Interview with Christophe Alves, CEO of Scal-e Marketing Cloud
As a privileged witness to the revolution that has taken place at Scal-e since the acquisition, CEO Christophe Alves spoke with Martech.cloud, A leading blog on digital innovation. Christophe Alves tells us about society Scaleits strategy, market developments, its team, or even its vision for the future of the company.
Scal-e was listed in two reports by theForrester International Research Institute the “Now Tech: Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2021” for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region and the “Now Tech: Customer Data Platforms, Q1 2022"for the global region. To discuss this, visit the website" Martech.cloud took advantage of the launch of the new Scal-e website to offer an interview.
Scale in a nutshell
Before we talk about your strategy, could you tell us what the Scal-e platform is used for?
Christophe Alves: The Scal-e platform facilitates implementation and improves the results of acquisition or retention strategies brand customers B2B ou B2C.
This is why our platform offers marketing teams different modules for unify easily their data, protect confidentiality or get a in-depth understanding of their clientsAll of this is done with the aim of...acquire or loyalty their clientele, thanks to the implementation ofpersonalized customer experiences.
How exactly does your platform facilitate the implementation of customer acquisition or loyalty strategies?
Christophe Alves: On the one hand, the platform can be configured (approach no queues) in order to adapt to the client's context. On the other hand, as it is natively integratedIt does not require integration between modules: this reduces implementation costs, and that It also facilitates collaboration and navigation on a daily basis.
A "no-code" platform
You mentioned configuration, in "no code" mode: what exactly is that?
And what is the benefit for users?
Christophe Alves: The platform was designed so that it could be used by business teams (marketing, data analyst, e-commerce, customer service, point of sale, etc.) without requiring daily assistance from IT teams.
This is what publishers call a "platform" No code " or "we low code "For the purists. It may seem like a minor detail, but the market is evolving at a crazy pace, as we saw during the pandemic."
The advantage of the "no code" approach is that it allows marketing teams to react very quickly to implement an idea in just a few clicks.
The goal is to acquire new customers or generate new sales before the competition has had time to implement the same type of marketing strategies.
Modular and integrated
Okay. You mentioned a natively integrated platform. Can you tell us more about that?
Christophe Alves: From its inception, the platform and its various modules were natively integrated around a CDP module (Customer Data Platform) on a single cloud. It should be noted that Scal-e is a spin-off from a Bouygues Telecom project.
To get back to the integration, it's a bit technical, but integrating all the Scal-e modules around our CDP simplifies both the platform's setup and its daily use, as I mentioned earlier. Because all the modules are accessible from the same interface for all users, this facilitates their daily collaboration. There's no need to go to a separate data cloud, marketing cloud, services cloud, etc.
This makes it easier to get started and collaborate. For example, if we look at the tier 1 or tier 2 brands we work with, their size often leads to siloed data organization. Customer service, marketing, IT, data, and even legal teams are often independent and use their own tools. The Scal-e platform provides the necessary structure to enable them to collaborate on marketing topics.
Can you give us some examples of cooperation facilitated by your platform?
For example, in a regulatory framework, between the work of the DPOFrom the agency, or from the brand's data team and its marketing team?
Christophe Alves: Yes, of course. It's important to understand that many brands have invested in marketing tools to move from a siloed customer experience to a comprehensive (marketing, sales, customer service, etc.) and omnichannel (online and offline) one. The famous "right message, service, or benefit at the right time, to the right person, and through the right channel." Yet, according to the Gartner Institute, by 2025, 80% of them will abandon their efforts due to a lack of return on investment, the risks of managing customer data, or both.
The reasons why so many brands are giving up are, on the one hand, the multitude of privacy policies to be managed according to the markets: GDPR, CCACPIPL among other legislation; and on the other hand, the silos created by the business lines (by channel, subsidiary or BU) or the technological silos (ERP(website, e-commerce site, social networks, messaging, mobile application, point-of-sale tool…). These two fundamental points really don't help marketing teams, who have to juggle these technical and legal constraints to implement their operations.
Let me explain: without proof of consent (purpose of processing, legal basis, retention period, etc.), customer data loses all value for brands and should therefore not be used by marketing teams in their operations. To mitigate this risk, Scal-e allows the Data Engineer to centralize customer data, while the Data Protection Officer (DPO) can configure the privacy policy and verify that the collected data complies with the brand's policy. Thanks to this process, marketing teams don't need to worry about these constraints: the Scal-e application allows them to use only data that complies with the configured privacy policy and the obtained customer consents.
« Without proof of consent (purpose of processing, legal basis, retention period, etc.), customer data no longer has any value for brands and should therefore not be used.… ”
Christophe Alves: CEO of Scal-e
The history of Scal-e – past and future
You mentioned a spin-off; if I understand correctly, you and your partners bought back the company.
Could you tell us more?
Christophe Alves: Yes, absolutely. Together, we co-founded a marketing agency in 2008 and developed its business in Europe, Asia, and the US. Over time, and with evolving local regulations, we had to adapt the various marketing solutions that we and our clients were using. Since these tools limited our growth, we decided to develop our own. Finally, before launching the project, we came across the sale documents for Scal-e, which had already completed over 200 projects, either directly or through its network of partners. This clearly demonstrates the advantage of a startup combined with extensive project experience.
Can you tell us how the Scal-e platform differed from the products you have used?
Christophe Alves: My partners and I have worked on fintech projects or martech For over 20 years, we've seen agencies, integrators, IT teams, and even our own teams repeat the same developments for every industry and every brand, adapting "off-the-shelf" solutions to meet the specific needs of each brand and user. An idea came to us: perhaps we should simplify things for users by allowing them to configure their own platforms without needing to develop or use overly technical products. A bit like Excel.
It was important to understand that The needs of brands are evolving And that even two competing brands don't want to do the same thing. We figured that instead of focusing on a single use case or sector, like having a CDP dedicated to B2C or B2B, or a CDP dedicated to specific e-commerce sites, or a loyalty solution that only manages certain types of benefits or awards points/benefits based solely on transactional events… we wanted to offer business teams (marketing, data, DPO, IT) the ability to fully customize the platform without having to redevelop the product. This would allow them to offer a completely personalized experience to their customers.
And that's what we liked about the 1stst presentation.
The modular aspect of the platform This allows each brand, and even each user, to use only the modules or functions they need. The single cloud aspect eliminates the need for IT teams to interconnect different clouds or solutions. The platform's focus on a Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows for the configuration of 100% customized data models without ever needing to touch the database server. The ETL functionality offers various interfacing methods, such as a polymorphic API that automatically adapts to the models implemented in the CDP. Any field in the CDP can be used to build a segment, a population, personalize content, recommend a product, or even generate a report, even if that field has just been created or calculated. And so on.
The best ideas are often simple, and we can see that major American players would like to move in this direction… but given their history of buying and integrating solutions, it's not so simple. So yes, we liked the product… as well as its designer, who continues to surprise us daily with the ingenuity of his ideas.
Can you share with us some of the topics you are working on?
Christophe Alves: There are dozens!
As I was saying, each project allows us to identify new canals or data sources. So this allows us to add connectors to these solutions.
As more and more brands are now able to unify their data, we are seeing increasing demand for better understanding and leveraging this data. To address this, we have invested heavily in creating a module for BI self-service which allows any user to create a dashboard in just a few clicks. This might seem simple, as many BI solutions exist, but I'm talking about a user with the same level of skill as right-clicking in Excel, choosing a chart type, and building a 100% customized dashboard. When you consider that some of our clients have millions of contacts with millions of transactions and other data points attached, this kind of calculation can take hours with standard solutions. With Scal-e, it takes just a few minutes.
Now, topics are starting to emerge, such as the ability to scrape data from different blockchains in order to unify not just offline and online data, but offline, online, and on-chain data! This allows for a 360° view regardless of the environment, or the ability to allocate tokens or NFTs to a member based on their... commitment whether in-store, on an e-commerce site or on web3!
But I suggest we save that for a future discussion, knowing that we will be making several announcements on this subject.
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The summer series continues
Read the rest of the interview in this article:
Optimize acquisition and retention costs with a CDP
