Customer centricity is no longer just a loaded buzzword used by marketers preaching tactics such as personalization and customer experience. Customer centricity is now a mind-set that companies need to adopt throughout the entire organization—not just marketing—to thrive in the digital world.

This quote from CMO.com’s article The ‘Age of The Customer’ Is Here. What Are You Doing About It? sums up nicely how we have evolved (or maybe suddenly transformed) into the customer-centric epoch.  The term “Age of the Customer” was coined by Forrester and aptly describes how access to information and the customer experience has shifted from companies to customers. This is why we keep seeing trends toward enhancing customer experience (see: Is Customer Experience the Top Digital Trend for 2015?).

Michael Hinshaw, CEO of McorpCX describes this the “Era of Smart Customers”.  He says, “Smart customers are customers that leverage digital devices to access information, anywhere and anytime. What that means is the power in the relationship between companies and customers is in the process of shifting.”

Customer-centricity is one of the driving factors for Digital Transformation.  To be customer-centric, companies need to bring together people, processes and systems from across the company, especially sales, marketing, customer service. If your company is acting in silos across these areas, customers will see it and move on if they can.

The article, linked below, provides a good overall description of the challenges in becoming customer-centric. Some key steps to take to overcome these challenges include the following:

• Define ownership for becoming customer-centric.  This could mean appointing a Chief Customer Officer, setting up a steering committee, or some other organizational technique.
• Define metrics and continually measure how you are doing.  Start with a baseline, set targets and hold people accountable to meet the targets.
• Refine and coordinate across the business where it affects the customer.  We might call this Digital Transformation, but it goes beyond the ‘digital’ part.  It is really about transforming culture and operations as well as the systems.
• Connect with your customer.  Get feedback, encourage honest dialog about what you do and don’t do right.

Source: The ‘Age Of The Customer’ Is Here. What Are You Doing About It?

When I looked back over the trends from the last several years, Customer Experience is the only topic voted highest two years in a row. Back in 2014, Customer Experience was predicted to be the hottest trend. In 2013, Content Marketing came out on top.  In 2012 Social was the top opportunity and Mobile topped the charts in 2011.

Econsultancy added a nice chart to this year’s report that showed how their predicted trend at the beginning of 2014 turned out. While Customer Experience was expected to be the highest priority, it turned out that both Customer Experience and Content Marketing tied for first in actual importance at the end of the year, with mobile and social coming in a close second.

The report also showed that 78% people said their company was attempting to differentiate using customer experience. Only 5% said they were not trying to use customer experience to differentiate.

Another interesting part of the report is the number of respondents who said that strategy was a key component of the customer experience. 82% had strategy as either one, two or three on their list of key building blocks.  This tells me that people are clearly thinking through the issues around building great customer experiences and know that just throwing technology at it isn’t the answer.

Likewise Culture came in second at 63%. Again this tells me that the people being surveyed are very thoughtful about customer experience.

One trend in the customer experience space caught me by surprise a little bit. 30% said that targeting and personalization were a top priority for them.  We have talked about personalization for a long time, so its great to see the message getting out to the rest of the market.

So when does a trend become table-stakes? Clearly trends of previous years either went on to be become ubiquitous or died off.  I mentioned mobile was a trend back in 2011. It’s clear – to me at least – that mobile has become table stakes. We hear “mobile first” all the time now when it comes to web design.

For customer experience, the Digital Trends report says that not only do people think this is a hot topic for 2015, but they also expect it to remain a top opportunity for the next 5 years. My guess is that in the next year or two, Customer Experience will be table stakes and anyone not trying to tackle this topic will be left behind.

What do you think? Has Customer Experience already surpassed the trend status?

Much to every one’s surprise, the Wave came out with nobody listed as a Leader.  Adobe, hybris (SAP), IBM and Sitecore came out as the Strong Performers followed by many others in the Contender category. Nobody was listed as a Risky Bet.

So what gives?  Really no Leaders?  Dom Nicastro wrote a story last week about this development: Forrester Wave: No Leaders in Digital Experience Delivery.

Forrester considers a Digital Experience Platform a full end-to-end delivery platform and most vendors fell short in the completeness of their offerings.  Each vendor seemed to shine in one or more areas, but nobody stood out as having all the components needed to be a Digital Experience Leader.

For me, part of the issue stems from how Forrester defined the market.  hybris from SAP is strong in Commerce, while Adobe and Sitecore are more known for their Web Content and Marketing capabilities.  So the companies included in the wave are really all over the map, in my opinion.

Is it fair to compare commerce systems with WCM systems?  Yes and no.  If you need commerce in your digital experience, then you want to know who has commerce capabilities.  If commerce isn’t important, then no and the analysis gets skewed.

There is a lot of interesting information in the Forrester report, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

An integrated customer profile is a main pillar of Adobe Campaign.  Also included in Campaign are targeted segmentation, visual campaign orchestration, cross-channel execution, real time interaction management, and operational reporting.

The goal is to build the most comprehensive view of a customer possible based on the following sets of data.

• Contact Information
• Sociodemographic data
• Computed Data – compute additional attributes based on other data
• Explicit customer data – data provided by the customer as in a customer preference
• Implicit customer data – data we gather
• Scoring attributes

A key message here is: The more you can gather and manage data, the fewer guesses you have to make as a marketer.

Adobe Campaign provides a way to collect and manage all this data about customers.  This allows you to market directly to customers by knowing this much about each customer.

You want to have conversations with customers, not just communications.  This means listening to what the customers are saying through explicit and implicit data.  In Campaign, you can use this data to target specific customers and target the specific communications methods they prefer. Workflows all you to split a campaign across devices, so if one person prefers email they get an email, while another customer that prefers phone, gets a phone call.

Data aggregation is important. You can load all data into one DB. Or you can map datasources based on common keys.  Or you can use a hybrid model of collecting data in one place and mapping that data to sources that can’t be collected.

Matthew provided a 9-point checklist for building an integrated customer profile.  The first 5 steps are all about planning.

1. Define Business Need
2. Identify data sources
3. Located Other Sources
4. Invest in Data Governance
5. Plan out your Data Ecosystem
6. Implementation
7. Automation
8. Measurement
9. Maintenance

The process above is iterative. You periodically have to go through iterations of some or all of the steps.

In Adobe Campaign, they have a very recipient oriented data model. This data includes data from delivery logs, tracking logs, proposition logs, survey logs and sales transactions.  There is often a need to include loyalty data, but you can map this data into the Campaign.

Campaign also includes a data loading workflow which automates the importation of data.  This sounds like a typical ETL process.

De-duplication is an important and complicated part of the process.  De-duplication rules need to be created and monitored. Campaigns uses a score-based matching system to do de-duping. This allows you to assign a base rule followed by the scoring rules.  Scoring rule allows you to add weights to specific conditions.  Totaled together, the base match and score rule results indicated a matched record.  Campaign calls this an Enrichment activity in the workflow.

After you have the de-duplication rules, you can also set Merge rules to the system which data fields to keep from which duplicate record.

Abode has introduced a Video Heartbeat Tracking library where they hope to simplify implementation of video analytics.  They also want to introduce stability into process and help you understand more about your video usage.  This is becoming more and more important as video consumption moves from traditional TV to all of our connected devices.

Challenges we all face:

• Granularity vs Cost – how many server calls am I going to make to track usage vs the cost to make all these calls. RIght now companies send tracking data at quartiles of the video.  If a video is short, like 5 minutes, the quartiles give you data back every minute, which is OK. As videos get longer, the quartiles get longer and you loose information.
• Different players and player vendors – flash, html 5, third party
• Measuring across devices and platforms – measuring in set top boxes, AppleTV, Roku, etc.
• Syndicated content – your videos get syndicated on many different sites
• Deciding what metrics to track
• Understanding how video is impacting business (ROI, KPIs, etc.)
• Video types – live streaming, video on demand

Heartbeat – what is it.  Heartbeat is a ping that lets us know you are still watching a video.  Adobe Analytics now has a video heartbeat tracking capability.   Data contained in a heart beat includes: environment, event info, asset information, stream information and user information.  There is also milestone tracking which Heartbeat is the new method.

During playback, a heartbeat is sent every 10 seconds.  These go to a pre-aggregation layer.  When the video is complete or abandoned, final time spent and completion metrics are sent to Adobe Analytics.  By going to 10 seconds, you get improved granularity of time spent tracking and you can also get real-time data. 

How does this affect Ad tracking?  Ads are tracked the same way – through the Heartbeat.  Adobe is working with Ad servers to ingest meta data from those servers.  New metrics that are available include impressions, duplicate views, bounce rate, average ads per video and time spend on ads. These metrics help you optimize your ad recipe.  If you have a pre-roll, you can use the analytics to determine the effect on viewing the content based on the pre-roll ad time.

How does this help with Standardization?  First the 10 sec heartbeat becomes a standard.  Adobe is defining a set of reserved variables so everyone has access to the same data. There are 7 core video variables and 7 ad variables.  You can then add custom variables on top of these (for which you have to pay additional money).

With these standards, Adobe will also be able to show benchmarks.  By taking out customer specific data, the standardization allows Adobe to compare video analytics across industries, content type, etc.

Adobe is also including real-time reporting for video.  You can pick a few measures and within Adobe Analytics see trends as they happen in real-time.  Later this year, Adobe is going to report on live events and video on demand.

Pricing in the past has been based on the number of server calls.  Adobe is moving to a stream-based pricing model.  So you pay one price for a stream.  In the stream you can track ads as well as content for the same price.  To estimate the cost, all you need is to estimate the number of streams you want to track.

Right now this new Heatbeat is available on ActionScript, Javascript, IOS and Android platforms.  Other platforms are coming later this year.

Theme: Search and Social platforms are converging – which  means successful marketers musth have one unified team with one set of data.

Key takeaways from this session

1. Connect: facebook to offline experience. feed the metadata
2. Bring: search and social teogher. People, process, and technology
3. Expect: social SEM data unification and all our war among Google, facebook, and twitter for ad dollars

2013

Paid, owned, and earned are converging.  Look at facebook where you can have your owned pages, people who like you and you also buy ads. They might even be on the same page.  Google search results even shows paid and owned assets together, especially with Google + and it’s continuing growth.

2014

Quote: “There’s no free lunch”

Quote: It could be argued from a consumer point of view that the better the search engine is the fewer advertisement  you will need. (Google)

Note that they followed that with a picture of a Google results page with TONS of ads.

• Social will become more like search and search will become more social.  As social becomes more like search, you will pay for it in some form or fashion.
• Search is improving within facebook and users are starting to use the natural search.  The results are like a combination of Yelp and Bing
• Point, you should search for your company or product to see if the results look good or if you need some work.
• Google Hummingbird search uses natural language processing.  They actually followed facebook on this
  • Google is trying to tie in Google+ as much as they can.  There’s a lot of
• Twitter has marketing events but it will depend on real time interactions and key words. You social guys should be talking to your search team.
• Look at all the reviews on facebook.  Although there seems to be some major rate inflation.  It could become the best way to find a restaurant.
  • Note that Google moved their reviews to Google plus so you’ve got something similar going on.
• The clunky: three results for Thornbury Castle on the facebook search right now.  It needs some cleanup.
  • natural language search on facebook is still a bit clunky
• Stalker: Can now search for divorced women over 30 years old. (Creepy)
  • Or divorced women who like a specific tv shows
  • key learning, watch out what you like. It will come back to you.
• Political implications: Femen is illegal in Tunisia but it’s a piece of cake to find people who like Femen in Tunisia.

How to improve your search and your social?

• Update your metadata
• use checkin to your locations
• encourage offline customers to go mobile with likes, checkins, and recommendations
• Great idea: everyone checks in when they upload a picture.   So put something photo worthy in it.
• Don’t forget stickers like rate us on trip advisor, etc.
• It will be easy to get yourself to the top of a list by checking in a fair amount.
• Be careful and remember that Facebook is still working on this. Graph search isn’t even available on mobile.
  • It’s early in the game. They’ve got a lot to do. they just had to index 1 trillion pieces of content.  So something has to slide
• Publish at least one per day on Google+
  • Find something to push out once a day to get decent looking results.
• use Google + social to put content in display advertising in Google ad network
• Twitter strategy
  • Conversation analytics
  • keyword strategy
  • creative development
  • bid optimization
  • Looks a lot like search ad strategy doesn’t it……….

Integrate Search and Social

You need to evolve your approach.

• Disparate teams with social, search etc need to come together.  Adobe uses a hub and spoke framework
  • Other options for approach include centralized, distributed, and holistic
  • Don’t just use a PR agency for your social. Become social yourselves
• Inconsistent KPI’s need a common framework across teams
  • and if you aren’t doing a good job tracking then start.  You need analytics and key measurements
• Siloed tracking and report becomes common tracking and reports
  • Common tracking will push you to channel optimization
  • Which will push your towards attributions.
  • Which will lead you to media mix modeling
  • It must become unified between social and search.  Of course, that’s the whole point of campaign management services.
• Volume, sentiment need to become something that proves value to the business
• In evolving, define what you want to do. Recognize the role of social in YOUR organization
  • PR and communications?
  • Marketing and ecommerce?
    • Search probably belongs mostly in this bucket.
  • Customer service and support?
  • Product innovation?

The ultimate aim is to get to the right mix of search, ads, email, and social media.  Doing that depends on how well you converge it all.

• Choose the right model
• Attribution does not equal Media Mix
• Media mix models should be realistic and predictive

For attribution, you can’t rely on the Last Click.  49% of conversions happen after multiple clicks so you must analyze the entire path to be predictive. There are many different Heuristic Attribution Models:

• Last Click
• First Click
• Equal
• Last More
• First More
• Custom

Mathematically all these models are equally right an equally wrong.

Here are a couple complex models:

• Bottom’s Up Attribution – the theory here is you start with two different methods and see what converts.  For example,  you start with a search and display an impression and measure the conversions. Then you do the same without the impression and see what is the conversion rate.  From here you can calculate probabilities of conversion based on the conversion paths.  Unfortunately, this method is problematic when it comes to scaling up the testing.
• Shapley Top Down Attribution – Roy Shapley won a nobel prize for Game Theory.  Here you start with a goal and see how each marketing/sales effort contributes to the response.  Here you have to account for extraneous factors like weather, pricing, the economy and others that may affect the measures.  So you want to see if you increase one marketing effort by 5%, how does that affect the conversion rate.  If all channels and efforts contribute equally, then attribution is a simple redistribution of sales based on the fraction of impressions. But if there is unequal persuasion in the various channels, you can then find the attribution of each channel and develop probablities for the effect of a channel on the overall outcome.

Note that attribution looks back in time and does not provide you a future view.  This is where the Media Mix comes into play.  Most marketing response usually follows a power-law model.  However, the models can become complex very quickly because there are multiple marketing inputs, macro influences, and mutliple outcomes that have to be part of the model.  Once you have a good model, you can then start to use the Shapley Attribution to gain insights with which to do Media Mix planning.

Sid presented a case study that showed several media channels where email and display were most effective at the point in time.  After going through the attribution process to see where channels affected leads and revenue, we find that display is contributing more to leads and less to revenue.  PR was attributed to a small impact on leads, but had a large impact on revenue.  This data helps us see where we gained good outputs based on historical data.  But Sid warns not to use this data for future planning.

Using the insights, we can optimize the market spend inflight on the media mix that contributes most to our goals. However the optimum mix may not be possible due to other constraints.  In the example, the optimization process said to increase spend on PR by 70%.  However the company could not hire enough PR people quick enough to make this optimization possible.

Adobe has a Market Mix Planner product that will help in the planning process.

In this session Craig Stoe and Andrew Bolander spoke about this topic. You can use Adobe Social to gain customer insight. These insights should lead to developing stronger relationships with customers and delivering more consistent experiences.

What is social data?
– engagement data is what is going on with the customer
– listening data are brand relevant keywords, sentiment, influencers
– attribution data is what we can learn about the customer personal attributes

Start with discovery. This is where you mine data about customers. Next is explore. Here you start to look for more engagement data. At the buy stage, customers express buying signals and you need to pick up on these to make offers. All this data can lead to better engagement.

A social profile helps you collect all this data so you have a better view of the customer. Adobe has developed a scoring algorithm that can be assigned. This consists of measuring User Class, Supporter index, Buzz and User Distribution. These measures lead to a composite score that can be used to target customers.

Andrew presented 5 steps to implement and use the social profile.
1. Listen
2. Prioritize
3. Engage properly
4. Gather insights
5. Share insights

He presented a live demo of Adobe Social and how to build and use the social profile through tweets from the audience.

For listening, you create listening rules that help you filter across the social platforms, hashtags, and attributes.

In prioritization, you can set up automation rules to route content around the organization. You can also apply segments and tags to results of the rules.

When it comes time to engage, you use Unified Moderation, which places multiple platforms under one screen so you can moderate multiple systems at the same time. Moderators can claim content, retweet, respond, and close out the item as handled. By claiming content, you prevent others from working on ending up with duplicate responses.

The social profile is connected to the moderation screen and you can review a users profile attributes. The system can also pull together different accounts into one profile. So one profile could link you twitter data with your Facebook data.

The social profile provides the customer insights, including emotion scores, sentiment scores, tracking of previous interactions and more.

As a final piece, Andrew showed how Adobe Social integrates and shares with the Adobe Marketing Cloud. For example, if a user logs into your AEM site using a Facebook login, their actions on the site can contribute to their social profile.

Have you ever wondered why optimizing your web site is sub-optimal?    Why is it so hard?

Quote: Simplicity is the ultimate representation (Leonardo DaVinci

Uncomplicate the Process

Optimization: To make the best or most effective use of a situation, opportunity, or resource.

There are lots of pieces to the puzzle.  It’s things like culture, training, governance, personalization, testing methodololy, biases, communications, segmentation, etc.  No less important are the tactical components like implementation, test setup, content creation, success metrics, QA, test planning, testing cadence, reporting, and testing tool.

Daniel chooses to focus on the testing tool to uncomplicate the process.

Demo of Adobe Target

Target comes with Target Standard, Advanced, Mobile app optimization, automated behavior targeting .etc.  The interface comes with four tabs

1. Activities: also called campaigns.  You put your tests here.
2. Audiences: groups of visitors that share a common characteristic.  You can segment by a variety of attributes or actions on a site.
3. Content: place to store content for the offers you build in Target Standard.
4. Setup: You find the one line implementation. Put one small scriptlet on the page and you are good to go.
   1. Includes users, preferences, implementation, and scene7 setting.

Something For Everyone

People from Daniel’s consulting career

Sarah: background in marketing with ideas for big changes.  Her need was to run a simple test as a starting point.

In the activities tab, he created an activity or test.  The UI only has four tabs in the wizard: details, diagram, audience.  Audience comes with a wide range of choices like from Bing, from Google, everyone, etc.

• Starts with the control screen or the default
• Add an experience B test by making small changes
• The scriptlet lets you make html changes. He made a change called stay with us instead of find a hotel
• He added a third experience to change an image.  He changed a beautiful image of a hotel in India to a more mundane image of a couple of snowboarders.
  • The image asset can come from the shared asset library
• Hit the save button and see your flow in the test screen.
  • Here you can define %’s on when to show the different tests
  • Define the goal of the test: His goal was to increase reservations.  To do so, he needed a default view for reporting.  He chose conversion
    • If someone gets to a page with “Thank You” on it he knows that someone was successful and it can be counted as a conversion
• This took about five minutes

James is sharp but is way too busy and wears many hats.  he needs testing to be easy. He needs to easily test requested site changes.

• Added another test called “Jame’s test
• Chose the audience of everyone
• Added an experience from Thrifty.com
• First test change was to manipulate text in and an inclusion/exclusion test
• decided to get rid of the “Welcome to Thrifty Car Rental.
  • Can hide, which doesn’t change the formatting or spacing
  • Can remove which causes things to shift
• Added another experience by rearranging a text box in the car rental form.  He clicked and then dragged the car type to the top of the form.
• Also decided to move a logo to the footer as yet another experience
• The test now has four experiences including the default.
• This took about 5 minutes as well.
• Same as before, he chose the metric to test and the default report. This metric was about clicked link as the measurable event that counts as a success. In overlay mode, Adobe Target highlights all the links that you can choose.

Bridget – Manages the testing program at a large organization.  She needs to effectively manage many tests at once.

• Went to Sarah’s original test.
• added a rule to the audience where state was not a match to Utah. Don’t need to show a ski picture if they are already there.
  • Could just as easily have added a positive rather than a negative match
• Went to the metrics.   You can put in the estimated value of one conversion
• Looked at Collisions to see if there was any possibility of test overlap. Bridget can manage it all from there.
  • Can drill down into the reporting.   Look at a specific audience for example.

Anthony – He’s a one man show. He’ll run his tests from idea to final test. He needs to more efficient in coding his new experiences

• Created a new test called Anthony’s test directed to all visitors
• Used Verizon wireless as the sample page
• Chose a button and edited the css class.  He changed the red button to a black button
  • Also changed the font weight of a piece of text near the top
• Created a new experience. Moved the image (left to right swap)
• Added a couple more experiences
• You can preview all the changes before launching the experience

All that makes it uncomplicated

Simple……. but not simplistic

As you can see, the UI is simple.  It does not mean it’s simplistic

• Global non-profit made on small change to their site and gained 12,000 registrations
• Pest control put the registration form to the right and they got a 20% lift in form completion
• Well known clothing retailer earned $1.7M by moving the add to cart button above the fold.  That was a 17% lift in RPV

Quote: The value of the test is not based on the complexity of the test but rather, on changing visitor behavior

Next Steps

1. Attend a lab session and use the tool tomorrow at 2:00 PM.
2. Give Adobe standard a try
3. Next month, Adobe analytics will combine with Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics. Huge release coming