The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Today we're going to talk about how to create better customer experiences through more effective search and content discovery. To help me discuss this topic, I talked with Jason McClellan, CMO at Algolia,  a leading api platform for search and dynamic experiences.

[Greg Kihlström] Jason, why don’t you start with a little background on Algolia and your role there?

[Jason McClelland, Algolia] Algolia was formed about 9 years ago under the initial premise being there wasn't a good search option for developers building mobile apps. Iif you fast forward to 3-4 years ago there was a realization that most people were using us for website search. Even though we could do a bunch of things, including that we're built into Zendesk, Stripe, and Twilio, as well as Playstation and Nintendo Switch, in addition to NBC's the voice app and all these amazing experiences. Still people mostly use us for website search. The other thing that is important to know is that we're the second biggest search company in the world. So, bigger than Microsoft as far as number of searches that we handle, and second only to Google, and even Google chose us as their partner for Google Cloud and Firebase—a pretty interesting story. But almost no one knows just how many of these platforms use Algolia.

So my job as CMO is to find a way to show people the art of the possible, to get those stories out there. Really get developers excited and aware. If you're trying to build a gaming discovery experience, or if you're trying to build you know support case routing sort of discoverability. We can help you with all those and we're already doing that with the biggest companies in the world. 

That's great context. So let's get started by talking about the importance of search and content discovery to the customer experience. Why don't you give your perspective on just why effective search and intelligent content discovery is so important?

First I would start with the premise that there are billions of people in the world. There's billions of pieces of content and in today's world people have really short term attention spans and so people don't they don't have patience for foraging.

So whether you're CNN or NBC, or whether you're Reddit, or whether you're a retailer, people expect you to know them and show them the right thing within half a second. If not, they're in line at Starbucks ordering a coffee, and if you're not showing them the right dress or pair of shoes or piece of content or game, they're going to flip over to some other news source right? Or some other gaming source or somebody else. It's just too easy for people to bounce back and forth between instagram and facebook or Tiktok. 

It's actually been really hard for companies to drive that kind of experience which is, with millions of people hitting my service, how do I show them the right thing at the right time? 

How should a brand look at consumer expectations? How does a brand align consumer expectations with how they do search?

The first thing is that I expect you to know me and show me something relevant at first touch, and to make the experience engaging. So I want to keep clicking, and I want to keep engaging. Right now because we're a week out from Thanksgiving at least here in the U.S., and retailers are really freaking out because all their inventory is stuck on boats. So retailers and merchandisers are trying to figure out, how do I beat my revenue numbers for this quarter when I don't know what I can sell? 

The other thing that is top of mind for businesses is do I have systems that in near real time can help me understand and be super transparent with my users around what's available like what's actually in stock, and when is it going to ship? It's on backorder, what do I think is the most relevant sort of like second best option? Being able to do that in real time because you have no idea what's going to actually be on your shelves. 

Behind the scenes, doing search and recommendations well means syncing up a lot of things including engineering teams, marketers, supply chain, and some of the other things you already mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about this and just how organizations should think about this in order to do it effectively?

Number one is setting the expectation with your vendors that this near real time is what you're looking for. Historically I don't know that people have known what to ask for or to know that they should have to set this expectation. 

Number two is it's getting easier and harder. The part that's getting easier is that in the past you either had to build everything yourself. That's incredibly hard, and a multi-year process. Or it was hard because you're buying some monolithic off-the-shelf Saas provider and you're having to rip it apart to figure out, like how exactly do I integrate it with my ERP, or how exactly do I integrate it with my PAM how exactly do I integrate it with like my last mile customer experience, or the display layer. So that was really hard because essentially you're fighting the system because the SaaS providers always pride themselves that you get the benefit of multi tenant SaaS. It's like living in the same apartment as everyone else—you don't have to pay for your own plumbing, and that's true. The downside, then is your apartment looks like everybody else's apartment because you're buying the same thing.

And if you're Dior and you're trying to look different than say like Loreal or some other premium brand, that's really hard when you're fighting the system and going, okay, we bought the same thing. How do we look different? So it's gotten easier because there's been this rise of what Gartner calls composable software.

Companies like us or Twilio or Stripe which are bigger than an api, and smaller than hosted SaaS. It's kind of like pre-built Lego blocks that make it easier for developers to build these experiences. So that part's gotten a lot easier from a build standpoint.

The part that's gotten a lot more complex is that in the past you would just ring up Salesforce or you'd ring up Adobe and you'd say, hey, I need a marketing system and they'd say, hey, we got 7 clouds. You know we're more than happy to sell you our 7 clouds now. What you do is you call up Salesforce or an Adobe and you say, hey I need your content management system. But I'm going to go to these other composable companies and actually build the you know the sort of experience layer around it. That's really confusing, especially for marketing and business execs. You don't come from a technology background and so that's part of the challenge of my job is explaining this.

As your go to markets become more technical, you have business people who come up through brand or demand or product marketing or product management and now all of a sudden they're having to figure out APIs and composable and how do I speak to my developer? There's a lot of work to do there and there's a lot of gray area in the market because of that.

There's this growing trend and expectation from consumers for personalization. How do we continue to up the ante as brands?

I would say there's definitely no going back. It's only going to accelerate. This is putting some brands in a real bind. There are plenty of examples of companies that were maybe a little bit behind on the move to digital and now they're really trying to scramble.

Given that these are multimillion dollar multi-year investments and their competitors are two, three, even five years ahead, it's only going to accelerate

I was talking with one of the analysts maybe two months ago, around that there are differences in expectations geographically. Meaning like in America I expect to be able to go to anybody's website see what they have online see what they have in store see what the shipping time is. I expect that it gonna come to me when you say and I also expect that if I go to the store, it's gonna be the same price as what you told me was on the website. But that is not the customer expectation in Europe, for instance. At least yet.

But the idea is like if you don't You're going to fall behind you're going to become irrelevant and so. So really being clear like what are the business goals that we're trying to move, who are our customers, and how do they shop? Then, how do I skate ahead of the puck, right? How can I leapfrog the days of “I'm just going to buy a one size fits all marketing cloud”—that was 10 years ago.

Another goal is, as a business, how am I going to drive a cross-channel, cross-app, cross-web,  in-person retail experience? Which providers can give me that experience and have they actually done it? In addition, show me what the business results were, show me the change management, the type of people you needed, and putting that to a test, or else brands will fall behind

So let's let's talk a little bit now about some predictions and some recommendations for organizations looking ahead to next year. Where do we go from here? 

In general a theme that we're seeing is that we're in a pretty big trough of disillusionment with AI, and at this point I really I grimace every time I see the word or say the word “AI” because for the last eight years, most of it's been garbage. So I look at I know probably 80 percent of the time that when somebody says AI they don't know what they're talking about.

So you have this trough of disillusionment or skepticism with business buyers and even developers. They look at it and they go, okay, you're telling me you got some great AI-driven thing. Is it really real because I've had twenty other companies tell me before and stuff just actually didn't work. It didn't it didn't help me. That is something that we as an industry have to dig ourselves out of—rebuilding that credibility of what exactly is it and how exactly does it work. 

That leads to the second secular trend, this idea around transparent or explainable AI or transparent or explainable ML (machine learning). Which is, I really want the robots to help me do my job but the robots have to be able to explain what they're doing in a way that a human understands it because then it makes a human smarter and a human can go explain to their boss, here's why I recommended article A versus B or game A versus B or you know red dress versus blue dress. You know because ML showed me that it maximizes revenue or maximizes margin or it maximizes most popular. Whatever the thing may be, and so we've seen a lot more retailers explicitly asking for that, which is that they love when the AIML models are transparent and it makes my team smarter. How do you guys get even better at that?

What do you see happening in the area of hyper localization?

When we think about hyperlocalization, what we're talking about in my part of the industry is what do people similar to me tend to want based on where I'm at? Google's really good at this, right? If I go to google and I type in like “lunch by me,” Google's able to figure out well where are you and what are the restaurants that are open right by you and really optimizes the results based on what's a half mile away from you, and that's now being democratized. That's one of the things we just did a monster deal with the biggest pharmacy company, and that was exactly what they were looking for— the idea that somebody needs something, whether it's toilet paper or soap, or gum. I need to be able to show them in that half a second, what's in stock and what's most relevant for them in their neighborhood because there's 3 different stores within a half mile from them. 

In the past, it was incredibly hard to stitch together that sort of geolocation data based on your IP address and your system’s MAC address, then stitched together across like your inventory system, your crm system, and ultimately show it in real-time.

Now that's quickly becoming the expectation and that was accelerated by 5 years just because of COVID. People were like, I can't go in a store and wait for a half hour to pick up toilet paper like I got to know who's got what and I want to be in and out. So that was at least a positive outcome driven from necessity.

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About Jason McClelland

Jason is Chief Marketing Officer at Aloglia, one of the world’s leading search and content discovery platforms.

From Jason:

I'm passionate about building businesses and making GTMs more efficient via digital transformation; Leading with Digital to allow companies to be more focused and have closer relationships with their customers, resulting in customer affinity and expansion, improved LTV and more efficient sales.

I was then at Domino Data Lab as their CMO, responsible for building the marketing team, motion, upleveling positioning, and upleveling GTM to enterprise/ABM-S.

Previously, at Salesforce as CMO for their Heroku (App Dev) business. Before that, I was fortunate to serve on the leadership team that drove Adobe's Creative Cloud transformation to SaaS services. First, in product management, leading the team that built Adobe’s “eCommerce as a Service” vision; then running the services business to scale to $1B+, building the teams, platform and management processes necessary.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host of The Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations on customer 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 at GK5A. 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.