MarTech Virtual: Using AI to Create a More Human Experience

Today’s cross-channel customers expect you to react and respond in real time to engagement across marketing, commerce, and CX channels — and they expect you to do it in a personalized manner. Seamlessly coordinate cross-channel customer experiences with the power of AI.

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Speaker:

• Vijay Chittoor: Co-Founder & CEO, Blueshift

The Evolving Role of Marketing: From Campaigns to Experiences

Vijay Chittoor: Hello everyone. Blueshift is a smart hub for intelligent customer engagement on every channel. We've been very fortunate to work with some great brands who are focused on customer-centric engagement, activating data, and turning it into ROI. Today, I'm going to share some lessons I've learned from these discussions.

Everything starts by understanding that the role of marketing in today's connected world is different from what it used to be. In the past, marketing relied on billboards, TV ads, and display ads, which existed outside the core customer experience (e.g., in a store, bank branch, or call center). Today, the opportunity is to connect with our customers by extending their core customer experience through marketing.

You might still send an email or show a display ad, but now everything begins with the customer at the center. This means:

• Understanding how the customer has experienced our brand to date.
• Using that knowledge to identify the right moments in their lifecycle to trigger a message.
• Determining the right segments to message.
• Identifying the next best actions, content, or offers to present to each customer.

The goal is for every marketing moment to feel like an extension of their customer experience. When we achieve this, every customer is treated individually. Customer journeys are no longer linear and well-defined; they take millions of different pathways, leading to continuously evolving, non-linear, always-on, connected journeys.

In this world of non-linear journeys, the world doesn't end at conversions. In the old paradigm, you drove customers from a marketing touchpoint to an experience touchpoint, and the journey ended with a conversion. Today, we need to think in terms of a flywheel.

The first step in this flywheel is a marketing moment that captures some customer data. This data is then activated to deliver more relevant experiences back to the customers, extending their experience. This extended experience makes customers more engaged, generating customer delight. These additional moments of engagement create more data, which you can activate again to deliver even more relevant experiences and drive further engagement.

This flywheel, once in motion, not only propels an individual customer's journey forward but also drives your brand forward at an aggregate level, generating significant ROI by transforming data into engagement, which in turn generates more data to fuel the flywheel. We truly want to embrace the idea that today's customer-centric engagement is all about flywheels, not funnels. These flywheels are delightful for your end customers, and they also drive meaningful ROI and results for your brands.

Three Lessons for Driving Customer Engagement

How do you get these flywheels going? Let me offer three lessons I've learned from working with our customers, including brands like Stitch Fix, BBC, Discovery, LendingTree, Udacity, and CarParts.com.

Lesson 1: Integrate Marketing with Customer Experience for Two-Way Conversations

The first lesson starts with the realization that the connected customer journey is much more than just marketing. This means understanding the customer, identifying the right moments in their lifecycle, and figuring out the next best actions for specific audiences. Traditional marketing moments (like email, display ads, direct mail) are still important, but the key is how they integrate with every other function that touches the customer.

This includes:

• Your digital products (apps, websites)
• Support teams
• Sales functions
• Merchandising
• Loyalty programs
• Offline interactions

Connecting marketing with all these touchpoints, using the same understanding of the customer, is becoming increasingly important. When done right, each piece of marketing feels less like a one-way push and more like a two-way conversation. Customers feel truly understood in the moment they interact with your brand. That understanding fuels a dialogue, as you respond based on their experiences, and they, in turn, feel compelled to talk back.

The first lesson is to integrate your marketing with your customer experience to drive two-way conversations.

Lesson 2: Put Data to Work – Prioritize Zero-Party & First-Party Data

The second lesson emphasizes that data, especially zero-party and first-party data, has become more important than ever before, and for all the right reasons. As a society, we are moving into a phase where brands respect our data more; it's not being packaged and resold as third-party data.

As the third-party cookie crumbles, marketers must realize that data collected with consent and trust (zero-party and first-party data) is paramount. Customers are also leaving behind more and more data with brands due to connected customer journeys.

However, the biggest struggle for most brands is activating this data – putting it to work. Despite the vast amounts of first-party data they possess, many marketing teams find themselves "working for their data," rather than having their data work for them.

To reverse this, brands must focus on putting data to work. The brands that achieve this will win. Putting data to work involves:

• Accessible, marketer-friendly data: It shouldn't be hard or complex to query. Marketers shouldn't need to learn SQL or understand technical systems.
• Actionable Identity: It's not just about knowing a customer's ten different email addresses. It's about knowing how to reach that customer (e.g., is email the right channel? Is it SMS? Which is the best email address? How are household members connected?).
• Real-time Automation: Data shouldn't just flow into your system; it must also flow back out to the customer in real-time, delivering engaging experiences based on that data.

Brands that effectively "put data to work" drive engagement agility, which is critical for getting the flywheel in motion and driving ROI through more and more customer engagements.

Lesson 3: Scale Storytelling with AI for Millions of One-to-One Stories

Finally, the third thing I encourage marketers to consider is that storytelling is the essence of marketing. While many marketers are excited about creative storytelling, the challenge and opportunity today lie in scaling that storytelling to millions of one-to-one stories.

To achieve this, you need to marry the creative side of storytelling with analytical insights. AI becomes very critical here. AI marketing is the key, infusing the right elements of who, what, when, and where to personalize your stories into millions of unique narratives:

• Who: Who should you message at this moment in their lifecycle? What are the right audiences?
• When: When is the right time to engage to optimize it? For example, don't interrupt a busy customer, but extend their experience by being relevant at an opportune moment.
• Where: What channel should you use? Customers want to be connected on their channels of choice.
• What: What items, content, or offers to recommend?

When you combine the who, what, when, and where from AI with the creative storytelling from marketing, it unlocks the concept of a data artist. This is a marketer who has accessible AI and uses that combination to drive intelligent storytelling. I encourage all of you to think about how you could become a data artist, unleashing the hidden talent within your organizations. Turbocharge marketers with accessible AI and the right data, or connect data scientists with marketing storytelling to unlock their full potential.

Conclusion: Driving Customer-Centric Engagement

To bring it all together, the three lessons are:

1. When you integrate marketing and customer experience, you deliver experiences that resemble two-way conversations instead of one-way blast marketing.
2. When you put data to work (rather than working for your data), you drive agile engagement.
3. When you combine marketing and AI, and all these ingredients work for you, you drive customer-centric engagement. This meets the customer at the moments and channels they are most interested in, extending their experience into marketing channels.

This customer-centric engagement looks like flywheels, not funnels.