 Hi, good evening. So, I am the last man standing between you and and it and your evening Right. So, no, there is a word of thanks. So, I'm okay Okay, good evening everyone. Thanks for staying For this session. I know it's the last one today And nobody wants to get stuck in the traffic here So, let's start with the with a quick poll Do any of you get those? pesky text messages pestering you to pay your credit card or other bills when you have already paid last week, let's say Do you get them? I get them too quite often, right? And they often have a disclaimer saying Please ignore if already paid Right. Now, I often wonder why do you need to have a disclaimer in place if your omni channel or Multichannel strategies are in place, right? So this shows there is a disconnect between Let's say they are messaging platform and Their platform that has my payment information, right? The two systems are not in sync or are not integrated at least not in real time Right. So this is what we'll cover today then We'll talk about these omni channel experiences. What's wrong with them? We'll take a look at some examples and so on We'll then look at How stack architectures have evolved and what is it that we need to do in the new decade to be able to address these omni channel experiences We'll look at both Both the old stack and how it is evolving for the new decade We'll look at some of the foundation services that are important as we get into 2020s and and modernize our stacks And then we'll summarize this Okay So the basic premise that I am taking today is that omni channel experiences is broken especially in India Let's let's look at an example. So last week I Ordered a number of items on a leading retailer's craft website And those orders the items were supposed to be picked up from the store So when I went to the store in the evening to pick up those items 50% of them were already out of stock and mind you I had already paid in advance and it had shown me that those items are in stock There are several examples Another time I placed an order for a demand draft or a banker's check on a bank's website To be picked up from my nearest physical branch, but when I went to the branch, they had absolutely no idea I'm sure you have your own fair share of such Omni channel fail stories, right? So text messages with with with with obsolete information or email offers coming in Which don't work on website and so many of those types of examples, right? So we'll we'll view some look at some examples So this is this is an email from from LinkedIn, which has a coupon code that gives me a discount of $50 But when I actually apply this coupon code on their website, it says the coupon is already expired Now if the coupon is already expired why send it to me in the first place, right? So some disconnect in the underlying systems and other examples I get an email with the with with and with a price of a mobile phone But when I actually click on it the price is completely different now you could argue that by the time I clicked on Clicked on the price that offer was already gone, right? But what explains this another example from their competitor, right? So here you will notice that while the price has changed the MRP has also changed and in India You know that the MRP cannot change, right? So the product is same the seller is same, but the MRP is different, right? So another thing that points to different underlying systems Right so content varies across these systems now. It's not just the content that varies across these systems It's also these rules that define how that content is Exposed right so these are the rules such as personalization rules that define What content to be displayed to whom right so? Often organizations have multiple setups multiple systems and they end up having rules in each of those systems, right? So in this case you see as Web experience management platform with a set of personalization rule and another email marketing platform with its own set of personalization rules And those personalization rules are usually separate and there is no easy way to standardize or align align them In addition customers have often have multiple identities, right? So for example in this case the left-hand side screenshot shows the retailers Ordering retailers website with my profile information and on the right-hand side is their Facebook page with my information and you will notice that I Provide different email IDs or different profile identifiers To this brand and there is no easy way or no Trivial way to actually map both those two IDs to a single user profile and these are just two channels Imagine what happens if there are like 10 channels or 15 channels, right? This problem becomes even more complex Right. So while we intuitively understand the issues behind these These problems, you know, we have seen different content different system not in sync and so on but let's look at a Tech stack view of what the issues are, right? So this slide shows a sort of a Stack or a martyke stack that a lot of organizations have right similar stacks You know, there is some statistic that says that a typical enterprise often employs about 90 odd platforms I think David that was your one of your findings, right? So 90 odd platforms we will not we can't have 90 platforms here, but let's take a subset of this for that discussion and And on the top you have the engagement channels that you used to interact with your customers then you have the interaction and delivery environments and then you have the engagement and And content platforms right pretty standard type of a stack diagram, of course each situation varies So these boxes might differ but the idea is similar Right now the problem with such taxes and these tax were quite popular in 2010 A lot of you have invested heavily in such tax build expertise and so on Right, but the problem with these tax is that each of these boxes is really a silo in itself or an island in itself What that means is that each of these boxes have their own? content rules Data customer data and so forth right so let's take the example of outbound marketing for example a Typical outbound marketing platform or ESP also has some basic capabilities of handling customer data, right? So they manage lists lists of customers list of contacts and so on They also have their own personalization rules So for example, you want to do some ab testing of your emails or you want to send specific emails to specific people You need some personalization engine or some capability for personalization there They also have campaign manager manage campaign planning tools, right? So you you visually create a campaign and then run that campaign with multiple drip drip drip steps and so on and so forth and And finally some some less some sort of analytic capabilities Right, so this this shows an example of such is such a marketing tool I think this is from MailChimp and on the left you will see that all those capabilities are mentioned there Slightly more detailed view of that, right? So you have the email template a visibig email template and then you have a workflow type interest as visual type interface for creating campaigns some interface for analytics and Another interface for managing customer lists, right? Now What is the problem with this you might ask, right? So the problem is that not just this outbound marketing box, but all other boxes have similar Customer content data rules planning and analytics of their own So so like I said each of these boxes is a silo and each silo has its own Capabilities whether they are rudimentary or sophisticated. That's that's a different matter But all of them have some capabilities of content data rules planning and analytics Right and because of that You are unable to do anything that requires cross application or cross channel thing, right? So for example, if you were to use your content in your WCM to be delivered to To let's say your e-commerce site or using content in your e-commerce engine with recommendations in your personalization Or something like that, right? Any anything that requires cross channel or Across channels across multiple channels. It's is not revealed to do right and because of that Oops, these images are not coming Right anyway, so those were smiley faces and some crying faces So essentially the idea is that because of this issue Your customer experience really suffers and is not consistent So you you get some channels where customers are really happy whereas there are other channels where customers are really upset, right? So that that that that that's the major problem with these kind of Stack models Right. So this is going to be a text heavy slide But this just summarizes all the things that we mentioned that I just described just now So just quickly summarizing this, right? So the problem with these taxes that your data is stuck in back office repositories, right? So each repository has its own set of data and because of that your experience is often Inconsistent and not actionable across channels, right? It's not cross channel or multi channel or omni channel The second problem is that your content experience and rules are now channel specific, right? They are platform specific or channel specific. So you have separate Content delivery rules for your email marketing. You have another set of content delivery rules for your website A third set of content delivery rule for your e-commerce and so on, right? So your content Your rules for content delivery are very platform specific and often get replicated across channels Right and therefore your decision logic is now part of individual delivery channel rather than something that needs to be more horizontal And drive all the delivery channels and therefore your customers and prospects don't enjoy a truly Integrated and consistent experience. Their experience is usually disjointed and fragmented and and not Not consistent. So we have seen these are sort of symptoms that we have seen in consistent engagement Siloed customer and prospect data marketing disconnected from sales and so on and so forth Right. So the end result is that it is impossible to create consistent customer experiences and a unified Approach to engagement across channels with the kind of stacks that we have been working so far Working with so far, right? So what do you do? You know, we have seen the problem, but What is the solution to this this sort of a stack problem? How do you modernize your your existing stacks, right? So Here's another Stack diagram and this is what we call a reference diagram Of course reference diagrams are always Examples they won't fit in hundred percent, but they sort of give you a starting point, right? So so what it does is that instead of having a An individual siloed Data content rules etc. It abstracts all of them into a sort of an enterprise foundation service layer of its own, right? So you have In the bottom you will see this enterprise foundation Services layer with three pillars. There is content and info data and decisioning So what we have done is that we have abstracted all those things like the ones that I mentioned like content like data Like rules away from each of those individual channels and into a layer of their own, right and What this results is in is that each of those boxes have same access have access to the same data same Same content same rules and therefore your customer experience all across all these channels is consist It is is constant and and unified and all of that So all those images that you don't see are all bright smiley faces. So you can imagine that visualize that Right, so essentially what this means is that now outbound marketing box like it had its own set of Data rules etc. It no longer has that instead. It has this access to this common layer With which has data content and decisioning and so do all of the other boxes, right? So customer care CRM WCM e-commerce etc. So all of them have access to same data same content and info and same decisioning And because all of them have access to same underlying Assets it's easier to have only channel experience. That's consistent across channels Right. So essentially what we have done is we have abstracted all the common things into a layer of its own So so the top layer become light and the bottom layers become heavy in this stack So so what does this mean for your tools such as CMS tools, which lot of lot of companies use, right? So what this means is that a lot of lot of logic lot of complex sophisticated logic from your WCM now moves to Till to the layer below it, right? So it's now part of this foundation services so that So things like content reuse or things like workflows etc. Move from top to bottom and and similarly for other capabilities So instead of having Customer data lists in your outbound marketing platform you have it in a layer below so products in your top row or top Become slightly lighter and the products in the foundation layer becomes become become a little bit heavier Right. So this is this is an example of how we use this this tag diagram We had a customer council two weeks back where we asked the 20 of our customers to put red green blue and yellow dots in the areas that they thought are doing well and And they thought are not doing well and you can see that a lot of reds are there in the customer data Bob pillar which is in the middle and there are a lot of blues in the decisioning pillar which me blue stood for An identified need that they want to do but they haven't done it yet. So they plan to do that, right? So those are the two boxes which are really becoming important As we talk more and more of omni-channel strategies or omni-channel experience Right. So let's look at these key foundation services. We have four minutes. So let's look at this key foundation services quickly There are three boxes here. They're three pillars here. There's content and info There's data and there is decisioning. So we can't go into all of them But quickly let's look at some of the most important ones The first one is the CDP. I think David already gave an excellent overview of CDP. So quickly going through it This is the traditional CDP model where you have All this data ingestion from first and zero party second and third party on the left And then you apply data management principles to it meaning you do things like ID resolution You do you do data cleaning you do ETL data enrichment segmentation and so on and so forth And then you activate that data meaning you send all those segments or cleaned up unified profiles to your downstream marketing systems Right. So this has been a traditional CDP CDP model where a CDP Claimed to be doing all of these activities in the middle right, but off late we are seeing that With second gen CDP implementations There is some sort of a divide happening there and and we see that There are two boxes there now and this is the emerging model So there is a customer data management layer and then a customer data activation layer with the with a split of functionality So you have ingest transform clean all those data quality management things in the customer data management as Box and then you have the activation pieces in the orange box Right and typically in large organizations or the enterprise or the complex enterprises We see that these Activities mentioned in the in the blue box are typically handled as part of data fabric Right, which is a broader data environment beyond CDP. So your data warehouse snowflake What have you right? So a lot of organizations the large ones specially ask us, you know when we talk about CDP They say that look we are already doing a lot of these activities elsewhere So why do we want to replicate in CDP which is why now CDP vendors are trying to differentiate between management and activation and trying To package their offerings similarly Right. So again, like David said a CDP can do a lot of things that are mentioned here But what's important for you is to find out what is the scope of CDP for your company, right? So for some CDPs can do first two boxes Well, some CDPs can do last two boxes Well, some cities would claim that they can do all of these boxes really well Don't believe those those vendors just do your own testing after figuring out What is it that you want your CDP to do for you? Okay, the second is the decisioning platform. So what's important here is the Things like journey management and journey analytics or omni-channel journey orchestration These are the platforms that allow you to Visualize and manage customer journeys across multiple channels multiple touchpoints across different times and and so on and so forth these These platforms became really popular in 2020s in late 2020s but now we are seeing that They this market is more or less Kind of dead, I don't want to use that word but but the fact is that most of the vendors have given up on that market and There were several reasons for that, but what's happening now is that A lot of CDP vendors are starting to pick up that and a lot of CDP vendors have started to offer some bit of journey orchestration capabilities As part of their platforms 17 seconds, okay And then you know content you already know that so will not cover This is our humble Martek map these are the vendors that we cover so if you want to know what are the key vendors in each of those technologies that I That I talked about CDPs and and journey orchestration, etc. These are the vendors that that we cover You can go to our website www.realsorrygroups.com vendor map and download a high resolution Version of this this graphic. So essentially we use some sort of a subway map to describe Different technology areas and their intersections Tell you a lot. So for example in the middle, you will see a lot of crowd Which is essentially the sweet vendors and and some people would like you to believe that sweets are often a better solution Again, don't believe them and do your independent testing with these vendors Okay, so key takeaways. This is what we discussed today the main thing about Omni channel is that you need to remove silos of information silos of data content, etc. From your stack to be able to do Omni channel to be able to provide Omni channel experiences and In order to do that you need to avoid content experiences and rules that are really platform or channels So don't have anything that is only specific to let's say your website So you can't have personalization rules that work only on website You need to be able to define your personalization in such a way that it works across channels And so what that means is that you need to rethink if it makes to have it makes sense to have all those Capabilities at higher level or at the lower foundational level, right? What we are recommending is that you abstract out all those capabilities and make your top level layer really light bring it to the level below Which is the heavy lifting foundational capabilities, right? And that's the fourth point Right. So essentially rethink your stack and make it more customer centric rather than enterprise centric, right? So that's that's really the key message Okay So that's about it Thank you to all those all those of you who who are still here. I appreciate there's any questions if you have one or two Question is always good news Okay, yeah, I don't know honestly there could be several reasons reasons there a lot of people Don't give an email ID. That's that's their primary email ID, right? Because they know that people will will contact them right with cold cold image, right? But that's that's one reason I don't know other reasons could be that They're genuinely not interested in what you have to offer. So maybe Deep deep the match between the profile that you want and that you actually got is is not a good Good fit so that that person maybe is not a good fit could be several reason. I honestly don't know a lot about that