 All right, I think we're ready to get started with the session for everybody else's all set So welcome to the frankenstack versus voltron session Who's handling your customer experience? So my name is Katie staveley. I'm the VP of marketing for modic We're an open-source marketing automation platform, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that stuff in a bit So a little bit about Who who we are and who I am so modic as I had mentioned is an open-source marketing automation platform The community has been around for about five or six years now I actually work for the commercial business for modic and so we sell modic as a SaaS solution So fully hosted and managed for our customers a subscription service And we refer to that as modics open marketing cloud solutions We're helping organizations of all sizes Build marketing campaigns So me I've been with modic for about two and a half years as the VP of marketing Prior to that I had worked for a number of B2B marketing companies or software companies Including aquia. I was there for a couple years early on when the company started So I've been a Drupal con before but the first time here with modic My focus is primarily demand-gen and content aside from that I Have a lot of experience using marketing technology solutions power user of modic naturally after you know That's our solution But I've used a number of different other marketing automation platforms and sales force and other CRM's and things like that So a lot of depth of experience handling these types of tools So what we're going to talk about today in today's agenda We're going to do a little bit of a level set on the context how I think about or how I'm going to talk about customer experience I'm going to talk a little bit about the Martek landscape that was released last week at the Martek conference I'm sure that Scott probably talked a little bit about that in his session I didn't catch it this morning, but I'm sure he covered that I'm just going to sort of to give my take on You know how that applies to this conversation Provide a few practical tips for you know evaluating solutions for your team And then a few takeaways on how to deliver a more personalized experience across your brand So let's get to it. So So customer experience, this is a topic that continues to hold momentum You know in our industry everybody's talking about it. Everybody's trying to figure out what it means what it means for their organization You know and that we what we've observed is that you know marketers They want to create memorable great experiences for their customers, right? We all want want to be on that page You know you want your customers to keep coming back and re-engaging with your brand Purchasing more what you're selling, you know providing reviews and feedback speaking highly of you when you're they talk to their friends and customers and peers But what I've also observed along the way here is that it's really hard to achieve One of the and I believe that one of the leading inhibitors actually is our technology choices which are directly impacting You know thousands impacted by all the thousands of tools in that Martek landscape Trying to puzzle them together into a highly functioning stack and then couple that with highly functioning teams that know how to use those and make them work Together in a way that's you know delivering a well-oiled machine for your organization So if we take a little bit of time to kind of peel away the onion You know we've established the customer experience already as the linchpin to you know creating differentiation and Sustained defensibility within your within today's experience economy. So that's great. We all agree, right? You know, but let's talk about what happens, you know When the customer experience happens, it's not when they receive your marketing promo emails, right? We can all send emails, but is that the only time that they're experiencing your brand? You know, it's every time they visit your website or anytime they've made their first purchase It's each and every one of the touch points that they're engaging with your brand every interaction every conversation You know today tomorrow and every day forward You know, I think that if I were to pull the audience here today that Building the kind of a relationship with your customers over and taught over time is important to your business And each of the conversations and interactions are opportunities to create a positive experience for your customers So they become building blocks for that relationship relationship so If we think about What does it really mean to build a relationship with your customers, right? First and foremost you want to build a healthy relationship and with a two-way dialogue It can't be one-sided you can't just be talking at your customers all the time about things that you want to talk about It has to be a combination of what you want to talk about and what they want to talk about You want to give them ways to connect with you and have a conversation with you and tell you what their interests are What their needs are and you know how you can be more helpful to them It's also an exchange of value, right? It's not just again, you know us taking from from them as you know providers or as solution providers or You know vendors it's an exchange. We want to make sure that we're we're giving and getting at the same time So whether that's giving with You know new content or offers or things that could be useful to them You know even as simple as answering their questions, but it's also you know as we're asking for things for them from them Right, you know asking them to buy more product or asking them to you know Provide more information about what their interests are and things It also is those little things that make a difference in saying thank you when they download an asset or You know giving them a an offer when they provide feedback on your solution And lastly relationships are about getting to know who they are and recognizing those customers when they come back So interacting with them in the context and knowledge so they don't feel like a stranger every time they interact with you And so imagine you know, I sort of equate it to real life, right? So imagine that you had this person that you met, you know Let's say you met here at triple con and you shook hands and had a coffee and learned a little bit about each other And then you see him at the next triple meet-up and they have no idea who you are, right? They forget they don't remember your conversation. Okay, you've reintroduced yourself Oh, yeah, we met at triple con and then you meet again and they still don't know who you are They don't remember you they don't remember your conversation after a while You're sort of like why am I even bothering with this person? You totally write them off, right? It's not different with your brand. You want to make sure that you're engaging with your customers in the way that you want to engage in real life You know have a conversation build a relationship make sure that you're adding as much value as much as you know, they're taking from you You know when when companies fall short of building that type of personalized experience They become selfish and inconsiderate right just the way that person who you've interacted with and that you know fake scenario You know becomes you know feels a little bit inconsiderate to you and to your needs And you risk becoming that annoying friend that nobody ever wants to talk to because you know, you know, it's never once two-sided It's always one-sided. It's always their perspective or their interests And so if we switch gears for a second We talked a little bit about building relationships and and hopefully you're sitting there saying yeah Yeah, that's absolutely what we want to do for our for our customers and the next logical step I know if I was sitting there be like, okay, how do I do that? What do I do? You know, I have to start by saying there is no silver bullet You know in marketing we want that one thing that's going to be that great campaign or that great piece of content That's just gonna you know get that you know the the great results than the sales team is going to say I love you marketing and they never do But you know, we have to think really smart about how important your tech stack It plays a role in you know building those relationships So this is you know, just off of I took a look at Scott's blog post from last week from our tech And you know, I can't I cannot I personally cannot believe that we're now up to over 7,000 different solutions You know, I run marketing for a company that thought of me having to evaluate 7,000 solutions is completely insane And so you know as we think about having to deal with all of those different solutions and and frankly You know one of the things he pointed out that I thought was really interesting is that doesn't include all the point solutions So if I'm vertically oriented around healthcare or you know higher ed You know, there's even a whole other subset of solutions that aren't even included on that that graph But you know the way that I see it is that we have all this technology at our fingertips But things are just becoming more and more complex where technology should be making them easier and easier And so we have to be really smart about how we're managing that technology and what we're really doing with it You know, I I wonder if we're gonna get to a point as marketers having to have one person's who will sold job Is to just manage technology evaluating reevaluating negotiating contracts making sure we're optimizing making sure we're using it efficiently You know, it makes it there's so much of it out there that it makes it really difficult to to think about And so one of the one quick stat that we had come across recently is that 3% of marketers believe that they're totally connected and aligned across their systems 3% so we take a step back and we think about this Martek stack which you can see kind of in the background there all of those different solutions and Then you know, we get to this and it's like well, yeah, of course How how could I possibly make sure that all these things are seamless and working, you know I have one team using this tool and another team using that email tool and another team using a CMS and another team using social It's really challenging to pull all these things together So if we take a step back and say, okay, we really want good experiences for our customers. Yep check That's that's on our list Good experiences depend on relationships. Yep, absolutely Relationships are formed in two-way dialogue, you know exchanging value understanding personalization We use technology CMS is marketing automation CDP CRM so on and so forth to facilitate those experiences at scale Otherwise we can just do it one-to-one and hire somebody to do that and only 3% of marketers believe their system or systems are adequate adequately connected It's really it's astonishing and it almost feels like it should be wrong But you know thinking about that landscape and how internal teams work together across the organization with that technology It doesn't really seem that surprising And so if we're saying that the customer experience on Depends on our internal systems talking across the organization. We have to take a step back and evaluate Who's really handling our customer experience? Is it this guy, right? You know, is it Frankenstack who's walking around and sort of held together with some so you know sewed up arms and Buttoned on legs and you know, however the monster was created with a little bit of electricity I don't know the full story, but something like that, right? You know loosely connecting your tools across your organization You know can oftentimes be more trouble than good, right? And the results are you know first and foremost inefficiencies in data sharing, right? You might have really good rich data in your you know your data warehouse, but it's not talking talking to your marketing automation platform So now you can't even trigger campaigns based on the things that are most important to your customers So when those things aren't talking you're just not your organization is not capitalizing on your investment in that area You know, there's always the potential of the collision of data between those tools, right? If you get into the secular Circular motion between your CRM and your marketing automation and your e-commerce platform And those things are not really seamlessly laid out or connected in the right way You can have redundancy you can have overriding of data you run into a lot of challenges You know when those things aren't really working together hand-in-hand Typically in a situation where you have a Frankenstack dominating there's a lot a High resistance to change there's inflexibility So when you when your business grows and you're you know You enter a new market you bring a new product to the market What you're finding is that my tools really are just not doing what I need them to do, right? I have this idea I want to do this this and this and I can't do it because what I have today is totally inflexible It ends up being an individual sport instead of a team sport, right? So when you have all these disparate technologies sort of held together You have different teams that are running them with different initiatives and different MBOs and different Things that are motivating them and driving them And so how could it possibly be a team sport when you have all these individual groups? And what you really want is all those things working together Because it is a team sport it has in order to deliver to customer experience Appropriately and adequately it has to be all those things working seamlessly and It really makes it difficult for you to truly personalize the experience You might be able to truly you might be able to personalize some sets of that experience So maybe on the web or maybe in you know your email Maybe in a few different ways But you really can't truly personalize and build a real relationship the way that again in real life that it would be Meaningful to you as an individual without Bringing those things together And the one thing that you know we consistently see over and over again particularly on the marketing automation side of things Is that oftentimes what companies are doing is they're compromising right and the compromises in a healthy compromise It's a compromise in the way that you let your technology lead your process rather than you leading your process and letting your Technology follow suit so you're following their playbooks and their recipes and things like that But what you really should be doing is saying no in my organization for my customers It should look like this and my technology should support it in this way And on the flip side we have Voltron right and everybody know who Voltron is and I'm sort of old so Right so a cartoon from many years ago Voltron is the combination of Robot warriors who come together and build this like super robot that saves the world and he's super awesome And everybody loves him and he's a superhero So you know when we think about You know pulling together your your more tech stack Voltron is really should be the role model Right, it's it's you're coming together and these things are coming together in a way that the sum of the parts is bigger than their individuals Right, and so you know we oftentimes think about at least in my perspective We think about marketing first and more tech stack first But really what you should be thinking about is your tools across all of your different teams, right? Your what tools are your sales teams using what tools are your product team using you know What tools are they is your are your support teams using and how are they talking to each other in a way that you can then turn that into Voltron instead of Franken stack You know by creating you know by pulling these things together you're creating a powerful force you can You know in a situation where it's Voltron dominating you can pivot quickly you can move fast and say okay As your business grows as you're bringing those products to market. You should be able to move quickly You know to deliver that vision that you you want to achieve You can easily recover from downtime with stable and resilient technology You're not waiting you know days and days and days for stuff to be fixed because you had a special developer code a few things to Make that those work together if they're working seamlessly you can recover quickly You can get as close as real time as possible. We have a customer who you know They use marketing automation to promote offers on ski ski resorts So they're a mountain and so as customers that they recognize check-in and buy a daily ticket They're immediately sending them information about weather They're sending them information about signing up for an annual ticket. So immediately as that data is coming through They're sharing it with their customers It's because they have that seamless stack and they can pull those things together and make it meaningful at the right time The right message to the right person And really it allows you to be flexible and create a truly customized or personalized experience for your customers And so one thing that you know when I think about Think about Voltron. I oftentimes see customers want to jump to consolidation and consolidation is great You know, we all want to you know We all want a few less tools in our stack particularly get rid of those tools that really aren't doing much for us And that that that's definitely a healthy conversation But you know, I would caution you to remember that it's it's not the silver bullet Just because you consolidate to one tool or one group of tools or one, you know, vendor That's not always the right answer. Um, you know, it really depends on your organization and really taking that To heart and understanding what are we what are we trying to do? Our our business is unique compared to our competitors compared to other people in the industry compared to other industries What's unique to us and what kind of technology do we need to support that? Streamlining some of those solutions can help though, right? So while you're not consolidating your entire stack Maybe there's a few things where you're like, okay, there's a lot of overlap between this and that Maybe we can consolidate those two things and You know, we we often see this and we're you know, I'm a little bit biased in this way Because we're marketing automation platform and the platform's fairly robust in a lot of ways There's a lot of feature functionality You know, we have these conversations where somebody has a landing page tool and a social tool and an email tool And I'm like, okay, well we can we can bring those all into one thing That doesn't mean we want to be your crm and your e-commerce platform and everything else you're trying to do But it does help you narrow down some of those things and make it a little bit more manageable And again, it should support your business. You shouldn't be force fitting something into your business and and You know Relying on their process that some product manager at some software company came up with it should be your process And what you know is unique to you guys And you should be looking for flexibility and openness, right? And today's um, you know, software development You know 10 years ago. Nothing was open and nothing was flexible It was like you followed this and this is how it works and these this how these systems talk But today, you know, software is is being built with flexibility and openness in mind And so as you're looking for new solutions, that should be on your checklist You should be asking that question and you should be asking the vendors How do you do that in what ways literally? That can help you be more effective with your With your solutions and with your go-to-market So now that you're thinking differently about technology, let's talk a little bit more about how you can be strategic with personalization So that definition of the top personalization is a means for meeting the customer needs more efficiently and effectively That's a definition. I got off the tech target site. Actually. It's not something I wrote It's I thought it was a pretty good description of how we might want to think about Personalization So really the way that I often will talk about it is how do you cross the bridge from digital to? Um Connect to each individual Connect to each individual Digitally And so, you know things as simple as meeting and greeting your audience when people return You know, it's me you you track me with cookies and everything else like you know who I am When I come back, you know, it's okay to say my name. My name's katie. Say hello, right? That's okay You know learn about their interests, you know, if it's implicit great if it's explicit even better Tell me tell me what you're interested in. Tell me what you like Tell me what you want to hear about what you don't want to hear about tell me how you want to hear about it If you never ever want me to send you an email, but you love text messages great. I'm happy to send you a text message Um, you know share helpful content and offers that are interesting to them, right? We often as marketers have a habit of falling into the Oh, so did you hear about me? Did you hear about my solution and what I did and all these things about me? Me right and so we have to always always remember and this is you know, this is not something that's new I hope to anybody in the room, but you know always remember that it should be about them and what their interests are You know most importantly a personalized experience does build trust and loyalty Which is what we want to build those relationships And at the end of the day, we can never forget that we're selling to people Individuals, you know, and so our job should be how do I talk to people not talk to you know IP address 14.3.6 that whatever So I thought I'd throw a few ways that you can sort of apply personalization pretty quickly So um, these are things that we share the tips that we share with our customers oftentimes Where they can just take personalization and get going on it right away So we often joke about you know When we talk to some customers their idea of personalization is hello first name, right? Of course the standard email opening and um a little bit of code you put in your emails to make sure you get that Right I will say that I get a lot of emails from people that I'm a customer of that do not say my first name They just say hey there Which I find to be as a marketing automation provider. I find that to be really annoying, but That's just me When it doesn't fill in I would agree with that Yep been there Um, yeah So a couple of different ways that you know, we often talk about it one of which is segmentation So when we talk about segments within the platform, it's more than just you know segment by okay anybody in the united states That's great. That's a great starting point So geography is one way another way is demographic What how granular can you get around some of these segments so that you can really deliver a message that's relevant to them Um other types of segmentation that we often talk about with our customers, you know demographic Firmagraphic affinity and interest like we have a customer who sells interactive books stories through amazon alexa and so You know, they have this big database of understanding who their customers are what their interests are do they like thrillers Do they like um, you know romantic? Stories things like that So really pulling that information in so that you can segment and get really granular around how you're delivering those messages Looking at past behavior. What have they done? What haven't they done? What do you want them to do next? What do you think would be helpful for them to do next so leveraging some of that past behavior? Whether it's web behavior, whether that's um, you know, are they clicking on your emails? Have they talked to your sales team? Have they contacted your support team all of those count? And then again thinking about real-time behavior What what can you know immediately that you can affect a message immediately for them so that they really feel like Okay, I'm I'm a person and they recognize me and they know who I am The next area is thinking about dynamic content And so we talk about dynamic content not only in emails So it's an email that you might want to switch out a segment of the the content that it'll Incorporate a little bit of that segmentation So if it's a customer you want might want to talk to them differently If it's a c-level executive versus a darker level executive You might want to talk to each of those a little bit differently with your message Maybe your offer and using dynamic content not only in your emails, but also on your website I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about that already today. It's a big topic. I think here at triple con but You know really thinking about how you can engage your audience further with You know using that dynamic content on your website. It's getting easier and easier to do the tools are out there So it's really about okay creating that vision for yourself and for your team and what you want to deliver and then acting on it Using multiple channels. So I talk about this as you know getting outside the inbox right using other channels And it's funny because I think some of us are reluctant Particularly on b2b marketing to kind of look at other channels like emails the channel. That's the channel Then you have your website. That's great. Okay, so now we can do a little bit more with website But we're really encouraging customers just think even broadly. How are you using text messages? Are you using text messages? Are you using mobile app notifications? Can you do this all in the same platform? Can you pull all these things together so it does feel like a seamless experience? You know and one of the things that I often encourage is you know thinking beyond those channels test everything and don't assume anything You know in b2b. We were usually saying okay text meant there's no way our customers are going to respond to text But I don't know try it see what happens see if they react to it Um and last but not least um or actually managing preferences letting them Set up their preferences and tell you you know when they want to hear from you how they want to hear from you And keeping those up to date so that you're giving them the messages when they want to hear them and how they want to hear them And then machine learning. I kind of joke about this with my little Bullet there, but really it's thinking about um how how can we it's it's early on but how do we start adopting machine learning to Interpret some of these things for us understanding. Okay. Well this person they they open emails all the time. Okay. Well, I think that's their preferred channel Let's let's you know implicitly understand that that's what it is Whereas um, you know or other things like they they like to receive messages at this time of day They never read stuff on Friday afternoons. Who does right? Um, so really thinking about some of those things as well So just to wrap it up a couple of key takeaways creating memorable memorable experience for um, you know Our customers is mission critical. We all have to be thinking about this Every day it doesn't have to be boil the ocean, but you know starting to pick away at that day by day is I think going to be important for all of us Positive experiences depend on relationships. So building those relationships with your customers is is really critical Um, again relationships are formed in you know a couple of different ways to a dialogue Um, you know exchanging of value and then delivering that personalization Be smart with your technology Choices they should be a force multiplier not a deterrent right thinking about it like how is this going to make me that much better How is my team going to be that much more efficient? But above all that how does this help me deliver a better customer experience for my customers? How am I going to engage with them even better and give them what they want? And then last but not least personalizing more than just first name I think personalization is going to be such a critical factor for this experience You know building a good experience down the road for your customers So really starting to think about okay. What can we do today and tomorrow and the next day again? It doesn't have to be all at once but starting with the attitude of you know taking action there So that's all I have. I just a few reminders as asked by Drupal con is you know remember to check out these contribution opportunities Fill out the survey. I'm sure you guys have seen these slides. Hopefully maybe I'm not the only one Um, and that's it. So I'm here if you want to ask any questions and then we have a table downstairs But I know it's lunchtime. So I won't feel offended if you guys bolt out of here and go get some food Thanks