About the Episode

A discussion about customer journey orchestration and its power in creating great customer experiences with special guest Tim Claytor, SVP Partnerships North America at Kitewheel.

About Our Guest

Tim Claytor is responsible for new business development and partner management within North America among the Advertising Agency and Marketing Services Provider (MSP) vertical. Tim is a highly respected member of the database marketing industry and possesses more than 25 years of experience encompassing marketing automation, predictive analytics, database marketing, consumer/commercial segmentation, and media buying. His distinguished career includes sales, consulting, and business development leadership roles across firms such as Nielsen/Claritas, TransUnion, Alterian/SDL, and OMD Chicago (Omnicom Media Group). Tim holds a Bachelor of Arts in Macro-economics from Indiana University and is a frequent speaker at DePaul University’s Kellstadt School of Business in Chicago. Tim also sits on the Board or Directors at CADM (Chicago’s Multichannel Response Marketing Community) as Secretary.

Transcript

Please note that this transcript was created with the help of automated services, so please bear with any inaccuracies.

Greg: 

My name is Greg Kihlstrom and today we're going to talk about customer journey orchestration and its power in creating great customer experiences. Tell me, discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome, welcome Tim Claytor. First, why don't you tell me a little bit about what you do at Kitewheel and what Kitewheel provides to its customers.

Tim: 

Thanks for having me on. I am the senior vice president of partner and business development for North America. I have been with Kitewheel since its founding in 2013. Have a long history in the database marketing space, marketing automation and real-time decisioning space spanning several companies prior to joining Kitewheel. But Kitewheel offers a real-time customer engagement hub that is an agnostic decisioning hub that listens and tracks behavior in real-time channels as well as legacy and offline channels in order to drive real-time orchestration. So based on what a customer or prospect does or does not do as part of a visualized journey in our platform we are able to suggest next best action or next best content to that customer that's contextually relevant to how they're behaving or engaging with the brand in a real-time. And one of the reasons people like this platform is that it's a very low code or it's a configuration process in order to build these journeys and do the integrations and implementations in weeks as opposed to months. So we've been doing this since 2013 when we were sort of a solution looking for a problem and our world took off as soon as forest are picked up, the overall wave of journey management, orchestration and visualization.

Greg: 

Well, yeah, definitely. You know, this is a critical component of CX. So let's start talking about what makes a good customer experience. So why don't you define what do you, what do you consider great customer experience and how is that measured?

Tim: 

So to me, customer experience is communications that are, that are textually relevant, contextually relevant. You know, we like to say you need to be able to show your prospects and customers that you know them, treat them as if you know them and certainly reward them and satisfy them as if you know them. Most consumers are happy to share information and happy to be identified as long as you're getting them from point a to point B in an efficient manner. You know, technology has not afforded us more time. It's afforded us less time. So to me, a great experience is being able to communicate with a brand. Let's say my, my satellite TV provider where I reach out via the 800 number and then I'm on the mobile app. And neither of those two channels are obviously not speaking with each other. A good example is signing up for the NFL package.

Tim: 

I go to the mobile app, I sign up, you know, I ask questions, do I currently have the NFL ticket Sunday ticket? The chat bot says, what are you interested in? While I'm interested in finding out is I have the NSL ticket, it goes dead because it's an unintelligent chat bot. I land in Los Angeles because I did it just before a flight. I call the 800 number. And they said, what are you interested in? I said, I'm interested in confirming whether I have the NFL ticket. And they say, Oh, well sure you haven't, you signed up for it this morning. So it's the disconnected communications and disconnected logic because there's so many databases, so many channels for a brand to coordinate that that tends to cause bad experiences. And as consumers we are looking to get from point a to point B in a path to purchase or a path to conversion or a path to service resolution as quickly as we can because we are all busy people.

Greg: 

You touched on this a little bit as far as just how, how databases need to be connected and, and things like that. But what are some of the other reasons that companies struggle providing this, this great customer experience?

Tim: 

Well, they're saddled with technology that was never meant, you know, siloed channels, specific technology that was never meant to talk across channel. So in order to get that legacy technology to work in a multichannel or Omni channel environment, there's a lot of custom coding that has to be done and it's just a very, very heavy lift. True omni-channel orchestration is a little bit disruptive because ultimately you are trying to get to proper resource allocation from a, from a marketing or media spend. And some people see that as threatening. You know, I, I handle the email service provider, I send out a billion emails a year. I don't want to send less emails. I want to, I want to keep my job and continue to blast out emails as I see fit. Same thing with display ads. So it's hard to tell a, an enterprise that you should probably be communicating less and communicating better and more efficiently as opposed to communicating more.

Greg:

Are there other specific types of companies or, or use cases that you see are most effective or or get the best results, you know, where, where are you seeing the best success with, with orchestration?

Tim: 

Well, the bigger the brand, the harder it is to launch the first journey, right? And get people to learn a new way of doing things as opposed to a batch and environment where I'm blasting you an email every Friday whether you want it or not versus, you know, sending you a personalized email based on what you just did or did not do in another channel. So what we find as a starting point is linking a CRM database or a CDP database to the email system and then the web behavior that we're tracking on that customer or prospect. And that can be done anonymously. And then certainly when they, when they tell us who they are, then that obviously we have a known identity. So we, we tend to start with just two channels, one or two channels in a database. And then over time we add the third channel, the fourth channel, the fifth channel, because it's, it's a pretty heavy lift to move somebody from batch and blast to a real time interaction management environment.

Greg: 

It seems like there's challenges on the technical front. I mean, would you say, you know, what are some of the challenges internally in an organization as well that might make it you know, that either makes it easier or it makes it more difficult depending on how you look at it?

Tim:

What makes it more difficult is, there are certain technology that can do what we do from a decision rules engine or if you look at sprinkler and what it can do in the social channel, it can, you know, read a tweet put some logic behind it and, and send an intelligent response back. The problem is as I leave Twitter and engage with that brand in a different channel, sprinkler is not going to be able to do that cross channel tracking. So they will lose me. So some other piece of technology now has to pick me up on the website that doesn't talk to sprinkler. So the way we've set up marketing, MarTech and adtech departments and even service, you know, customer service and service resolution, you know, it's all independently driven. And while the CMO may have the overall responsibility of customer experience a lot of these independent channels have their own fiefdoms and budgets and a lot of it just isn't coordinated.

Content is also a heavy lift as well. Greg, you know, the two, the two pushbacks we get are, my data isn't perfect. I need a CDP or I need to clean up my data before I you know, launch something like this. And also my content is all over the board. You know, I've got some of it in a content management system, some of it in a digital asset management system or my ESP system. And a lot of clients struggle with because, because at the end of the day, this is all about content optimization, the right message at the right time and complex message matrix to use to support the complex decisioning that that real time journey orchestration is providing.

Greg: 

What are the teams you've seen that have got to work together more closely that maybe traditionally haven't, since customer experience really is a holistic way of looking at things. What are the teams that you've seen or that are maybe even struggling the most as they're, as they're learning to work with each other?

Tim: 

Well, customer experience is sort of going through a metamorphosis of itself. A lot of customer, traditional customer experiences come from the customer service side, right? And then marketing may have a user experience or overall loyalty or overall customer treatment function and marketing. But you know, as brands start to figure this out there more and more there, there is a person for overall customer experience that's managing that, who hopefully has broad authority, all the this channel activity together. So it's changing, you know, as, as, as enterprises realize that the best way for me to differentiate if I'm Citibank against chase or Bank of America is that is how I treat my existing customers. Because everybody, you know, all the banks provide mortgages, credit cards, investment services. There's not a lot of difference between Citibank and Bank of America from an acquisition standpoint. It's how they treat me and how they onboard me and how they service me going forward. That makes the difference.

Greg: 

So what makes Kitewheel’s solution unique and beneficial?

Tim:

First and foremost,  it's agnostic. So we don't have to go into a large enterprise and say, you know what? You've got to get rid of this piece of Adobe or this piece of Salesforce or this legacy system, we can sit on top of anything that's within the enterprise to leverage what you've already done. So that helps us get market very, very quickly with the time, interaction journeys that are built within our platform. Secondly, we believe true smart orchestration cross channel is driven by advanced decisioning. And whether that's artificial intelligence or machine learning or simple rules and complex rules true orchestration has to have a brain behind it. And we try to come in and say, look, keep what you have kite wheel is going to sit on top of that and unify it. I mean, one way to think about it is it's the centralized brain that unifies that firing to the synapses, which is the individual channels. 

Greg: 

So let's talk about data a little bit. How does data get managed and orchestrated amongst all of those moving pieces?.

Tim:

We use a federated data model, so we don't have to, you don't have to have all of your attributes in one place. We have database listeners that are only grabbing the attributes in real time that are necessary for the logic being driven as I, as I interact with Greg versus Tim versus Don versus Shelly. So if they are existing customers, I'm only gonna pull the three attributes for the decisioning graph. It's being fired at that, at that point in time. And a lot of clients will say, look, my, you know, my data's all over the place. I've got loyalty databases, I've got service databases. And it's like, well, that's fine. If you want to continue, like we've been doing since 1985 to build the perfect, to build the perfect three 60 degree of the degree of your customer or prospect base, you go ahead and have at it. But we only need access to the attributes that are relevant to the journey that we're trying to push.

Greg: 

We've talked a lot about the marketing and customer experience. Outside of that, what are some applications that orchestration might be able to solve for enterprises?

Tim:

Yeah, so we started out heavily heavily centric in, in marketing applications, so paths to purchase paths to response path after conversion. But we've seen a lot of traction and customer service, you know, that is saddled with tons of technology, tons of of, of real time interactions that may not necessarily split with each other. And we've seen a lot of uptick in big brands, insurance companies, financial services where call center is a major initiative, you know, either reducing my calls or making my calls more productive and efficient. We've seen a big uptick in that. And then, and then certainly where you come from Greg around employee orchestration. So whether that's using real time messaging and contextually relevant messaging to onboard an employee if you're, if you're trying to find a, an it or a developer who's, who's in high demand, how can I use customer experience or, and orchestration to drive a better impression with that potential employee to get them onboard. And again, just like Citibank will compete with Bank of America through experience, a lot of hiring companies are trying to compete in that same vein.

Greg: 

What we've seen in the employee journey, there's different names for the stages, but it's really the same. It's the same idea of, of guiding someone through a journey. 

Tim: 

Exactly. And, employees are similar to consumers, right. We don't want you to waste our time and we want to be informed, right? And we want to be informed and pushed with the accurate message of who I am, what I represent with the firm and, and what I should do next really is all we're looking for.

Greg: 

So one last question before we wrap up here. What advice would you have for someone that, either they want to learn more about how orchestration could benefit their company or just orchestration in general?

Tim: 

Well, Forrester has, obviously a lot of coverage. Between them and Gardner, they were the first ones to really dedicate an entire way of around journey management, journey visualization and journey orchestration. So they're, they're a terrific resource. Unfortunately this is a very cluttered marketplace. You've got a lot of companies and providers who are all saying the same thing. Whether I'm a tag management company or whether I'm in a content management provider or an email service provider. They're all saying journey, this journey, that cross channel omni-channel. So you have to be careful because there's a lot of confusion and of course brands, you know, have everybody coming at them at once. But you know, there's tons of information out there that's, that's publicly available. Certainly if you search for customer journey orchestration, you'll, you'll see the myriad of providers that will, that will show up in that search.

But you know, we provide a maturity model that the brands can, if a white paper about a seven page white paper that a brand can review to understand how ready are they for customer journey approaches, right? And journey orchestration. What is the, the, the, the shape of my existing data, what is the shape of my content? You know, what pieces of technology do I have to, to make this happen versus what may be needed. So we try to help them assess as we sell into to give them a sense of, yeah, I can do this. And, and then certainly when they're ready to start, we push a crawl, walk, run approach because again, most brands are not used to leveraging time messaging. That that's, that's, that's resonating from a cross channel approach. So it's very much a test and learn, start small, don't try to boil the ocean and hook, you know, seven channels together because the more channels you, you try to connect and the integrations, the more data you're going to have to ingest and the more logic that you're going to have to build to make sense of that data that's firing in real time.

So, again, starting with a database link to a website or a database website and email is a perfect way to start. As we've done this, a lot of brands have come to us and just with the realization that I can't send 25, you know, irrelevant emails to my customer base anymore, you know, I'm getting, I'm getting killed with opt out, I'm using all these other channels to communicate with my customers and prospects. I'm not leveraging it because I don't know who's coming in through other channels that I'm, that I'm touching. So, you know, the smart brands are really figuring it out that I don't have to send 20 emails just because there are half a penny a piece to sell to send.

Greg: 

Well Tim, thanks so much for joining the show. And for those listening what's the best way for them to learn more about what you're doing and keep up with you?

Tim:

Yeah, so we have a very robust website with lots of content that can be downloaded. It's www.kitewheel.com and if you just go to that website, you'll find tons of information about project partners that we do business with, a lot of applications through from awareness to acquisition to loyalty to advocacy. So that's a great place to start.

Greg:

Wonderful. Well, again, I'd like to thank Tim Claytor or senior vice president of partner development, a development North America Kitewheel for joining the show