Introduction
Thank you so much for joining our fireside chat, my name is Lee Lee Paschal, I run partner marketing for Medallia. I’m joined today by two panelists. So we’ve got Mike Debnar from Medallia, who is our principal within the retail vertical and digital innovation. And then from the Adobe side, we are joined by Chris Young, who’s an industry strategist for Adobe’s financial services sector. With that, let’s get into it.
Shifting to “Next Best Experience”
So Chris, you know took this directly from a conversation with you, you said moving from “next best offer” to “next best experience.” Can you elaborate on this? Yeah, I think the state of the union in personalization and financial services today is currently around this concept of “next best offer,” and that’s geared towards acquisition and product sales and that’s kind of the mindset of the marketer. And with that in mind, you’re working in really, portions of the journey, where the marketer has jurisdiction, you know, typically the public-facing website, maybe email, maybe paid media — but this shift is going to “next best experience,” which is geared towards value to the customer, not necessarily purely value to the bank. And with that in mind, you’re gonna need a lot more data. You’re gonna have to connect to a lot more channels like financial services being omnichannels of branches and call centers, and you’re gonna need a lot more content to deliver personalization and scale. So this is the importance of our partnership between Adobe and Medallia in meeting that end-to-end journey geared towards that next best experience, but I also want to add that it’s gonna require a mindset change as well. Marketers have to go beyond thinking: how well do we sell what we make?, to how well do we know and serve the customer? And I think the combination of our applications to build that intelligence about the consumer is extremely important.
Retail Perspective on Customer Journey
Yeah, and from the retail perspective, you know, you think about how customers have changed their behavior and just the advent of digital and you know, in retail, tier one, tier two retailers have invested in digital, those digital assets are out there, there’s high adoption, so consumers are going from, at a much higher rate, going from the online experience to the offline experience. So for example, from the app looking for products that are in stock, and they’re — then they’ll go to the offline experience, to the brick and mortar store to go ahead and find those products and purchase those products. So that, you know, you call that the customer journey, It’s not that complicated in that there’s only one hop there, but there’s a lot of risk within that journey. And so understanding, as best we can, that the customer’s intent being online versus their actual feet-on-the-ground experience in the store is really where there’s an opportunity within retail. And that takes data, and sometimes it’s a little bit different data, right? Because a lot of that data historically has just not been known, like, when I walk into a store, you know, how do you know that I’m even there unless I identify and purchase something? So there’s new technologies that are really helping with that, to identify customers in-store. For example, a lot of our clients are using in-store mode within their app. So the app turns into like a super app when you’re in the store, it provides navigation and you can check out with your phone and save time and energy. And so that type of data, much to Chris’s example that we’ll need more data, that’s becoming available, and to the extent we can use that to create what I’ll call as close as possible to the perfect experience for that customer. And what that entails is not only the data, but taking action on the data to improve the experience. Some of that action can be automated, and some of it, quite honestly, is gonna be still on the part of the employees in the store to be able to see that information, understand that customer journey, and actually take action on it. You know, call it the analog to the digital, and I think we’re getting closer to getting there, and I think that’s really where we’re gonna see brands differentiate themselves. The ones that are gonna be the early adopters to that, you know that next best experience, are gonna see a, you know, an additional share of market and share of wallet.
Enterprise Agility and Ongoing Adaptation
I think a wise man once said, it takes a virtual village to support personalization goals. So — The premonition, I mean look at that, but this is exactly what we mean, you know, this village. I don’t think that anybody listening to this today, can completely just reimagine the organization overnight. So a lot of it has to do with improving the way that you work together, new ways of working is the term, and fostering better collaboration that gets you to a higher degree of customer-centricity. That improves speed to market, that unlocks innovation. So this virtual village that I’m talking about is how — think about how you work with your peers and colleagues, and how more efficient it could be. The one thing I want to point out is this concept of “one-and-done,” and I know, Mike, and you’ll agree with this, but it is an ongoing, iterative process. It’s just, you know, the consumer change — look how much the consumer has changed, even over the last two years. And the idea is, this whole concept is around enterprise agility. Because the consumer may change again, and this next generation may want something entirely different. It’s your ability to pivot the organization, to move the Titanic and pivot rapidly, to meet those demands.
