more “in chat” so you can do more with it. Currently, our knowledge base is a separate product, and the chat widget is integrated in a certain way, but from the client’s point of view, it doesn’t have the knowledge base included. Same with our calendar—like a scheduler akin to Calendly, but it’s not built in. We also have a ticketing system that isn’t built into our chat. We want this widget more modular, so all those features I’ve mentioned will be available from the client perspective inside the chat widget, and the landing pages is the second thing we plan to implement.

Some time ago we did road map planning. We have many small improvements—small features—that I think will yield big value for our customers. One thing we’re working very hard on is product recommendation engines. Yes, we have a lot of ecommerce customers, and we’re working on AI and machine learning algorithms to offer better product recommendations. So those are some of the things we’re planning in the near future.

Hard, hard question. I’ve never been to the US. I’ve traveled around the world—I was in China, the Middle East, Europe; I visited all those countries, but I’ve never gone to the US. So probably one place I’d like to visit—I was hoping this year, going to Collision, but then coronavirus slowed that down.

Yeah, so solve that issue. I hope to see—I don’t know—Las Vegas. I’d like to go there. I know it from TV and movies, but I’ve never been. So I’d like to go to the US just to check it out. Like, how is it going there?

I will remember that.

Like, I think it’s not so—like, I would—it would be great to have this superpower of making people healthy, curing them, yeah? I think making your health better, especially in this coronavirus, COVID—these strange times—it would be a great superpower. Like, I don’t know, speaking with somebody and making them healthy, or touching them, or something like that. That’d be a really great superpower because I’d have so many friends.

Yeah, I think that this would be a great superpower.

Yeah. That was the first thing that came to mind.

Yeah, so we actually have a special offer for your subscribers. They can reach out to me at Mike@user.com—simplest email possible. But if they enjoyed the podcast, they can head over to try.user.com/shane. They’ll get a special discount: 50% off all paid plans for the first six months. How does that sound?

Thank you for having me here.