This episode features conversations from season 2 of Good Data, Better Marketing. In this episode, you’ll hear expert advice on AI adoption and ROI, the human side of marketing, and tips on achieving a seamless customer experience. We also have an exciting announcement from your host, Kailey Raymond!
This episode features conversations from season 2 of Good Data, Better Marketing. In this episode, you’ll hear expert advice on AI adoption and ROI, the human side of marketing, and tips on achieving a seamless customer experience. We also have an exciting announcement from your host, Kailey Raymond!
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:08) - Special announcement
*(01:52) - AI adoption and ROI with Morgan Norman, Ilan Frank, and Pete Housely
*(11:33) - The human side of marketing with Kristen Maa, Ali Miller, and Andrew Mok
*(19:28) - Building best-in-class customer experiences with Patricia Corsi, Jessica Jensen, and Tiffany Perkins-Munn
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“This next wave of AI is how do you get everyone to adopt it and start to tinker with it? It doesn't mean that it's going to work perfectly for them, but they're going to push the envelope of what it is, getting back to you of what those features might be or how it would work better for their workflow.” – Morgan Norman
“We're continuing to really leverage all of the signals and all that wonderful first party data, to drive better outcomes and more efficient outcomes for CPGs. Altogether, it feels like the recipe for trust is not just great products. It's also engaging in those transparent conversations and building those relationships with the people behind the budgets.That's also what I love about CPG.” – Ali Miller
“There are lots of businesses that are using social media, not only for marketing, but also for customer service. Actively engaging with customers on the platform, addressing their concerns, building relationships. This, to me, is a real opportunity for digital transformation and AI to maximize the work that's happening.” – Tiffany Perkins-Munn
Links:
Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
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Sponsor
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Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing everyone. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond. And today we have a little something different for you. We've been at this now for two seasons and have interviewed over three dozen guests from the world's biggest brands and innovative companies. So we thought, what better time than Q1 to soak in the wisdom of some of the best minds in customer engagement to help you chart your path in 2024. From JP Morgan Chase and Indeed to Airtable and Instacart, we're taking the experts advice on developing successful data-driven customer engagement strategies. Today's episode curates some of our favorite moments from season two for you, you'll hear us dive deep into AI, how to drive adoption in ROI with everyone's favorite buzzword. We'll also discuss one of my personal favorite topics, how to make marketing more human through trust and personalization. And last we'll round it out with top tips on achieving a seamless customer experience. So that's what to expect today. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we also have an exciting announcement, a new season is on its way, Season 3. This season, we're bringing new voices into the mix to discuss data activation, profile enrichment, campaign personalization and much more.
Kailey Raymond: A little teaser trailer. Our first guest is the Global CMO of PwC, who wrote the book on B2B customer journeys. So if you ever found yourself wondering how to approach the B2B funnel with fresh eyes, this episode is for you, season three of Good Data, Better Marketing, brought to you by Twilio segment, coming to wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Kailey Raymond: To kick things off, here's Morgan Norman, Ilan Frank and Pete Housley going all in on AI. Can you just tell me a little bit about how you're helping your customers to implement AI use cases? What does that look like?
Morgan Norman: Well, it has a lot to do with data, which I think you folks talk about in all the parameters around data. So what Dialpad originally started as, it's the folks that built Google Voice, they had this vision of building business collaboration for everyone, all types, whether that's meetings, voice, contact center, sales, it didn't really matter. And then they got lucky in a way with this acquisition that came to them and they figured out like, could conversational data be the most valuable data in the world. And data is the new currency suddenly that happened this year. So one of the pieces I think from an AI perspective is it's one thing to say you're an AI company, it's one thing to actually have AI data, it all comes down to usage and adoption. We can all talk about it. You've launched a feature, there's a press release, the sales people have presentation decks, but are people really using it? And what I love about working for a company that has Google DNA and design and self-service DNA is from a contact center perspective, those who are dealing with customer engagement, 96% of all customers on our Customer Engagement side use AI.
Morgan Norman: It's shocking, we didn't even know it was actually true, right? This can't be accurate at first. The other piece now is this next wave of AI is how do you get everyone to adopt it and start to tinker with it. It doesn't mean that it's gonna work perfectly for them, but they're going to push the envelope of what it is getting back to you of what those features might be or how it would work better for their workflow. So the difference that I see a lot of AI companies is, yes, you have an AI feature, but the truth is we all know you don't have capacity, if you're in the AI market, you know you don't have capacity to offer it to a lot of people, it's just the nature of the space right now, the next flavor is really dealing with users that are very passionate about this, and actually do they want to kind of adopt some of these features and kinda coach you in because it is uncharted worlds, if you will.
Morgan Norman: The other piece of AI is we have a lifecycle team that's constantly educating the individuals on what features might be interesting for them, is it a meeting summary, is it a recap, would they like a coaching moment or a playbook? And so if you think about your AI features, not just like, did they turn on AI, what are the different features and functions you want folks to adopt, and then how is that gonna provide data for you and different parameters for you?
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Kailey Raymond: How are you thinking about helping your customers actually adopt some of these features and feel comfortable in using them in their workflows?
Ilan Frank: Yeah. We hear AI in almost every boardroom conversation.
Kailey Raymond: Oh yeah.
Ilan Frank: So every time that we come in and meet with a customer and meet with executives in that board room, they are mentioning AI, what is their AI strategy, what are they doing. When we get on smaller conversations with four people on a zoom call at that company, it's not exactly to being discussed at that tactical, we need to this right now. When do we roll this out? So we've rolled out a limited availability version of our AI as of June, and we're testing with customers. And so we have early hand-raisers and adopters where those individuals who are builders have said, I'm really interested in this, and I'm gonna be that champion, that AI champion inside my company.
Ilan Frank: And so we're working very closely with them. So that's the first thing is how can you deliver value. This is almost with any product market fit type of situation, how can you deliver value first to early adopters to champions, and then you figure out basically the next S curve, which is, Alright, how do you now go and develop something that delivers or shows value to people who are more hesitant of new technology like this. You're really figuring out what is it about the product delivers this instant delight, this instant value, that someone that is using it, will say to their friend, right, use their social capital, so to speak, in their workplace, "You've gotta try this. This has made me more productive." We're having instances of that throughout Airtable where people that have had access to this for now many months, will say, "Look, I did this overnight and it saved me hours." And so we have actually a Slack channel where people share those stories internally. We're gonna need to do that in a more broad sense, of course, with our customers.
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Kailey Raymond: Where would you say companies are today in their AI adoption curve, and are there any common channels or programs where you're seeing AI implemented right now?
Pete Housley: I think realistically, Kailey, companies today are at 10% of their AI maturity curve, their awareness is much higher, their appetite type is much, much higher, but in practicality in terms of implementation and walking through their various functional areas and understanding how AI can enhance productivity, etcetera, 10%. Perhaps, in marketing areas on matters of personalization and some of those things, ad serving, even when we read programmatic advertising, there was AI principles built into that, but I would say 10%. In terms of the low-hanging fruit, and my prediction of where the adoption is going to be the highest, the fastest. The most obvious to me is chatbots with AI functionality to do customer support, customer deflection, because all those files exist, call centers have years of recorded answers on their telephone calls, they have messaging and support resources and libraries, all of that can be loaded into AI chat tools. And at your fingertips, it's available, and not only can that work in a self-serve environment for customers that are calling in, it also is a better tool for agents than any of the queue management tools that are used for call center management.
Pete Housley: And some of those tools may debate that point, but that to me is an overwhelming opportunity. There's a great business case out of Ikea in the UK, and what they did is they fully implemented chat for support. "Where's my dining room table and when is it arriving and I need a refund there's a scratch on it." And what they did is they took the workforce and they retrained them into design consultants. So they took the repetitive work that AI could do, and they enabled that and then leveraged that money to do a much higher value-added serve... That to me, is the best example of AI creating jobs and carving out new territories and really stepping up to the power of AI.
Pete Housley: I have read a lot and certainly talked to our VP of Data and engineering about peer-review in code, and I think GitHub's CoPilot essentially gives coders peer review in the moment in real time, very often suggests the next line of code, but if we think about over the years we've always had code reviews with peer-to-peer or peer-to-bot. And so now you have Copilot, which is just going to make everybody better and more efficient, so that's I think a great territory. Obviously, with the super exciting year we've had on conversational AI and ChatGPT, and then the art direction tools, and whether that be MidJourney, Dall-E, etcetera, content creation is dramatically enabled and many of us have full stack marketing teams, we basically run an in-house agency here, but for solopreneurs and founders, they do not have a marketing department.
Pete Housley: So these tools are so good that literally a solo marketer can do almost everything a full-service agency could do, they've gotta learn a little bit how to be a prompt advertising person, but super empowering, and then I think the obvious is in the area of marketing automation and marketing optimization. And we've seen this coming on for the better part of a decade, but once again, that's predicated on having the right data foundation to be able to bolt on these AI tools.
[music]
Kailey Raymond: Next up, we learn about the human side of marketing from Kristin Maa, Ali Miller and Andrew Mok. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper to see if there were other tactics around customer engagement that you're deploying at Saks.
Kristin Maa: One of the other tactics that I think over the last couple of years we've really started digging into in a new way is the concept of LTV. It's something that I think a lot of companies are using to try to think about customer acquisition, and we are using it in that way, but we're also using it in a couple of other ways where we've taken, again, the things we sort of know about customers and what their actual LTV has been and sort of modeled what are the biggest impacts on predicting higher LTV. And so, this is helpful in a bunch of ways, but one of them is, a lot of times we think about VIP customers or high value customers, and we know who they are based on what they've spent historically, but sometimes we might have a customer who's new, they've made one purchase with us, so we don't really know them, but if we can know from some of the behaviors around their first purchase.
Kristin Maa: So what they bought, of course, brand and category, but also, did they sign up for email? Did they have an account? Were they using an app? Have they been in a store before? All of these different things that are sort of pre-purchase behaviors, we can say they are likely to be high LTV based on the few data points that we have on them. And so, instead of waiting for them to be with us for a year and prove that they're high LTV by continuing to come back and spend, let's help make sure that happens by treating them like a high LTV VIP customer from the beginning.
Kristin Maa: So if we're giving early access to product or an exclusive capsule or enhanced customer service to our VIP customers, we're also taking a group of people that haven't "earned" that status, in quotation marks, "earned" the status already, but they're indicating that they probably will, and going ahead and giving it to them. Because we wanna make sure that we're retaining them, it gives us a better chance to engage them in sort of wrap our arms around them early and make sure that they kinda fulfill their destiny as that high LTV VIP customer that we think that they're going to be. So I think that's important for us, especially as we and everybody else starts to think more about retention and making sure that we're keeping the customers that we've acquired and growing their wallet share with us, knowing if you can't invest the same amount in every customer and you can't treat them all in the same way. If there are special things that you can only do for some, how do you make sure that you're extending that to customers who haven't yet demonstrated the behavior that you're looking for, but they seem like they will.
[music]
Kailey Raymond: I think that some folks might consider ads like a four-letter word in some ways, where it's like, "You're really influencing me to buy... " But like, framing it in the way of making it a really meaningful touch point for both the consumer as well as the businesses that you're supporting and being able to tie that back directly to revenue, or you found this new product that you really fell in love with and you wouldn't have found it otherwise, and making it that really meaningful part of this journey, I think, is unique now with what you're able to do.
Ali Miller: Yeah. Yeah, it's very true, and it also really reflects the kind of coming online of the traditional in-grocery store experience. All of those shelves, all of the brands you see, everything that's trying to kind of inspire you to try something new, that's all part of what is now coming on to the digital shelf, and the digital shelf can be so much more personalized and dynamic, and what I love is that especially when we're looking at the breadth of brands, we can support digital shelf space is not finite, you can find the right thing that's gonna resonate with the consumer at the right time. And so emerging brands have a chance to play on a level playing field, and we can provide a little bit more diversity in what consumers are able to find and discover, so I love that the digital shelf can be so much more responsive, and that's an amazing ads opportunity as well as a great opportunity for consumers to discover something new.
Ali Miller: We've made a lot of progress, I think, in engaging with what our CPGs expect to see as we're maturing as an ads platform and taking in all that feedback, figuring out where the industry is going and figuring out where we can best provide that true understanding of value, so that goes hand-in-hand with optimizing toward that value. We've launched optimized bidding, we're continuing to really leverage all of the signals and all the wonderful first party data as I mentioned, to drive better outcomes and more efficient outcomes for CPGs, so all together, it feels like the recipe for trust is not just great products, it's also engaging in those transparent conversations and building those relationships with the people behind the budgets.
Ali Miller: That's also what I love about CPG, it's very personal, it's really relationship building in addition to cold hard results and reports on a screen, so it feels like that's helped to put us in a better place and continue to build that great relationship with our partners. So I've loved that, and it's been a really rewarding journey to see the value actually come through in the metrics.
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Kailey Raymond: What are some of the trends that you're currently seeing related to customer experience?
Andrew Mok: I think there's just been a trend that has been going on for a while that's going to be further accelerated, which is a premium on things that only humans can do, so, human stories, human connection, originality, creativity, these are things that robots by definition can't do because people value them because they come from another human. That's turbo-charging even more I think just this idea of coming up with original content, coming up with original campaigns, doing things that are new, doing things that are different that are authentic to sort of like what it means to be a human, I think those are gonna be the types of stories that really resonate, with people.
Andrew Mok: A really big part of our brand strategy has always been centered around hosts and guests and the people that are sort of behind the community operating peer-to-peer car sharing, and so for us, it's even more leading into that, so the human stories of our host, our incredible host community. We have the single mom who shares five cars on Turo so that she can stay at home with her kids and still generate an income, we have the pastor in Hawaii who has and wants to continue to dedicate his life to local community service and helping his community, but he also needs an income because he has five kids, [chuckle] so he starts a small car sharing business, so really highlighting, I think more and more of these stories has always been a big part of our branding, and it's gonna be something that we continue to do.
Andrew Mok: I mean, I think also just kind of speaking more from the marketing lens, I think we've put even more of a premium on creativity and creative direction in our phenomenal, in-house creative team that's comprised of designers, video producers, photographers, copywriters, content strategists. I mean, we really believe that that is part of the special sauce of what we do special is the team that we built and the team dynamic and our process for brainstorming and coming up with concepts and testing them and making them better and reacting to trends as they happen. I mean, these are all things that I think it would be very, very difficult for a robot to replace.
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Kailey Raymond: In these final clips, you'll hear from Patrica Corsi, Jessica Jensen and Tiffany Perkins-Munn about building best in class customer experiences. I'm wondering if there's any consumer trends in particular that you're watching as it relates to building great consumer experiences.
Patricia Corsi: Yes, so this is one thing that we can't sleep on this one, especially after the past three years that we had where the changes that have happened due to COVID or political and social unrest have happened. So we need to have a very close proximity with the consumer. So the first thing that I'm looking in terms of trends is, how do we keep this closeness? How do we create positive and engaging interruptions with the consumers? And I don't mean this in a bad way, but it is a complication factor. We are in very noisy and polluted times. And what I mean by that is there is so much distraction everywhere that you go in every moment of your life that is difficult to focus. So being empathic with the consumer needs, sometimes they don't even know that there is a solution for them because there's so much noise around that they don't get that information.
Patricia Corsi: So, one of the trends that it's important for us to understand is how do we connect and what are the solutions, either it's apps, platforms, or whatever it is that can make this journey frictionless. And this is one of the most, if you ask one of the things that take my sleep at night is this, how do we make this connectivity to the consumer to better serve them and our customers in a way that is as smooth and really deliver value added at the time and place where it's needed. One of the things that we have seen in the past decade is that the trust from consumers into brands have decreased year over year. And this is a massive problem because brands are the sponsors in the turbine behind a lot of the developments. And you even see platforms like Netflix or social media and all of this that despite of the fact that for years they said we are not going to have advertising, they surrender to it because they start understanding that this is a means to an end.
Patricia Corsi: But also this is where people, in most of the cases find communication, education, innovation. So you can imagine... And there is a very simple relationship between this trust and how can we help, and I'm going to use our health industry as an example. When we had COVID and when we had the big crisis that people were simply not leaving their house either to go to the doctor, to the hospital or to the pharmacy, how could they know what products were available if it was not, for example, for e-commerce? And of course in the countries where we have e-commerce very well developed, then the critical question is, is the material that is in there in terms of information and education enough for this new moment where they cannot consult their doctors as they did before, or they cannot consult the pharmacist like they did before? So then the role of the brands changed, the role of the brands move from a bit more, you know, like it was seeing a bit more transactional to one that is really supporting two to help me in a moment of crisis. And it's interesting enough to see that the trusting brands, since COVID has increased back again after years of decreasing. And shame on us, and I mean in all the industry, if we don't take this opportunity to really do the job that we need to do with our brands.
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Kailey Raymond: Are there any things that you are working on that the trends are driving some of the strategies that you are implementing on your team right now?
Jessica Jensen: Sure. Well, so a lot of people don't know that our sister company is Glassdoor and we are owned by the same Japanese holding company called Recruit. And we go to market partnering with Glassdoor. We don't wanna just be a place where you go when you quotes need a job, right? We and Glassdoor, we want to be career companions to workers throughout their lives, not just when they're a job seeker. And so we're very excited about this community integration on Glassdoor and all of those jobs and all of the cross integrations between Glassdoor and Indeed we are the jobs provider to Glassdoor. We work together on a lot of the matching technology between employers and job seekers. So that transition and that investment in a deeper richer customer experience for job seekers also of course helps us with employers.
Kailey Raymond: Can you just tell me a little bit more about how you do apply that matching technology to get the right candidates into the hands of the right employers?
Jessica Jensen: You know, we have invested a ton of work and are investing in skills taxonomy and the real specificity around types of jobs, types of workers, worker proclivities and desires and extracting from people. Extract sounds like a surgical process, but there's some data surgery involved, right? But a nurse in Dallas, Texas, there are renal nurses, there are cardiac nurses. I mean, there's very... We have to get into very granular specificity around certifications and experience on the employer side and the job seeker side, right? And so that is not a small undertaking when you're doing it at global scale and we have massive teams dedicated to that investments in LLMs and AI making a lot of progress.
Jessica Jensen: But it's hard. It's hard deep work, but our tools are learning so much over time, right? These kinds of job seekers with these backgrounds apply at a certain rate, interview at a certain rate, get offers and get hired. So I mean the data not only about people's skills and experience, but then how they engage with jobs and employers is so critical. Like time connectedness between job seekers and employers. I'm sure you've heard this term, the black hole of recruiting, right? Like, a job seeker applies.
Kailey Raymond: Oh yeah.
Jessica Jensen: Employer never responds.
[laughter]
Jessica Jensen: And employer reaches out to a job seeker says, "We'd love for you to apply or interview this job." Job seeker never responds. So trying to drive the actual responsiveness funnel is another major focus for us.
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Kailey Raymond: I am wondering if there are any trends in particular that you have your eye on that you're seeing that relate to the customer experience and that journey that you're building?
Tiffany Perkins-Munn: Yeah, there are so many trends, but maybe I would classify the top five just to make it simple. The number one being digital transformation, right? Artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics to deliver personalized experiences. That's all about the digital transformation that's happening across our broader landscape, not only in financial services but across all industries. Number two I think would be more automation, like self-service and automation, right? So we have all these digital platforms now and as it turns out, there are many customers who like to solve their issues independently. You know, they really wanna be able to get from the issue that they're having to the resolution of the issue without any human intervention.
Kailey Raymond: I'm that person.
Tiffany Perkins-Munn: Me too, me too, by the way. [laughter] So as a result, businesses are actually investing in self-service tools, right? So you'll see the rise of lots of chatbots. Now when you go to websites, in addition to being able to send a question via the online portal, you can typically chat with someone right there to help you resolve your problem. And the chat right there could actually deliver the service for you, like walk you through the process for filling out the application or take the order and get your information to send it to you and things like that. The third thing I would say is probably omnichannel customer service. So this is a place... A space where I feel that businesses that have omnichannel capabilities have not quite figured out that single line of sight across the omnichannel experience, right? But customers, you and me, we expect seamless experiences across all of the touchpoints.
Tiffany Perkins-Munn: If we go onto the website, if we go onto the app, if we communicate via email, if a business sends me something in email, if I go into the store, if I'm on my phone, even snail mail, 'cause snail mail is still a thing. The fourth thing I would say is like data privacy and security. So all of these businesses are collecting much more data, and I think now customers are becoming more engaged with the way that data is being utilized and they're starting to take more of an interest in understanding, how is that information being used and to have expectations around if the information is being used, what are you getting out of it? I would say the fifth and the most obvious, is social media.
Tiffany Perkins-Munn: There are lots of businesses that are using social media, not only for marketing, but also for customer service, like we were talking about before. So actively engaging with customers on the platform, addressing their concerns, building relationships. So this to me is a real opportunity for digital transformation and AI to maximize the work that's happening, particularly within marketing, which is where I think the customer experience lives and how you should be engaging with the customer, what you need to know about them, and what their expectations are about how they should engage with you.
Kailey Raymond: Thank you to all of our guests who joined us this season, and thank you for listening. We'll see you back here for season three of good data, better marketing.