The following was transcribed from a recent interview with Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Today we’re going to talk about the growing need for businesses to adapt to heightened customer experience expectations. Between a continually changing business environment, to increasingly sophisticated consumers, this presents a need for companies to tackle these challenges from multiple angles and perspectives. Recently, Optimizely, one of the leading providers of digital experience platform solutions, announced the results of a global study of nearly 1200 business executives and 5,000 consumers around the globe, that shines a light on both the expectations of customers and the challenges that companies face in delivering on these expectations. To help me discuss this topic, and the results discussed in this report, I’d like to welcome Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely.

(Greg Kihlström): To start, why is it so important for businesses to have this discussion about adaptability and agility?

(Alex Atzberger): For us it's important obviously to to do reports like this because ultimately I want to lead the company based on data. I personally believe that today to be a modern CEO of a company you need to have a perspective on the market and your customers. Reports like this are fundamental in terms of how we actually build our own business and also how we engage with our customers. One of the big challenges and changes of the last few years years has been that they can no longer command or determine how the customer will engage with them—it's really the customer's choice, you have to adapt to your customer.

Referencing the research that Optimizely did, it sounds like business executives are in alignment that business agility and adaptivity is a top priority. Yet respondents to the research said that implementing personalization requires too many resources. What would your advice to be to those that say this?

I have a lot of conversations obviously with our customers and prospects around this this topic and I do believe that in any form of change or anything that you are driving inside a company. You always need a sense of urgency. To kick off initiatives and to ultimately drive them to success, and I think the the part that is very eye-opening for me is that over the last 2 years as we experience the global pandemic, we saw an acceleration around projects that previously were deemed as too complicated too difficult or as taking too long and it's all because there was a resolve and a need that suddenly became so apparent that companies and organizations were able to execute things much more quickly than they ever anticipated. So for me, it always comes back to this notion of: do you have enough urgency and enough resolve inside the company and inside the organization to actually drive a personalization effort. We work with many companies who have that. Ultimately you need to build the case for change. You need to have the sense of urgency behind it and I think you can absolutely do this if you have the right level of resolve. And you just need to really build the case inside your company and I think it starts with understanding your customer and ah where they go to buy and once you do that work. You will see that you need personalization.

What's the mindset of the brand that gets this and and really you know, truly embraces this and how does it differ from the organization that is,for lack of a better term, stuck in the old way of doing things?

I think it starts with having a mindset that actually wants to to learn and evolve and actually but you know take an understanding that you need to be you need to drive digital maturity in terms of your own organization. I have conversations with CEOs who clearly understand that they need to move there and that they need to become digitally much more mature. Ultimately, it's about the mindset of failing fast. Do you have a mindset of building not for perfection but actually for speed and ultimately recognizing that it's not the size of your company that matters? Agility and the speed at which you can move that actually matters in today's market yeah and so there's a lot of similarities over time that you see of companies and brands that get it and you see it in terms of the people they hire, and you see it in terms of the initiatives that they. 

Forty-one percent of those surveyed in the report that you just released said that a barrier to being more adaptive is that their organization takes minimal risks. How do you recommend that organizations look at this perhaps in a different way but look at it in a way that doesn't feel so threatening?

This is something that we work a lot on at our company because we help companies set up a culture of experimentation, and experimentation is ultimately all about observing your customer behavior, and seeing what works and what doesn't work and then moving more of your customers towards a solution that works. Wile you do this, you obviously have experiments that work out and you have experiments that fail. What's remarkable is that some companies get very discouraged when they see for instance that they run a test and the test is negative or it doesn't work out. They then say “maybe we should stop our testing program,” while you should actually be doing exactly the opposite. Because once you test and have a negative or failed experiment, you should actually see it as something you didn't waste money or time on because you just tested it.

And so you really need to take the word failure and failing and put it into a completely different context of learning. How do you learn about things? You test things out and if they don't work, you move on to the next thing but you have actually now just avoided spending a lot of money and effort on something that didn't work. I've had unbelievable conversations recently with some customers who told me how elaborate they have done certain tests and they failed and they were ecstatic that they actually failed. They actually enjoy them more and that's what I think companies need to do is they need to think more about this notion about learning and how you can actually understand your customer behaviors better by testing and experimenting rather than seeing it as a risk that you are taking for the business. 

Let's talk about some of the internal challenges that the organizations are often facing. In your report, nearly one-third of executives surveyed said that their marketing team is limited in what they're able to achieve on their own without technical help or IT teams. Can you talk a little bit to this point and you know why is this so important for marketers to be able to be more independent? 

I think the evolution of marketing has been particularly interesting because if you think about a marketer initially there was a lot of focus on brand marketing and how you position your brand and then over time marketing has extended and evolved into a business engine for how to create demand, manage demand and for so many businesses that's the lifeblood of the company. 

As opposed to in-person or direct communication, it's very different when people come to your website and you don't see them and you need to understand what does your customer or your prospect actually look for and how do you start to personalize experience. How do you show the right content to the right person, and how do you do that at scale? In many ways marketers feel very restricted by the time it takes to actually implement something on digital because oftentimes they will need to go through a developer or an engineer to make a change and one of the big challenges with that obviously is time and speed and the ability to drive results.

The marketeer obviously wants to be independent wants to have the ability to have solutions where they can implement changes themselves without having to rely on on others to actually drive it, and for me this is a very important design factor because we build our solutionsaround the needs of the marketeer because they are our key customer. They should also be able to run experiments by themselves around content. They should be able to do great content marketing. They should be able to understand the analytics. I think those are then internal barriers that start to impede the business results.

Also according to the research seventy-five percent of business executives surveyed believe that good content's being created in their organizations yet poorly leveraged so some ofthis you you already addressed as far as the the barrier between marketers and the technology that they're using. What would your advice be to organizations about smart content creation in the age of personalization?

This is a big challenge that a lot of companies have. Content is something we spend a lot of time on—it's at the very heart of Optimizely. We believe that you are what you read, what content you look at, what podcasts you listen to. One of the things that I found most helpful for companies was a very simple view of their content and it's basically a matrix where on one side we say “what content do you publish” and then on the other side as of the matrix is  “what content do people read?” What you basically see is how much content have you published on a certain given topic versus your prospects or customers are actually reading.

So you start to get analytical and data driven around your content production and what people are actually interested in and so we do this for companies that sometimes have hundreds thousands of pages of content. There's a massive amount of content out there and what you oftentimes find is surprising to companies. They suddenly recognize they did not know certain topics were in such high demand, yet they actually have so little content on those. 

My recommendation would be strongly to companies to get analytical about the content they produce to look at how they can leverage personalization and targeting technology to actually serve up the right content at the right part of the customer journey and to customers because I do think that a great piece of content is extraordinarily powerful.

Listen to the Episode

About Alex Atzberger, CEO, Optimizely

I consider myself very fortunate. Over the course of the past 20 years, I had a front seat in three of the most significant transformations of our time: the massive digitization of all industries, the globalization of the world including the rise of China, and the shift from back-office to customer experience. During this time, I was very lucky to work with and learn from amazing people that believed in me to give me opportunity, and those who believed in me to follow me to new opportunities. Now as CEO of Optimizely, I am blessed to have a fantastic team, amazing value-proven products, and a recognized brand to help companies rely less on assumptions but move to knowing as their customer experience becomes a digital experience.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host ofThe Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations oncustomer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017. Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist atGK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board. Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF.