MarTech Virtual: How Leading Brands Make Omnichannel a Reality

Speaker:

• Vijay Chittoor: Co-Founder & CEO, Blueshift

The Imperative of Omnichannel Engagement

Vijay Chittoor: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session of the Martech conference, where we'll be talking about how leading brands make omnichannel engagement a reality. I'm Vijay Chittoor, Co-Founder and CEO of Blueshift. For those of you who don't know us, Blueshift is a customer data platform that acts as a smart hub connecting every touchpoint in the customer journey.

In that capacity, we've been very fortunate to work with diverse brands across many different industry categories, including:

• Media and publishing companies like Discovery.
• Retail and e-commerce companies like Stitch Fix.
• E-Learning companies like Udacity.
• Personal finance companies like LendingTree.
• Many other companies across sectors like hospitality, healthcare, and much more.

Today, I'll distill many lessons I've learned from talking to these brands about making omnichannel engagement a reality. The starting point, whenever we discuss this, is that this topic is incredibly important.

Connecting all your channels and delivering a consistent omnichannel experience is vital because:

• We're talking about 30% higher lifetime value among omnichannel shoppers.
• Brands that do it right achieve 89% customer retention, compared to others retaining only 33% of their customers.

We can intuitively understand why these statistics hold true. As consumers, we all know that when we have a bad experience with a brand, we often walk away. There are countless examples online, like those found with a quick search on Twitter, where people share frustrating brand experiences. These happen all the time. Well-intentioned brands often deliver poor experiences by failing to connect all their omnichannel touchpoints.

Multi-channel vs. Omnichannel: A Critical Distinction

Vijay Chittoor: Why does this happen? And is multi-channel engagement good enough? Is it a sufficient starting point?

When we speak to brands, multi-channel often comes up. However, we've found that multi-channel marketing and customer engagement are simply not enough. The mindset for multi-channel is very similar to that for single-channel engagement, focusing on the marketing channel rather than the consumer.

In single-channel marketing, the focus is on questions like, "What email should I send out tomorrow?" In multi-channel marketing, you might rephrase that to, "How do I create a brand-consistent message that can be sent via email, print, and paid media in parallel?"

Despite this, your customer engagement remains on the periphery of the customer experience. The true customer experience happens in the store, on your website, in your apps, or in your call center, where customers actively engage with the brand. Marketing, in this model, feels like something that sits on the periphery, potentially driving customers into the experience, but not truly extending it. To extend the customer's experience, you must start by understanding the customer, not just the channel.

If you look at the multi-channel marketing approach, it clearly starts from a channel-first mindset. You focus on coordinating channel programs across email and print with a campaign-oriented mindset ("What do I send out to customers?"). This is a brand-centric message, with much less emphasis on understanding "who is Vijay as a customer."

This gets flipped when we start thinking about omnichannel. You have to invert that model. You must truly start thinking of customer engagement as an extension of a customer's experience.

This means you have to start by understanding:

• Who is the customer?
• What are the right moments in their lifecycle to engage them?
• What are the right offers or next pieces of content that I can deliver through different channels to extend their experience with the brand?
• What kind of audiences can I target that are highly relevant to their experience with my brand?

When you adopt this mindset, you're inverting the paradigm: instead of starting channel-first, you're truly starting customer-first. We'll discuss how to achieve this transition shortly. This is a very important shift that every brand needs to make to move from multi-channel to true omnichannel engagement. The rest of our discussion will highlight how some of the brands we've worked with have achieved this.

The Challenge of Disconnected Customer Data

Vijay Chittoor: Why would every brand not achieve this omnichannel reality? The biggest barrier, when we speak to different marketing and customer experience teams, is always about disconnected customer data.

Consider your email engagement versus an in-store interaction where a human agent talks to the customer. These often run off very different data sets. The same applies to paid media campaigns and direct mail. While marketing and customer engagement professionals have always been data-driven, the data they look at is typically confined to that specific channel.

For example, an email team usually looks at data related only to email opens and clicks, deciding to send more emails to those who click. They don't consider the customer's experience in the store, inside the app, or in the call center. This same mentality pervades all these different channels, leading to disconnected customer data.

Let's understand a little more about why this disconnected customer data problem occurs. At its heart, this problem is about the disconnect between customer experience (CX) touchpoints and marketing and engagement touchpoints.

There are customer-initiated actions and brand-initiated responses. We'll see how these two understandings of the customer often diverge.

Example 1: Hospitality Industry Customer Journey

Let's take a hospitality example, familiar to many who've recently booked a hotel or flight post-COVID:

1. Research Phase (Customer Initiated): As a customer, you start by researching options, browsing websites, and collecting information.
   • Brand Response: At this stage, appropriate responses include sending relevant offers to encourage booking, retargeting to remind about ongoing research, or offering support/chat from a human agent to provide more information.
   • Channels: Customers primarily engage via websites or apps.
2. Booking/Purchase Phase (Customer Initiated): The customer moves to booking or purchasing.
   • Brand Response: The brand has an opportunity to confirm the booking and recommend additional services (e.g., restaurants in a hotel).
3. Check-in Phase (Customer Initiated): The customer physically checks into the hotel, interacting with the front desk.
   • Brand Response: The brand can engage with reminders, alerts, and other relevant information.
4. Post-Stay/Advocacy (Customer Initiated): Beyond the stay, there's an opportunity to convert customers into loyal advocates.
   • Brand Response: The brand can solicit feedback through NPS surveys and reviews.

If you think about this journey from both the customer's and brand's points of view, data acts as the glue that can connect all these different channels (website, hotel operations, chat, paid media retargeting, mobile, SMS, etc.).

Even this simple customer journey of one person booking a hotel stay generates many different kinds of data:

• Research/Abandonment Phase: Browsing data, page views.
• Booking Phase: Transactional data (booking ID, check-in/out dates). This transactional data has different states (booked, checked-in, checked-out), making it distinct from browsing data.
• Experience Data: Data from the actual stay.
• Loyalty and Review Data: How you engage with loyalty programs, what reviews you leave.

These are all very different kinds of data, behaving very differently. How do you build a unified profile from this customer experience data (left side) that can then inform the brand's engagement efforts (right side)? Bridging this gap through data is the core challenge. We intuitively understand that there are many different types of data and channels (experience-side, engagement-side) that must be connected.

Example 2: Financial Industry Customer Journey

This challenge isn't unique to hospitality. Whichever industry you're in, you face a similar problem. Let's look at an example from the finance industry:

• Research Phase: You might research a new product (credit card, insurance). You receive offers, retargeting ads, and support.
• Application Phase: Instead of booking, you apply. This might involve walking into a bank branch or calling a call center, each having associated engagement touchpoints.
• Approval & Usage Phase: The application goes through approval, and you start using the product (e.g., daily credit card swipes, or less frequent engagement with a mortgage). The brand has many opportunities to engage based on your journey stage.
• Advocacy Phase: Converting happy customers into advocates who can extend the brand's reach.

Again, the nature of data in this example is very different:

• Browsing data at the top.
• Transactional data in the middle (application ID, approval stages). Understanding this data's stages is critical, differentiating it from browsing data.
• Loyalty data and usage data (e.g., each credit card swipe). Understanding usage data differently from application data is vital for a brand to bridge the gap between experience and engagement channels and deliver a consistent omnichannel experience.

Bridging the CX-Marketing Divide with Smart Hub CDPs

Vijay Chittoor: What we're learning is that the data on the left is Customer Experience (CX) data – data generated by customers' experiences with your brand. It's not just marketing data (email opens/clicks, ad impressions); it's about how customers consume your brand. This data comes through many different sources and can sometimes be aggregated into a data warehouse.

The right side represents all the different ways brands can extend that experience by engaging customers with relevant messages and interactions. The biggest priority for brands looking to cross the omnichannel chasm is to bridge the gap between the CX data on the left and the engagement channels on the right.

This is where a new category of products called Smart Hub CDPs comes in. A Smart Hub CDP goes beyond a conventional CDP by:

• Unifying CX data: Not only unifying data from the left (customer experience data).
• Making Smart Inferences: Becoming smarter by making intelligent inferences on:
  • What to say to each customer.
  • What offers to present.
  • The right trigger points in the customer lifecycle, based on a full understanding of CX data.
• Acting as a Hub: Relaying all this decisioning and "smarts" to every touchpoint on the right.

This is how brands are starting to make the transition to omnichannel engagement. You start with the customer experience, build the CX data, and create the CX profile. But you build it in a form where you can make millions of smart decisions and distribute those decisions at a massive scale across every touchpoint.

This is important, but it's not the be-all and end-all. What I showed you on the previous slide is still largely within the realm of customer engagement and marketing channels. Where brands are going next is beyond this.

The starting point on this picture is the Smart Hub CDP at the center, which:

• Identifies the right trigger moments.
• Determines the intelligence on the next best content or offer.
• Figures out audiences.
• Distributes that to marketing.

So far, the picture is all about marketing. But where brands are heading next is to say, "If I have that customer-level intelligence, I want to connect marketing into all the other touchpoints happening in the customer journey."

Case Study: E-Learning Company

An example of this is one of our customers in the e-learning space. They look at customer experience data not only from customers logging into the digital product and completing their education but also from offline interactions (e.g., meetings with mentors, completing courses and projects offline). They build that customer experience profile.

On the engagement side, they're not just sending email reminders or push notifications. They're starting to realize they can involve their customer success teams at the right moments in the customer lifecycle. For instance, the customer success or support team can proactively reach out to students who haven't completed a mentoring session on time, help them schedule, and truly nudge that experience along in a concierge fashion.

To do this, they're taking intelligence from the CDP and connecting it to their support or help desk. Many other customers are now connecting this same intelligence into their CRM systems so sales professionals or relationship managers can act on that data. They're also connecting to their product systems, loyalty systems, and many more touchpoints.

This is a big "aha!" for many brands. Traditionally, marketing and the broader customer experience weren't seen as connected or unified. Now, brands are realizing that if they understand customers through the lens of CX data, they can:

• Take very intelligent actions in marketing.
• Make marketing itself much more experiential.
• Make customer engagement channels much smarter.
• Influence all other CX touchpoints and make them more coordinated with marketing.

This is where the best brands we work with are heading: connecting their customer engagement across marketing channels with the broader customer experience that happens in sales, support, product, and many other functions. This is truly the holy grail of building an omnichannel experience.

Building Blocks for Omnichannel Experience

If you think about the three building blocks of this omnichannel experience:

1. Centralized Experience Orchestration: You have to think about the customer experience and all customer journey touchpoints (marketing or outside) and figure out a centralized way to orchestrate them. This orchestration is about identifying the right moments for interaction, and also the right content and the right channel.
2. Align People and Processes: This is a big one. The best brands are doing it right, connecting people and organizations instead of operating in silos. The simplest version is connecting different silos within marketing (e.g., email marketing with paid media). More importantly, the most successful brands are connecting marketing with customer experience functions outside of marketing, like the e-learning company example.
3. Unified CX Strategy: This all feeds into layering in a unified CX strategy, where all efforts are seen as extending the customer's experience, going much beyond just marketing. This strategy must be the underpinning of the entire effort.

Key Takeaways

I've learned these lessons from our customers, some of the very savviest brands we work with. There are three key things they're doing right:

1. Shift Focus from Marketing Data to Customer Experience Data: Traditional marketers focus on marketing data (email opens/clicks, ad impressions). While this data is still important, truly understanding customer data (CX data) is even more crucial. This mental shift means optimizing the customer's experience at a customer level, rather than just squeezing out clicks through A/B testing based on marketing data.
2. Customer-Centric Campaigns, Not Channel-First: When thinking about marketing campaigns, engagement orchestration, or experience orchestration, channels are still important (email, direct mail, paid media, SMS). However, you must start from the customer, not the channel. This is a big mindset shift that successful brands have made.
3. Intertwine Marketing with Broader CX Functions: Traditionally, marketing has been on the outskirts of the customer experience function, focused on driving customers into the experience rather than extending it. Today, brands everywhere are realizing that marketing and customer experience must be integrated to truly deliver an omnichannel customer experience.

These are three big lessons I've learned from working with so many different brands. I'm excited to share some of this with you. Thank you for having me at this Martech conference. I look forward to all your questions from the audience, and once again, thank you for taking the time to be here. Thank you so much.