GlobalEdgeTalk

Alex Stein & Eccentex: How Personal Achievements in Sports Create Winning Companies

• Alex Romanovich / Alex Rein

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This episode's guest is Alex Stein! Alex is a 20+ year high-tech expert with extensive knowledge in Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Dynamic Case Management (DCM). Alex has a strong track record in delivering great products, excellent sales/marketing skills and ability in building successful companies that have achieved and sustained long-term growth and profitability.

Alex is considered as an industry expert by many analysts, frequently published in industry magazines and holds multiple patents in the area of BPM, ECM and DCM.

Alex is a Founder and CEO of Eccentex, where his mission is to innovate and lead the company in delivering cutting-edge, multi-featured cloud-based Digital Business Platform in $18 Billion market to customers around the world enabling customer experience, significant reductions in operating costs and increasing efficiency.

Alex is an avid athlete and an excellent swimmer, and many of the competitive traits in his early days transferred to success later in his professional career.

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Hi, this is Alex Romanovich, and welcome to GlobalEdgeTalk, the podcast for global entrepreneurs. Today is June 24th, 2021. And one of our guests is Alex Stein, who is the chief executive officer of a company called Eccentex. We're going to talk about your path to success with Eccentex. It's a very interesting path. I've just found out that we're both were born in the same city, Kyiv, Ukraine. I always laugh and say that all roads lead to Kyiv. We talked about soccer, about swimming, and I understand that you also have a motorcycle, so we're going to talk a little bit about the personal side of Alex Stein, but also your professional path. And we'll ask a few questions. Welcome once again. Please, feel comfortable. GlobalEdgeTalk is about entrepreneurs who are on the edge, who also have the edge. We strongly believe that people who go through globally, who go through some challenges, go through a number of different trials and tribulations, then come out on the other end with success. That's what you need. You need to have the edge, you need to be on the edge. And that is exactly what GlobalEdgeTalk is about. Let's talk about your early days. You were born in Kyiv, Ukraine. By the way, the Ukrainian team is fighting in the 1/8 finals at the European Soccer Championship right now. We're rooting for them. You're an entrepreneurial leader, somebody who built a number of businesses. But you started with very traditional companies like Wang, systems and some of the other ones. What gave you the edge? What can you say about your advantages, your strong points that made you a success? Maybe going back to your early days, maybe going back to your childhood. Please, tell us what you think gave you the edge. I think, being very competitive from early days. When you go back to history, and look at Kyiv, I was a part of the swim team, I actually play for the youth Dynamo Kyiv team. Then when we immigrated to the United States in 1980, I joined the Jewish community center, and swimming for them and then swimming for the school. In college I was very competitive and one of the top breaststrokers and butterfliers in the school. Having those competitive genes, I would say, made me very competitive in business. I like to win, let's put it this way. And I think that drive has always been there. And even today, I just hate to lose, I have to win, I will go until things get done. That's in my nature. Alex, you've mentioned something really interesting right now. You said competitive genes. Do you think that being competitive, being successful is genetic or do you think this is something that could be acquired? I think being competitive is genetic. At least if I look at myself. It's helped me in life. And I always go forward even if something doesn't happen. And I like to win, it's my nature. A lot of entrepreneurs globally are listening to this podcast. Winning is part of any success, obviously, but let's talk about losing, let's talk about what you've learned by losing something that helped you win. Let's also talk about under what circumstances you would be willing to repeat the same experience to gain some advantage. One thing that I've learned is when you lose, you need to learn why you lost and you need to put yourself together and move on like in any sport. And I tried to win the next time and that's what I do. We lose, we talked about this with my guys and it's okay, this is why we lost and just move forward, learn from mistakes. That's kind of my nature. Alex, what do you think about repeating the same mistake twice? They say that you could make a mistake, but you should not make the same mistake twice. Have you had that happened to you? Like in any business you try to learn from your mistakes, but it happened to me that I made mistake twice. Alex, beyond your personal stories, there're many great topics that we can discuss regarding general topics of automation. We're moving rapidly towards robotics automation. I mean, the COVID pandemic showed us that there're so many companies, so many technologies, innovations that have been just sprouted literally in the past, one to two years. You started Eccentex, you founded the Eccentex. What was the impetus? What was the driver for you to start Eccentex? Because even though it's still in a very fast-growing early stage of development you've had some really great successes working with major partners like Genesis and some of the other ones, you've had some amazing clients. Why Eccentex, why automation, why case management? Tell us more about that. It came from the Wang days. When I graduated from college I got to work with Dwayne. This is where I pretty much got my automation experience. I would say from the company called Datamax. We were one of the pioneers in document management and workflow space. That gave me the foundation. In the early days, I learned a lot about the workflow, what is the document, what is imaging technology. That was a foundation to start Eccentex. When we started Eccentex, I took all the knowledge that I had with Datamax Technologies. They looked at salesforce.com. And I really loved the cloud concept. My goal was to take the knowledge of Datamax and take it to the next level. Datamax days, we used to be the workload, the document, but leading the school case management component to the whole story was the next wave. Putting everything in the cloud was another idea that I learned from salesforce.com. I took the ideas from Datamax. I took all the cloud concepts from salesforce.com. And that was the foundation of Eccentex. Why case management? Because we were looking for technology that could be repeatable, which can also cover a lot of use cases. If you look at any organization, there're a lot of different case-based processes. The idea was to create a platform that allows you pretty much to take the public sector, or take the banks, or take insurance companies, and pretty much apply our technology to many different use cases. Initially, the technology started to automate human-based work. We call it knowledge workers. And over time, we started seeing a lot of repeatable steps within the different use cases. We took it even to the next level where not only we've been able to automate the human steps, but we were able to use robotics to automate repeatable steps. With that, we truly created a very interesting technology that allows us to come into any organization and pretty much automate any end-to-end case-based process. Fascinating stuff. Let me ask you a question about COVID. In this software business, in the platform business, in startup space a lot of folks were saying that actually, they've benefited greatly from COVID, they've greatly benefited greatly from some of the things that needed to be automated, and so forth. Have you benefited from COVID and have your customers benefited from COVID having your system and platform in place? What do you think about this entire COVID concept vis-a-vis technologies, innovations, and so forth? That's actually a great question. During COVID our business grew 40%. The reason is in the last two years focusing a lot on the customer experience. Not only providing the case management but also focus a lot on building customer experience modules. Like I'm your channel, I'm an integration to your channel, I'm a knowledge-based product, the ability to automate portal. I would say we've been one of the few local platforms, a case management platform that really connected the customer experience and the case management and digital business process automation into one offering. And with that, we've been able to build a really very powerful end-to-end customer journey that can really start with any kind of omnichannel. This could be a pool, this could be a chart. And we are one of the very few companies that can go all the way to the resolution module. That gives us a big agent. During the COVID all the companies or many companies are trying to go digital. We experienced a huge upside during COVID, our business grew 40%. Excellent. Congratulations on that. The other day we had an outage in my house. I think our providers, Verizon Wireless, and clearly, we get so dependent on having an internet connection, on-demand, and uninterrupted, and so forth and so on. And I think it was a storm or something like this. I decided to call customer service. I never try to call customer service and companies like these, because my expectations are very low. But we're in the age of automation, we're in the age of new technologies and customer service automation. I decided to take a chance. What a horrific experience. Let me ask you, do you feel, do you think that the customer service of the future is going to be totally automated? Because that's a thought that I had this person is definitely not going to help me, we're running in circles, and I wish there was a robot sitting on the other side of the phone line. Do you feel that this is the sentiment of many folks out there, and do you feel that one day customer service will be completely automated? I think big percentage. I look at the future and look at the 90% of the tickets that are coming through the company, I think most of it will be done through the robot, or chatbots, or some kind of service technology. We begin to see the trend and with AI, with machine learning, with artificial intelligence. I really feel that moving forward, I should also work on this problem, that problem, but we work in these types of solutions right now. And a lot of customer service requests will be done through either a robot or a chatbot, artificial intelligence. The other question I have was about the global nature of the business. This is a global entrepreneurship podcast, so we have to talk about global. And just now we spoke about you traveling internationally or beginning to travel internationally because of COVID, I've already made it over the ocean to a couple of countries myself in the past six months. Would the economy come back? Do you see any major shifts in automation, local development, maybe case management as it pertains to not just customer service, but marketing, sales, global expansion, things of that nature, scalability? Does it matter if the business is local or if the business is global, does your platform give the global business advantage of being global and scaling globally? Tell us more about that. In today's environment companies trying to be a lot more competitive and because of that they need to come up with new products. They need to roll new projects much quicker. And that's where the local platform, like Eccentex, allows them to deliver this project very quickly, this whole kind of agility, ability to roll project very quickly, ability to manage the workforce, people who can work from home will work. Absolutely, the technology that we offer is ideal for this environment. And specifically, the ability to have that omnichannel and customer experience also gives companies an edge where customers really can do requests from any channel, which is another big movement in the industry. It's interesting. You talked about acceleration. During COVID a lot of the CEOs and CTOs, chief technology officers, mentioned that the companies came to them and said, remember that digital transformation project that we were putting on the log burner? Well, let's do it now because we need more speed. We need to accelerate. We now have remote workers. We now have pressures to cut costs and so forth. And by golly, everybody started to doing the quote-unquote digital transformation express. Is this what you're talking about? Are you talking about having the ability because you don't have to program too much because you have the ability to have very little code because you have a number of automated functions? You can literally visually put those snap, those functions together and create the workflow. Is that possible then to help companies to transform digitally using your platform? Absolutely. That's exactly what we do today. And that's exactly what had happened during the COVID. The companies are realizing that they need new ways to basically drive the business. And that's exactly what our technology does. It helps these companies to very quickly map these digital processes and implement them. Without the digital transformation, they basically can't survive. Any great product requires a great product manager, a great head of product design, product implementation, and I believe you have a person like that in your company. And his name is Max Gill. I'd like to bring Max into this conversation so he can about some of the cool functions, maybe something that's related to omnichannel, automation via email or social, or case management processing. Max, welcome to the studio. Hi, Alex. Max, tell us about the platform itself, maybe a little more detail in terms of what does it take for a product manager or head of product to design a product like this? The product has to be visual. It has to be intuitive. It has to give you a lot of functionality to produce virtually no code or very low code. What goes into designing a product like that? I think the biggest asset I had when designing this product was an understanding of the market space. Alex and I quickly understood that IT departments are generally shrinking and the business units themselves were kind of taking on more and more responsibility for their own applications that they need within their own teams or departments. And one of the reasons was that people can't really wait for IT to constantly go and design the applications every team needs. The time it takes to write those requirements really makes it understandable to external units heads. It was just too long. We sat down and figure out how it can make an enterprise-grade application, but to be designed by business people. That's an experience, unfortunately. I mean that definitely once you have the experience honing in on the exact problem was easier from Gartner to Resources to get customers. But I spent a few years actually doing project implementation and the professional services side to understand the problem. And I think what's really important at least in the B2B space is to understand the problem you're trying to solve. A very important aspect of this. Let me ask you another question regarding futures. We've seen a tremendous spike in automation, low code processing and development, and so forth. What do you think is going to happen next? What is going to be the major Aha!, the major moment where we'll say, oh my goodness, this is going to be an improvement again for the enterprise or mid-sized business, for the customer service area? What's in the store for us in the next three to five years? That's a loaded question. AI is, honestly, just starting to take off. We're going to be able to see more and more fruition from it because the more systems that start connecting to AI, the more information the engine has to really start not so much automating work because automating work is to happen, but assisting the human in doing the work that the computer really can't or shouldn't. I think that we're going to see a shift from simply automating everything with AI to focusing more on assisting the employee in completing real knowledge work. I think that's not going to be that big of an aha moment, but it's definitely something that I think is going to be a substantial shift. And omnichannel and channel, in general, is going to change as well because there's VR that's coming. A couple of years ago, I was speaking to an analyst who told me that the next big thing is going to be VR in customer support. How is that going to work? You're going to put on glasses to solve your car problems? And they say, yes. And that's exactly what's happening now. I've seen all sorts of situations like that. And the more channels we have from wearables to VR, to more things in a phone, to more mobility, I think that's the next big aha moment is going to be how do you really have an omnichannel experience from all of these channels? Not all of them are going to interface the same way that you can with a tablet or a phone. This is pretty fascinating. You're telling me virtual reality is going to be the answer to customer service. By the way, I just bought my daughter Oculus too. And we've set that up and it was pretty cool, but it's great for games. It's great for other things like that. How is virtual reality going to help customer service? Please, explain. The first use case was only about cars. I bought a new car two years ago and this car has all sorts of buttons on it and a manual with 2000 pages. When I got on my car, I called customer support, and they try to explain to me where the buttons are, but every car with different features you get has buttons in different locations and different options. It wasn't that easy. With VR, they expect that there'll be an overlay, an interface. The agent can talk you through while overlaying or showing you. So what you're seeing, they're able to also navigate you through that experience. It's mostly overwhelming. Same thing with showcasing a new car. Sales, for example, because we took this a little bit to the next level pushed a little bit was instead of going into a store to actually buy something and to be explained what to do, you can put on glasses and it still has that personal experience with a human, but be at a distance, something that you can't really do when you're looking at the two-dimensional screen, you really need that three-dimensional view. And that proximity that you get from virtual reality, that immersion that you get. That's pretty fascinating, actually. Thank you, Max. Alex, go back to you. We're coming to the end of our interview, but I guess one of the last questions I want to ask is what would Alex of today said to Alex of 15 to 20 years ago based on all of the experiences you've had? What advice would you give to our global audience of entrepreneurs, investors, companies, and CEOs? Tell me more. Going back from 20 years to today, two things that I think are very important. First is having a great team, a solid team that works with you. Number two is a focus. I'm learning that having a focus is very important because when you're small and you don't focus, it becomes very hard. You need to simplify a business model. I would say these are even three things that are important to be successful in business. Having a great team, vision, and having focus. I'm in total agreement. Our slogan for a GlobalEdge and GlobalEdgeMarkets is 'Even when you grow, we help you focus'. I think the focus is one of the most challenging problems that entrepreneurs have because you always want to do much as you can. You want to cast your net widely, and then you realize that in reality, if you don't focus, you're going to get out of breath very, very quickly. Especially when you're small and you don't have a lot of freedom, enough resources. That can become a problem. Gentlemen, Alex, Max, thank you so much for being in our studio. Really appreciate you stopping by and telling us about automation, and case management, and customer service, fascinating stories, fascinating story with you, Alex. Wishing you all the best. Thank you very much.