 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Hey, welcome back everyone. Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, my co-host this week. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is Glenn Hartman, North America lead for Accenture Interactive. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So you guys are doing some great stuff around the creativity piece, doing great customer experience, implementation, we had a great walk-through from a lot of the folks from your organization. Yeah, designing up ideas and products, delivering them and then operating them, nice model. Yeah, thanks. Is that your business model? How does that work? What's Accenture Interactive's business model? Well, Accenture Interactive is really about one thing. And it's about creating, delivering and running the best experiences on the planet. We help our clients do that for their own customers. And when we talk about experience, a lot of people have different definitions for that, especially at the conference here. It's not necessarily an experience of a website or a mobile app or the UX as people use it. It's really any way a brand engages with a customer. It's not just marketing either. It could be sales or customer service, loyalty, anything, any way a brand promise can be delivered to a customer. One of the things I've noticed with you guys is that there's a talk track about leadership around a new creative and a new creativity in Adobe, obviously with the software that they have and now the cloud. You're seeing in the marketplace, we saw this at Sundance two years ago, a new kind of creativeism organically coming into the marketplace with more channels to direct a consumer, whether it's B2B or B2C, you would now have new kinds of mechanisms to take product, whether it's apps or content or movies. You're starting to see this democratization really starting to happen. How is that changing how you guys help customers because now they now have new capabilities. They can tell their story in a different way. They have access to new kinds of channels that weren't there before. How is that changing the business in your opinion? In a profound way. So I mean, everybody knows that marketing is inextricably linked to technology and data. Everybody knows that. But when we are thinking about the new creative and the ways that you can tell stories and create experiences, we look at experience very differently. I mentioned before that it was all about all the different touch points and the ways people interact with the brand. But when we look at experience, we call it the big E. And the big E actually stands for empathy. And it's understanding how to define what a brand experience means to that customer and defining success in the terms of that customer. And you know, Jeff and John, you guys are not defined by your data set or what you bought last week. You can be very different types of people in different situations. And understanding ways to empathize with you in the moment and having experiences change in the moment and having creative play a part of that and data play a part of that is the big, aha, it's a new way of looking at things. And the last part of that too in the big E is about emotion. So when you have a big brand that has some emotional connection. You know, you love this brand for an automotive or you love this hotel chain or there's some brand connection you have. How do you have that connection flow through every touch point and data and technology can enable that but it's really empathy and emotion that's the driver. How do you get empathy and creativity to work together because you now have an accelerant with data. You mentioned getting to know people's and empathizing with them in the moment. It's contextual. I could be having a great day or a bad day or driving my kids to school. Whatever's going on with me certainly there's might be some data out there. How do you get the creativity and the empathy to work together in your mind? How do you see that play? That's the nice part is more than ever we have different data sets that can help us do that. I just give you a couple of examples. Instead of understanding how to market to someone so they'll buy the next product and basing that maybe on their demographic or maybe basing it on their preferences. You hear all these terms in marketing for years and you can understand what they bought. Instead of understanding that why don't we try and look and use data which you could easily do today to understand why they bought something. So it could be something as simple as like a I don't know CPG example. Maybe you have shampoo and you could say well they bought these kinds of things before so maybe they'll buy that shampoo but if they know that maybe Jeff is eco-friendly or John maybe you're more into things maybe you buy that shampoo because you care about animals and they know they don't test them on animals or maybe it's something more about experience that that particular shampoo won't make your daughter cry when you shampoo her hair and it helps that experience. That's the reason why it actually helps me you're empathizing in the moment with something that is meaningful that you care about. It's not about a better deal or better or some kind of feature it's something actually about you. More meaningful. It's a deeper meaningful interaction data set. Is that because there was no data before or is there more signals potentially to get exposed to that because that's a hard data points to get. I mean to find the why is a holistic kind of perspective. It's true but I mean I think it's more of a mindset the data's there but the mindset has been different over time people have been looking to technology every buzzword in the world used to be big data and personalization and then now it's AI and machine learning and they're like well that's great and they're all wonderful enablers as I said but it has to be driven by empathy first so it all starts I mean we've been saying this forever customer centricity and customer concerns but really I mean for real if you start to use those data sets and have the mindset has to be a CMO or a brand manager or someone who actually it's advocating for the customer and they are willing to say no I don't need big data I don't need all the data I need this gold nugget part so I can speak to John. It's interesting but as you say the emotional part of the biggie I think of as the old Coke commercial right we're all one world together and we all cry and there's some great McDonald's commercials but when you talk about getting beyond that to the empathy I can't help but think of kind of the whole purpose purpose driven mission driven companies you know kids coming out of college want to work from mission driven companies we heard it over and over in the keynotes you know we're not a product company not even really a service company but we're committed to an ideal to a mission be partners with us be our customer and let's have a relationship that goes so much deeper and longer than any particular transaction is that kind of that tied to that? It's a big part of it absolutely. Now the interesting thing of what you said is that people are tied to a purpose and maybe something that's meaningful in a broad sense absolutely and that's a wonderful place to start and you can start to align products and services in that way. I think the way you talked about like shampoo and you know animal testing right? It's a good one but the next one is really getting a little bit more down to you. So I think all that is great but really understanding what you need in the moment because what happens is some of those things may change. If you are shopping at a grocery store every Saturday for your family and you're used to doing that your attitude there might be different than when you're shopping when your kid is sick and you got pulled out of work and you got to get there to get their prescription you're into speed and you're stressed in the moment versus maybe on Saturday you're like I'll try some new coupons and try some new things and go buy the little tasting station. It's actually behaviors that you want to understand in the moment that is a big part of that as well but the key thing too here is let's think of this when you deal with empathy it's not just getting to know all those things even if it gets to that level it's actually changing the way marketers think about talking to and communicating and relating to customers. Even the language that they use I mean think of it today I mean still people use marketers are they're marketing two people. It's let's acquire customers. Let's convert customers. Let's win developers over. Good I mean you don't win developers over. I mean what was the last time you guys were real excited about getting converted. Okay it's not a fun experience right. So if you even change that mindset and you say let's market with someone let's help them. Can you actually create experiences that are useful and helpful not about conversion and not a business metric but success that's defined by the customer. How are you guys playing this out because this is really kind of ties on multiple threads. I mean there's a whole other community angle too. People belong to communities in context to their life and they engage and when they engage is emotional connection to a group. There's some cohorts as a word okay the groups but their friends and colleagues or whatever it could be. You guys are deploying this with customers. Take us through a use case day in the life of empathy deployed into how you guys do business with the big brands and what are the success. How do you make it happen? What's the engagements look like? How does someone do this? So they just wake up one morning and say okay I'm going to have more empathy. They actually call you guys up. But what happens? Like what take us through what. Sure I mean I can give you a little bit of an example of how it starts. We've been talking a little bit more dramatically about sick kids and testing on pets and animals and things like that. Not testing on pets can you imagine that would really be horrible. But in the cycle graphic of the users individually well personalization is hard right? Well I mean the whole point of this is that when you really get into the mechanics of how this works I'll give you an example it's a little bit less dramatic okay. So it's a telecommunications company, it's a telco company that's selling you guys know what triple play? Yeah. Okay so you have it's a cable and internet and phone right all together. It's like a commodity product right? It's no emotional thing necessarily. But in that game if you can just optimize certain parts of the journey you can make a big difference right? So we got a benign request from a marketer to say listen we do a lot of paid search can you help us with this one product? Just if you move it even like 1% it would be significant to the company. But okay we'll do that and it worked out we go in and help them do their search. But because we're thinking about experience in a broader sense we say well let's do it more. Let's make them be able to transact or engage in multiple ways. Well you could sign up for the service through email or maybe just click to call or click to chat or you could even walk into a branch and do it there or maybe through the call center right? It's what's all working together on the channel all the fun words you want to use and you're leveraging different technologies to do it and people. So the way this worked was people were coming in through search and then eventually a lot of them were converting in the call center so it was all working. And you think well that's great. Well it wasn't great to the company at all. They were very upset. The people that were buying the media were really bummed because they couldn't get the attribution or the credit for the thing that was in the call center. So they came up with a great idea. They said okay take the phone number off and take the click to call off and we'll force the customer to convert in our channel. Of course there's a brilliant company with great people and rational thinking prevailed and they didn't do that. But they said well what do we do? I said well you're going to need a multi-attribution model to be able to help you do that. Okay but that's not enough because you also need a new sales incentive and commission structure inside the call center because those people are getting paid on that but since it's such a low commodity product that's not going to work. You have to change that. That's a new sales kind of thing. Then wait they can't talk for another three seconds to that person because you'll bring the margins down and you got to get them back into the digital channel. Only internal metrics get screwed up. That's right. So there's new business processes now, new operating model, new skills to get them back into the digital. So all of a sudden this benign request from a marketing team say can you optimize my paid search becomes new business transformation. Okay now because that brand manager had the guts to say I'm going to advocate for this customer. This customer wants to come in through this channel and they want to convert over here and we're going to actually change the operating model, the sales structure I had to call the sales, lead I had to call the CFO and the COO and we're going to make this happen. We're going to change the way we do business on behalf of that customer. That is a way it works. Well and I can tell you we see this all the time in marketers all the time that they're so married to their website analytics funnel that that's all about who gets credit, coded URLs and the customer experience is brutal. It feels like I'm not linear on other sites. I'm all over the place. I don't really need to go to the site every day. I'm going to only go there when I need to. And the thing we were talking about before if you're grocery shopping and you're upset on that Tuesday and you want to get it out for your kid versus the nice leisurely thing we talked about on the weekend, there's a whole another set of outcomes and KPIs you have to deal with. If you went into that supermarket on Tuesday and they figured out a way to get you in and out fast and just get those two or three items you needed for your kid, that is a failed trip. According to the grocery industry, you need to be in there longer. They want to sell you certain items. The eggs are in the back. That's right, totally. That breaks the whole model. But it's wonderful for you. You'll shop there forever because of that experience. So what you're getting at the moment is they're changing the business models of companies. That's the bottom line. You've got to be at the center. That could be a driver for the transformation. That's it. Empathy is the driver. Absolutely. You have the emotional connection to all that stuff to help also internally. CMOs don't need to just be relevant to end customers. They need to be relevant to the enterprise. They need to be relevant to the CEO. I hear the screaming and kicking and screaming right now. Glenn, that's great, but man, that's a heavy lift. We don't know if we can do it. How do you answer that? Because I can see a cultural reaction. The antibodies will come out and attack that notion because it's scary because now like, whoa. Well, I mean, it is hard, but the good news is, is that we see, even at this conference, and a lot of our clients are coming over to do that. There's incremental ways to get there, but I'll make it simple. So the advantages are, we said, there's new technology and new data that allow you to do some of this stuff. That's great. And you can see a lot of them consolidating. A lot of the stacks all now have content and analytics and commerce and all that, and there's nice ways that they come together. And that consolidation can help. And there's other ones that can handle different data sets, and that helps too, and there's automation. But the thing is that what people miss is one of the ways to accelerate this is to add a human-centered approach to how you actually create the experience internally. And what I mean is, it's not enough to consolidate the data and figure out that gold nugget and not enough to do it with technology, you have to do it with humans. It's a human-centered approach. So we are bringing in integrated teams of humans that are pulling all this stuff together. It's someone who understands strategy, maybe. Someone understands creative, and what a creative thing is. So they're priming the pump, basically. They're priming the pump, getting everything together. But they all sit together. They sit together. The analytics people sit next to the creative people. They sit next to the technology people, and they work on it as they design the experience. You don't do a strategy project and then do a roadmap and then do an RFP for technology enablement. The waterfall does not work. But it's beyond even waterfall versus agile. This is actually taking humans and consolidating that thinking, new skill sets at the center in like an incubator way to do pilots, to do prototyping, to do things. If you want to create that new experience that we're talking about in any of these cases, you got to hand the CMO some kind of thing they can bring to the team and say, look, here's an app that would enable this, or here's a pilot we could try without boiling the ocean to actually create an experience that would move the needle or whatever lame corporate analogy. Just make more money and get some decent results in. Get a beach head, start small and iterate through it. Glenn, great insights. This is a great thought. We'd love to get you back on theCUBE and drill down at this. It's kind of design thinking combined with execution on the front lines with the customer center, the value proposition. Great conversation. Before we end, just do a quick plug for the business. What's going on with Accenture Interactive? How's the business going? What are your goals? How many people are working there? What's the geographies look like? Give us an update. Thanks for asking. Accenture Interactive is joining its third year as being listed by AdH Magazine as the largest digital agency in the world and the fastest growing. We have coverage in a truly integrated, global delivery model that hits every part of every market. And we're so excited to have this growth because it's a way to show that the market is truly interested and being experience-led and the way we're defining experience. So we're seeing more and more clients moving from some of these incremental changes to really trying to put the customer at the center of what they're doing. And Accenture Interactive believes in this model. It's very much in some ways we call it a new kind of provider, like an experience agency for lack of a better term to help companies drive that transformation. And it's done with people and technology and we've been on a tear recently. Most of our growth is organic but we also do lots and lots of acquisitions to make these capabilities come together. All the creativity and the design and the strategy and the tech and the run of it is all in one integrated team. And that is very, very helpful when you're trying to do some of the things we've been talking about. And you guys, I think, are on the right way. This customer wave is really real because with digital, the customers are in charge. They control their data. They're now going to shift this happening. We're starting to see some visibility into it. This is going to impact the economics, process and business models. So I think it's just the beginning. Congratulations. It really is, thanks. And we're so excited because some of the client's successes are it's truly transformational. Some of the things we've done at Carnival or Marriott or Subway, I mean, it's a whole different kind of way of looking at experience. And it's really helping people. It's not just for, it's good for the business but we're really changing people's lives and helping have experiences be meaningful. It's been wonderful and fun for us. Glenn, thanks so much for sharing these insights here in theCUBE. Hey, thanks. We're getting the data here live, Adobe Summit 2019. And I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Stay tuned for more coverage after this short break.