Direct Marketing Magazine December 2018

❱

14

❱

17

Marketing in 2019: same, but different PM 4 0 0 5 0 8 0 3

vol. 31 • No. 11 • December 2018

The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations

Unleash the power of your data

❱ 12

How to harness data to enable relevant and productive loyalty programmes Data. Analytics.

Insights. Results.

introducing

clickSpend powered by j.c. williams group

TM

// 3

Vol. 31 | No. 11 | December 2018 EDITOR Brendan Read - brendan@dmn.ca PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jeff Guthrie Matthew Clare Mia Huntington Rob Daleman Debbie Major Eric Dauphinais Rebecca Martin Jonathan Eisenzopf Marie-Louise St-Jacques Linda Farha Michele Sexsmith Dan Goikhman Lia Grimberg

Loyalty ❯❯12

Attention retailers: unleash the power of your data

LLOYDMEDIA INC. HEAD OFFICE / SUBSCRIPTIONS / PRODUCTION:

302-137 Main Street North Markham ON L3P 1Y2 Phone: 905.201.6600 Fax: 905.201.6601 Toll-free: 800.668.1838 home@dmn.ca www.dmn.ca EDITORIAL CONTACT: DM Magazine is published monthly by Lloydmedia Inc. plus the annual DM Industry Guide.

DM Magazine may be obtained through paid subscription. Rates: Canada 1 year (12 issues $48)

2 years (24 issues $70) U.S. 1 year (12 issues $60)

2 years (24 issues $100) DM Magazine is an independently-produced publication not affiliated in any way with any association or organized group nor with any publication produced either in Canada or the United States. Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome. However unused manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by sufficient postage.

Occasionally DM Magazine provides its subscriber mailing list to other companies whose product or service may be of value to readers. If you do not want to receive information this way simply send your subscriber mailing label with this notice to: Lloydmedia Inc. 302-137 Main Street North Markham ON L3P 1Y2 Canada.

POSTMASTER: Please send all address changes and return all undeliverable copies to: Lloydmedia Inc. 302-137 Main Street North Markham ON L3P 1Y2 Canada Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 40050803

Customer Centricity

❯❯4

E-commerce is dead. Long live digital commerce!

❯❯26

Making payments painless

Customer Segmentation ❯❯6

Successfully segmenting customers

Contact Management

❯❯7

❯❯ 2

❯❯8

Effectively marketing pop-up retail spaces

Specialized service: the future of contact centres

❯❯10

❯❯ 3

OTT for niche segmentation

Tailoring data for success How Harry Rosen is using segmentation to enhance its customer appeal

Feature

Twitter: @DMNewsCanada

❯❯14

Marketing in 2019: same, but different December 2018

Excellent Execution

How to deliver an impactful omnichannel experience

❯❯ 4 Filling the CX gap

❯❯ 6 Chat before you bot DMN.ca ❰

// 4

Customer Centricity

E-commerce is dead.

Long live digital commerce!

I

Jeff Guthrie is the chief sales officer

for Moneris (www.moneris.com). Jeff is responsible for Canadian revenues and partner relationships. Jeff has 19 years of experience in the electronic payments industry and over 40 years of experience in financial services.

Prior to Moneris, Jeff was vice-president, operations for RBC Royal Bank, Card Services.

Jeff is currently a member of the MasterCard Canadian Advisory Board and has served on the Visa Canada and Discover North American advisory boards.

t’s time to finally say goodbye to e-commerce. It has evolved into something more advanced and complex, namely digital commerce, and businesses need to make sure they’re keeping up pace or they risk falling short of their customers’ expectations.

To most consumers (and marketers), e-commerce implied there was a purchase made through an online store, likely by firing up a computer, opening a browser and/or skimming through a retailer’s web site.

But that’s rarely the case when shoppers make an online purchase today. People use their smartphones, tablets, laptops, virtual assistants and even smart TVs to do their research. Everything has gone digital, even the window-shopping experience.

Moving customers to digital commerce While the shift to digital commerce is well underway, most consumers are still not even at the old e-commerce stage. Moneris sales data shows about 90% of Canadians’ purchases at mass merchandisers, department and specialty stores are still happening in the bricks-and-mortar environment. Which begs the question, how can businesses succeed in a world where shopping starts online and ends in store?

It sounds obvious, but in order to be seen a business has to be visible. Long gone are the days of Canadians relying on the Yellow Pages to look up businesses. If businesses don’t have any kind of online presence they may as well be invisible in today’s business climate. Even if having fully integrated online stores are not feasible, it’s important that businesses to have presences online that educates consumers about what they sell and directs them to the right places to make those purchases.

If businesses don’t have any kind of online presence they may as well be invisible in today’s business climate.

The good news for small businesses is that there are plenty of easy-to-use tools and services that can help them get up and running digitally. Those services that can walk anyone through the steps it takes to create a web site and an online store, even at the same time.

Active social media pages are another great way to do this. Though businesses are less likely to be found ❱ DMN.ca

online through a Google search, they are still in front of their target audiences on a platform they know that has the potential to reach them.

Enabling digital commerce payments Furthermore, Canadians are now using an omnichannel approach to their shopping habits, and businesses should consider how they could integrate multiple channels into a seamless on-brand experience. This means that payments should be simple regardless of the place they’re made, be it at a cashier’s station or online through digital commerce platforms. When customers are ready to pay, they’re either going to have cash, cards or even their smartphones in-hand. Businesses need to determine if they are ready for that.

The move to digital commerce isn’t just about keeping up with trends for the sake of keeping up. It’s about advancing your customer service potential by making your shopping experience convenient.

Accepting digital wallets A recent payment trend that has since merged into the digital commerce space is the acceptance of digital wallets: Google Pay, Apple Pay, Visa Checkout and Masterpass by Mastercard as the most common examples. Digital wallets allow users to make purchases through safely secured and tokenized data stored within their smart devices, which are linked to their credit or debit accounts. The transactions then appear on their smartphones for example, where customers approve the purchases through biometric authentication channels.

Many payment processors that offer online solutions will have integration options to include digital wallets as a payment choice in their digital commerce checkout solutions. This payment choice is both convenient and secure for online shoppers and allows businesses to keep up with digital commerce trends with less payment card industry (PCI) data risk.

In the world of digital commerce, businesses need to think beyond their storefronts to ensure their relevancy. There are many easy ways to make sure they are visible online, from digital commerce web sites to social media, but it’s important to make sure they make things easy for customers too.

In a marketplace controlled by customers that have unlimited access to goods and services, making your business as customer-friendly as possible is vital. That means making it easy to find, convenient to shop at and ready for all payment types via digital commerce.

Deliver the experience your customers want, not the experience you think is right, and you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

December 2018

// 6

Customer Segmentation

Successfully segmenting customers

By Rob Daleman

F

or today’s businessto-business (B2B) marketer, proper market segmentation is a key step that will make or break your marketing campaigns and go-to-market models. While not as focused as accountbased marketing, a well-defined segmentation model offers the ability to break down a larger market to better target your most powerful value propositions and messaging to the right customers.

The great thing about being a B2B marketer in Canada is that the market isn’t too large for the average marketer to analyze and create a defined segmentation model that is both accurate and actionable. It is an exercise worth pursuing: the increased focus is exceptionally helpful in driving increased response rates and lower digital advertising costs.

highlighting areas of over- and under-performance. Strong sales in a particular vertical is often indicative of a strong use case for your product or service that might be leveraged with other prospects.

But inconsistent sales across geographic zones may indicate an opportunity for additional advertising and sales coverage.

Leveraging these insights is an important first step in defining your go-to-market strategy.

Don’t ignore outliers The first lesson I learned in segmentation is not to ignore the outliers in your customer data! I remember one account that was labelled as a small business but which had been purchasing large scale enterprise server and storage solutions far beyond what their firmographic data would imply.

When we dug down deeper to better understand the account,

A well-defined segmentation model offers the ability to break down a larger market to better target your most powerful value propositions and messaging to the right customers.

There is no “one size fits all” I have had the privilege of working on several market segmentation models for a major computer manufacturer, a leading telephony provider and several small technology companies. While every company requires a unique model, the base approach is always similar: a comprehensive review of the current install base and potential market broken down by company size, industry and geographic distribution. Comparing the sales versus potential market in this way is often very revealing, ❱ DMN.ca

we found out this company had advanced requirements because they were doing video rendering for blockbuster movies. Clearly, their needs were very different than those of the average small business: and our model needed to be adjusted accordingly. Looking for these outliers will help you fix your model to include niche customers that would benefit most from your products and solutions.

Bad data = bad models Every customer database I have ever worked with has had

challenges, including duplicate and outdated company information, non-standardized and duplicate transaction information and a lack of proper contact data.

The first step in developing a solid segmentation model is to ensure that data is properly cleansed and de-duplicated to create a data set that is both complete and accurate. Data cleansing should be executed on two different data sets: a market dataset that is representative of the entire Canadian landscape, and a transactional dataset that includes your current customers and their purchase histories. With these two core datasets cleansed, the initial analysis may be completed.

is powerful because it allows us to move beyond using historical records, such as transaction histories and other data that is rooted in the past. It permits us to see how different accounts are interacting with us today, through online tools, and to build segmentation models based on anticipated actions. For example, we use this type of data to understand how, in aggregate, different verticals are engaging with our content over time and how they are traversing our product line. This informs our content planning team to ensure we are delivering the right information at the right time for both current and potential customers.

Moving forward with data integration Up to this point, we have developed a segmentation model based on who customers are, such as by size and vertical. The traditional approach may stop here, but marketing technology allows us to do much more today!

Is your business ready to focus instead on segmenting customers based on their actions?

Using data derived from marketing automation tools, advocacy platforms, digital experience platforms and CRM systems, it is possible to create 360-degree views of your customers. This data can then be used to analyze the level of engagement of your customers by account, vertical, size or geography to determine who your most active customers are and projecting this information onto the wider market to better inform your segmentation model.

Often, this type of analysis offers insight into important shifts in the marketplace, such as companies from a new vertical beginning to engage with your organization more often, potentially revealing that your solution is finding a home in new markets or with new customers.

Leveraging this information

Make your data even richer Today’s marketplace is awash in high-quality third-party data sources including firmographics, mobile data, anonymous cookie data, demographics, psychographics and online sentiment analysis.

Marketers need to proactively plan for the future, as the number of data sources available is set to increase exponentially as more connected devices come online. All of these data points should be considered as potential assets to help your organization further tune your segmentation model.

To leverage these emerging data sources, consider an on-demand data approach that allows your organization to be future-ready and offers the ability to cleanse and enrich your data sets as new attributes become available.

Utilizing these modern forms of customer segmentation serves to make your brand more powerful than ever before.

Rob Daleman is vice president, corporate marketing for Quadient (www.quadient.com).

Quadient is a leading provider of customer communications management (CCM) technology, enabling organizations to create better experiences for their customers through timely, optimized, contextual, highly individualized and accurate communications for all channels.

December 2018

// 7

Customer Segmentation

OTT for niche segmentation

By Dan Goikhman

S

tandard cable TV has been the long time programme viewing giant in the Canadian market. Then Netflix was introduced in 2010, providing over-the-top (OTT) viewing and the whole game changed. Viewers across the country liked the comfort and easy access of OTT services and subscriptions have been growing ever since.

The Convergence Research Group reported that Canadians spent $872 million on OTT subscriptions in 2017. The same report suggests that those numbers will rise to $1.11 billion by 2018, peaking at $1.58 billion by 20201.

With OTT’s growth in the Canadian market, local service providers have taken notice of the shift. Both Bell and CBC launched their own OTT service apps last year. Many other smaller companies have provided the service for some time now. These include DAZN, Mubi, OUTtvGO and Shudder.

OTT is inherently niche OTT has shown advertisers that it allows for superior customer segmentation and targeting in comparison to traditional cable TV, in addition to subscriber revenue growth. OTT’s inherently niche nature stems from being more cost effective and easier to set up than cable channels.

When it comes to cable TV the cable channel is end-to-end. The provider has to account for many factors such as licensing and satellite uplinks. The cost of setting up a cable channel could surpass the $1 million-dollar mark, and for many startups that’s out of the question.

Tech companies are now looking to lower costs for content providers to go online. Turnkey OTT solutions cost less than $100,000 per year to maintain, which makes the service an attractive and affordable alternative to December 2018

traditional cable channels.

If we look away from the Netflix giant, most other OTT services target specific audiences. They all have their own dedicated fan bases, on the grounds that they stream content which directly relates to their viewers’ liking.

Having a niche audience on an OTT service lays the groundwork for ad campaign possibilities, which are more precise than standard cable. DAZN, for example, streams major sports events to Canadian audiences such as the UEFA Champions League and the Premier League. Dedicated sports fans know that DAZN is where they need to go to stream their favourite events. At Unreel, we partnered with Canadian Hard Knocks Fighting Championship to launch Battle Zone, an OTT streaming service for fight fans to access mixed martial arts and other fight sport content on all of their devices at anytime.

Better data tracking capabilities The main advantage that OTT has over traditional cable for marketing and advertising is how specific the ads are for the viewers watching the content.

In traditional cable, general ads are shown to a wider audience, and advertisers use comfort in numbers to generate a return on the ads they put out. But OTT allows content providers to target viewers individually. Viewer data can be accessed, analyzed and segmented into different audience groups, such as the sports fan or the food lover. Once they are organized into their respective groups, ad campaigns are created to deliver the advertisements to the respective audience group(s).

This precise method is what gives OTT-using advertisers an edge over standard cable TV. Cable TV ads focus on the content such as the specific sport or food, if we were to use the aforementioned examples. But OTT shifts the focus to the viewers instead of just the content, and with its emphasis on

data collection, audience targeting reaches pinpoint accuracy. It combines content along with the audience, their postal codes and even their IP addresses.

The statistics gathering web site Statista reported on the revenue generated by OTT ads since 2010. In North America, OTT advertising brought in just $1.5 billion CAD in revenue in 2010. By 2015, that number had increased five-fold, bringing in almost $7.5 billion. With increased interest in OTT, the ad revenue is projected to reach over $14 billion by 20212.

Flexibility to experiment, quickly measure ROI Broadcast and cable TV make it difficult for advertisers to understand how effective their ad campaigns are. It could potentially take months and a significant amount of work to figure out if the campaigns are reaching the audiences that they were made for. By identifying large demographics and creating ads for them advertisers were playing a guessing game with viewers. They therefore couldn’t be sure that the viewers would be interested in the broadcasting ads.

In contrast, OTT performance metrics provide real-time measures for how well ads were received during their broadcast.

With this in mind, advertisers can experiment with different types of

campaigns, and using the data they collect, narrow down the methods that bring in more return on investment (ROI) versus those that don’t perform well. They can run many experimental campaigns, quickly gauge success and evaluate and adjust them.

Roku, for example, has an ad metrics feature called Survey Insights. This feature gives feedback in real-time and can also provide demographic data and on-device surveys. With the release of the Roku Stick+ and the Roku Channel in Canada, it’s clear that the OTT service is looking to delve deeper into the Canadian market.

A new report by eMarketer suggests that the total number of Canadians using OTT is set to reach 17.4 million this year, representing almost half of the Canadian population3. With this increase, it is likely that we will continue to see a gradual shift to OTT as the future of content distribution—and advertising— in the country.

Dan Goikhman is CEO of Unreel.me (www.unreel.me), a leading platform for networks and publishers launching OTT streaming services.

1 Convergence Research Group, “The Battle for the Canadian Couch Potato: OTT, TV, Online”, report, April 2018.

2 Statista, “Revenue generated by advertising on overthe-top TV sites in North America in 2010, 2015 and 2021 (in billion U.S. dollars)”, 2018.

3 Paul Briggs, “Canada Streaming Video 2018”, eMarketer, report, August 2, 2018.

DMN.ca ❰

// 8

Customer Segmentation

Effectively marketing pop-up retail spaces

By Linda Farha

P

op-up stores are one of the hottest retail trends as they provide high-demand goods ondemand with minimal footprints.

At the same time, they are retail real estate market disruptors, requiring landlords to be agile, flexible and equally critically highly knowledgeable about their potential tenants’ business and be savvy marketers.

Major cities are the hot spots for pop-up retail activations. The main reason is easy access to high foot traffic, but this business volume often comes a high price. It’s easy for large companies like Amazon and Nike to pop a pin in downtown locations in top destinations like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

But for most other brands, a more curated approach must be taken, where the selected space must meet specific requirements, while also conforming to any budget or logistical restrictions.

Applying shopping data In this instance, foot traffic is still important, but rather than just looking at volume, brands are looking at statistics and consumer data to make informed decisions to ensure they’re positioned in an area that will lead to the right feet crossing their doorway.

On the other side of the doors, landlords must know the demographics of the people who work, live or spend time within the locale of their spaces.

This knowledge empowers them to effectively market their availabilities, so they can target the right brands, letting them know they have exactly what they’re looking for.

To fully understand the minds of consumers, it’s useful to note their motivations and explore the factors that influence the way they shop. Where a consumer lives can affect how much they spend, what they buy, what channels they use and how much is spent on each trip. Landlords that want to ❱ DMN.ca

market their spaces can improve the effectiveness of their efforts by implementing strategies that align with each region’s distinct consumer habits/preferences. One size does not fit all.

On average, Canadian consumers make around 156 shopping trips each year. Over these 12 months the spend across all channels (including grocery, drug and mass merchandisers), is $8,645. Further breakdown of these figures will show that not all provinces are equal in this spending pot: ❯❯ Ontarians make fewer trips (152 per year) and spend 4% less than the average Canadian; ❯❯ Albertans spend the most with $9,448 in annual purchases.

Interestingly, despite being big spenders, consumers in Alberta make fewer trips to stores. This alone can tell us a lot about their shopping habits, such as the fact they may be inclined to spend more per shopping trip than other consumers in other regions; and ❯❯ On average, Quebec households have fewer members. In fact, 32% of homes in Quebec are one-member households and 79% have no kids, compared to the 25% single households in Ontario, 69% of which have no children. Calculating the number of household members and if there are any children can help predict variations with potential spend and shopping focus1.

Customer experience key Consumer spending is increasingly being driven by their desires for new and engaging experiences.

A study by Walker, a customer intelligence consulting firm predicts that, “Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the year 2020.”2 Now driven by interesting and experiential experiences, “experience per square foot”3 according to Walker, is fast

becoming one of the top retail metrics to measure success.

Consumers want to see tech incorporated into their retail journey: all the bells and whistles for a high-level shopping experience.

This is why pop-up retail is increasingly popular, with brands looking for new ways to attract the attention of their customers through exciting events and activations. Selecting spaces for these one-off events are extremely important as despite ample planning and innovative ideas, it’s easy to miss the mark if the location isn’t right and the target audience isn’t being reached.

Measuring traffic It’s important that landlords are paying attention to the data around their space to ensure they can pick out the things that matter the most and present them in a way for brands see the benefits of appearing in their vacancies.

Foot traffic is an important number to businesses as they want to know the potential number of customers their activation may reach throughout its duration.

Similarly, the draw of certain areas may be influenced by the number of household/residents, offices/ workers nearby or proximity to public transit/subway stations. Not only will this offer an alternative, but equally useful figure to foot traffic it will also help brands arrange their pop-up timing for maximum impact.

For example, a location that is surrounded by offices is likely to reach its peak during Monday to Friday, 9 to 5: times when people are in the area for work. It’s also useful to include any impressive statistics on the incomes of the people who live in the area. Brands are drawn to wealthy locations, with the assumption that people who earn more are more willing to part with their cash and shop.

Mixed-use residential/ commercial/retail transit-oriented developments are in vogue for

environmental and transportation cost defrayment reasons, but equally if not more critically, they provide high and balanced foot traffic for merchants. Namely when the office workers are working and when they go home, the residents shop instead. One of the best-known examples is the Yonge/Eglinton area in Toronto where housing, offices, retail, hospitality, entertainment and transit are connected to each other.

The area will receive a significant boost when the Eglinton Crosstown LRT is planned to open in late 2021. Expect to see more such developments in Ontario in particular as the provincial government favours private sector participation in new stations.

Tapping area vibes Almost all areas have a vibe, or a distinct characteristic that landlords can use to their advantage. In some areas this personality is well known colloquially. Examples include Toronto’s Church/Wellesley district, which is known for its fun, lively atmosphere and thriving LGBT community and Vancouver’s Gastown, which presents mix of “hip” contemporary fashion and interior furnishing boutiques, in the middle of a thriving food and drink scene.

If landlords can package the essence of the area, businesses will want to attach themselves to that as they will want their pop-ups to draw from that personality to help create a buzz and make sure they are positioned among consumers who can relate to their products or brand messages.

Looking at the businesses that thrive in a certain area can help brands understand the types of products that do well there. It’s about complementing existing businesses rather than copying them. If the consumer profile of a successful tenant echoes the values of another brand, then Continued on page 25 December 2018

SOPHISTICATED EMAIL MARKETING MADE EASY Engage Shoppers and Grow Revenue

bronto.com

// 10

Customer Segmentation

Tailoring data for success How Harry Rosen is using segmentation to enhance its customer appeal

By Michele Sexsmith

M

ost retailers are fortunate if they know their regular customers well enough to give them a familiar nod as they enter the store. On rare occasions, they might know a customer’s name and engage in idle conversation.

Then you have Harry Rosen, where some of the sales staff know their customers so well they’ve been invited to their weddings and other milestone events. This strong customer rapport is just one of several reasons why Harry Rosen is one of the best specialty menswear retailers in the world. The proudly Canadian company has 18 stores in eight major markets and employs more than 1,000 sales associates.

Knowing the occasional shopper While the associates do a great job of personalizing the customer experience, they get some help from Harry Rosen’s extensive database, which has detailed purchase histories for each customer. The information the company has is invaluable, especially for customers who have deep transaction histories to mine, since it can help staff predict what they might be interested in next.

The challenge for Harry Rosen is that these loyal customers represent only about 20% of total sales. “The occasional shopper, representing 80% of sales is where we struggle,” explained Jay Sewell, director of analytics at Harry Rosen. Those occasional customers are demographically diverse. “If you come in to buy a belt then we don’t know who you are,” he added.

“We don’t know how to talk to you based on one or two transactions.”

In an attempt to get a better read on those occasional shoppers, Harry Rosen launched Sartoria, its new loyalty programme. With the previous programme, shoppers would earn gifts if they spent a certain amount in the store, but the programme largely appealed to the high-value customers. Sartoria is instead based on a points system ❱ DMN.ca

that would help incentivize spending and track customer loyalty and transactional data within the company’s CRM system.

While Sartoria gave Harry Rosen’s analytics team some new information, there were still significant gaps in its data. “We really needed more data to know who our customers are and where the opportunities are,” said Darren Thompson, senior consultant at Harry Rosen.

Employing segmentation To learn more about their customers and broaden its appeal, the retailer reached out to Environics Analytics to help it adopt a more customer-centric approach. By linking Harry Rosen’s robust customer records with PRIZM5, Environics Analytics’ leading segmentation product, the retailer was able to segment its customers and look for patterns.

“PRIZM5 provides a window into who your customers are without transactions,” said Sewell.

“PRIZM5 can tell which customers will respond to e-mail and how often, which is a huge win for Harry Rosen.”

Harry Rosen zeroed in on 24 of the 68 PRIZM5 segments and combined them into six larger custom segments that it wanted to target. Data and analytics are playing a larger role in the company’s growth strategy, particularly as it connects with younger consumers.

As Sewell explained, Harry Rosen is trying to strip away the bias and assumptions that can creep into the decision-making process. As an example, he pointed to the company’s outerwear guide, which is delivered via a direct mail campaign. “If you look at the guide itself and you look at the people that seem to be the key drivers of acquisition of outerwear, it didn’t match,” said Sewell. “We have this picture of our customers as the stylish gentleman from affluent neighbourhoods. But when we looked at the data, we saw a huge variety of customers.”

Improved response and offer accuracy The additional data and segmentation work have resulted in a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of Sewell’s statistical models to predict responses and next best offers. Previously, it was a bit of a guessing game when it came to deciding which brands to market to certain clients, he said.

But when the company looked at its customers through PRIZM5 it immediately saw a 16% lift in the accuracy of its models. In the past, he added, it would have spent hours to get a 1% lift.

Data and analytics are starting to affect every aspect of the business, including store design and product selection, but the early wins so far are coming from

families. It learned something new about the Cosmopolitan Elite segment, too, the highest net worth lifestyle type in Canada.

While this segment regularly shops at Harry Rosen, they also shop at the company’s outlet stores.

PRIZM5 is also helping Harry Rosen see Millennials as well as its Chinese and South Asian consumer segments in a new light. In the past, the company would have steered younger clients towards lower price points, but the data showed that that might not be the case. In contrast, the company’s Chinese consumers are attracted to high-profile brands when compared to the brands of interest to South Asian customers.

While Harry Rosen is still early in its analytics journey, Sewell

“We have this picture of our customers as the stylish gentleman from affluent neighbourhoods. But when we looked at the data, we saw a huge variety of customers.” its marketing strategy. When a store wants to send out direct mail, Harry Rosen will identify that store’s top segments and find out where they live in proximity to that location. The company also plans to test the results from its latest direct marketing campaign against some control markets to measure effectiveness. The same approach is also helping to identify billboards and outdoor advertisements the company might want to buy, based on their proximity to the segments it is trying to target.

Engaging a variety of customers The segmentation work is helping Harry Rosen gain a better appreciation for how varied consumer tastes are. While the company tends to attract higher net worth households, the model showed that the company also appeals to lower net worth

said it is already exploring new ways to engage customers through direct marketing efforts, including developing multiple versions of its outerwear guides that are tailored to different consumer tastes.

When the company only had transactional data to inform its decisions, it would focus on what products were selling the most. But as Sewell explained, the downside of this approach was that it would focus on high-traffic customers only and not the new ones it was hoping to attract and convert.

“If you had one transaction with us, we could never estimate your potential, but with PRIZM5 we are able to get a sense of what that might be,” said Sewell. “If we can up our incremental transactions by just a tiny bit, that’s a huge win.”

Michele Sexsmith is senior vice president and practice leader, Environics Analytics.

December 2018

// 11

Advertorial

How Your Post-Purchase Email Strategy Can Win Customer Loyalty Greg Zakowicz, Senior Commerce Marketing Analyst, Oracle Bronto

How will online retailers increase email revenue, grow their repeat customer rate, and slow customer churn in 2019?

There are plenty of strategies and tactics to achieve these goals, but the one strategy that won’t work is sending more of the same batch-and-blast emails.

Today’s consumers are smart, technologically savvy, and have higher expectations from retailers. They expect more personalized experiences and are empowered by their ability to purchase products from virtually anywhere — which means retailers must do more to create and maintain customer loyalty.

I suggest focusing on one of the most underutilized yet powerful email marketing strategies: post-purchase email messaging.

When an online purchase is made and the shopper receives multiple marketing emails the next day, does that experience increase their loyalty to your brand? If anything, it may be creating friction with the shopper and other customers.

A post-purchase email series is more than transactional and product review messages. They are designed to enhance the user experience. This can include a message that simply says “thanks” with a more substantive call-to-action than “shop now.” This could include links to your FAQs, a blog, or YouTube resources.

A post-purchase series can include product care messages, which demonstrate that retailers care about how customers treat and experience their products. This makes quality synonymous with their brand. Other messages may include how-to tips, site resources, return policies, gift-reminder services, social media messages, and loyalty program messages.

The other half of planning a successful post-purchase series is understanding how promotional messages impact recent customers. Retailers should be able to easily create simple segments within their email marketing platform based on recent order date. For example, one segment can be purchasers within the last week, another within the last two weeks, and so on. Segmenting allows retailers to send regular promotional messages to current customers without alienating them.

December 2018

Retailers shouldn’t forget to review the metrics from these segments. Who is unsubscribing at higher-than-usual rates?

Who receives higher-than-average opens, but much lower-thanaverage clicks and conversions? These KPIs will shed light on current promotional efforts and indicate a good time frame of when recent purchasers are most responsive to post-purchase messaging.

By focusing on most recent customers and building messaging dedicated to improving their experience, retailers should be able to discount less, create more brand advocates, and ultimately develop more customer loyalty. This strategy can then transition to lapsed-purchaser, or win-back, messaging. Knowing the customer has truly lapsed, in spite of best efforts to retain them, will allow retailers to create an appropriate strategy targeting them with more relevant messaging.

A past client of mine, and current Oracle Bronto customer, implemented a three-message, non-incentivized post-purchase series designed to be engaging, helpful, and informative for recent purchasers. These emails accounted for less than one percent of their yearly email sends, yet drove nearly five percent of their yearly email revenue.

They increased email revenue and repeat customer purchases — without incentivizing.

So how will retailers grow their email marketing revenue in 2019?

Hopefully through creating a post-purchase email strategy instead of the same batch-and-blast emails.

About Oracle Bronto:

Oracle Bronto helps organizations of all sizes grow revenue, save time and optimize marketing resources. By delivering powerful and flexible email marketing solutions that work seamlessly with multiple ecommerce platforms, Bronto enables brands to maximizes the value of customer data and deliver irresistible customer experiences. Bronto solutions incorporate best practices from 15 years of email marketing success and are used by the world’s top brands, including Rebecca Minkoff, Lucky Brand, Theory, Brooks Running and Christopher & Banks.

DMN.ca ❰

// 12

loyalty

Attention retailers: unleash the power of your data

By Lia Grimberg

I

n today’s world of discerning consumers, vast amounts of data, proliferation and increased accessibility to artificial intelligence (AI), having a “me too” loyalty programme with a mass communication approach is no longer cutting through the competitive clutter.

At the same time, unfortunately, too many Canadian retail loyalty programmes do not leverage their unique assets, including customer data. Instead, they all offer the same features whereby members earn points for every dollar spent, which can then be redeemed for dollars off their future purchases or store gift cards.

As a result retailers get into a complacent manner of thinking wherein points and cash back are the only possible currencies and means of value we can offer to our consumers in exchange for their spending at our stores. But this kind of thinking limits our ability to leverage our data to drive better consumer insights and deeper relationships with our shoppers. ❱ DMN.ca

Relevance and personalization are no longer just possible: they are mandatory to compete effectively and retain consumers. Mass programmes are not just “safe”: they risk costing retailers as consumers are voting with their wallets:

Only 14% of consumers are satisfied with the level of personalization they receive according to Bond Brand Loyalty1; and 41% of consumers said they ditched a company because of “poor personalization and lack of trust” according to Accenture2.

The truth is that many organizations would like to have more relevant loyalty programmes and customer communications, but they do not know how to get started. In fact, 61% of companies say the lack of a clear roadmap is the biggest barrier to personalization, according to the Boston Consulting Group3.

Utilizing data is key We believe that the key lies in utilizing your data: the best asset that makes your organization unique. The big question then becomes how do you unleash such data within the organization to help create the one-to-one relationships, programmes and dialogues with your shoppers?

We see the following common gaps in terms of analytics: 1. Companies either have unmanageable amounts of data or have vendors that manages their data and have to pay for access.

2. Consolidating data across all the data sources, especially with respect to providing a single view of the customer, is extremely

complicated and therefore not always performed.

3. Reporting is available but is disjointed across organizations and uses many visualization tech solutions, which makes it difficult to consolidate.

4. The ability to come up with insights is light and sharing those insights across organizations is difficult.

5. The biggest issue facing companies is coming up with actionable steps to capitalize on the insights and seize the opportunities, closing the gap between companies’ current and desired states highlighted in the reporting.

To overcome these challenges, you need the right kind of partner with the right kind of experience, people and tools. Relation1 has designed our AI and machine learning powered customer data portal, R1.ai, to provide a single view of the customer. It stitches all data sources at the customer level, layers on enriched customer models and a personalization engine, features a customer-centric December 2018

// 13

Loyalty ❯❯

❯❯

❯❯

RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) segmentation to identify the most valuable members; Top product index analysis to identify the most popular products among the best members; and Basket analysis to identify the products most likely to be added to the shopping carts.

We delivered key insights that helped both the marketing and merchandising teams to: ❯❯ Enhance product offering in-store and online; ❯❯ Understand what products to feature and offers to display and increase relevancy and response; ❯❯ Better allocate the loyalty budget and resources towards the right customers; and ❯❯ Direct the right bonus incentives to encourage more products to be added to the members’ baskets.

dashboard and it connects to CRM and marketing communication platforms.

Loyalty programme data is particularly rich in providing valuable insights and should be included for such analysis. Your data could, for instance, help you create more differentiated rewards, such as experiential rewards that would help balance out your nearcash redemptions. Experiential rewards can be priced to bring down your cost per point, can be targeted to be relevant to each member or group of members and are quite popular and highly valued by programme members.

Loyalty data-driven successes Relation1 has implemented R1.ai with several clients, leveraging their loyalty data with great success. For example, one of our clients is a beauty and skin care retailer that offers a line of bath, body and home-ambience products. With our expertise in loyalty and data science, we helped the retailer noticeably gain more from their programme. We accomplished this through: December 2018

Can any marketer afford to lose 41% of our consumer base to companies that are able to better understand and serve our consumers’ needs? Would you as a consumer rather participate in a programme where you are one of multiple millions of members or a customized programme with a communication plan that speaks directly to you?

I believe the choice is simple.

Retail “me too” programmes are no longer cutting it. Data absolutely needs to be at the heart of any programme design/redesign, and

we can help you get there.

Lia Grimberg is an associate vice-president

of consulting services at Relation1. To learn more about R1.ai or how you can unleash your data to personalize your loyalty programme and your marketing communications, you can reach us at engage@relation1.ca.

1 Bond Brand Loyalty, “The Loyalty Report 2017”, report, May 23, 2017.

2 Robert Wollan, Rachel Barton, Masataka Ishikawa and Kevin Quiring, “Put Your Trust in HyperRelevance”, Accenture, Global Consumer Pulse Research, December 5, 2017.

3 Mark Abraham, Steve Mitchelmore, Sean Collins, Jeff Maness, Mark Kistulinec, Shervin Khodabandeh, Daniel Hoenig and Jody Visser, “Profiting from Personalization”, Boston Consulting Group, article, May 8, 2017.

Here are our recommendations for unleashing the power of your data: 1. Start with strategy (the what and the why) rather than with marketing technology (the how).

2. Create a flexible programme with relevance and personalization at its core instead of being strictly points or cash-back based.

3. Use your data to create a dialogue with your customers, to customize communications with each customer and communicate with them in a unique way, to truly care about them and their opinions. Connect with them in a meaningful way: that provides your customers with value they can’t get anywhere else. Value can be in the form of money, but better yet, value should be in the form of customer experience.

4. Use what you learn to continuously adapt and evolve.

Continue using new insights to innovate your business; continuous innovation will have your competitors always trying to catch up and never quite succeeding.

5. Worry about satisfying your customer (retention is key!) and not about what competitors are doing. Their customer is different and so are their insights. Stop looking around and look within.

DMN.ca ❰

// 14

Feature

Marketing in 2019: same, but different

By Debbie Major

D

Courtesy: Carol Wong-Li

o you really know what your client customer’s needs?

Do you know what is keeping them up at night? What does your client look like?

What is your customer’s avatar: male, female, young adult, senior or child? Where do they hang out? Where did they go to school?

What pain can you alleviate,as in what medicine do you bring them?

Or what pleasure do you deliver them, like a feel-good vitamin or supplement?

Ultimately, do you know where your customer is in their buying journey? Are they not aware they have a problem, aware they have a problem, but are not aware of solutions and or aware they have a problem and know of the solution but do not know of your solution?

Or is your customer aware of the problem and aware of your solution?

❱ DMN.ca

Courtesy: Ani Ieronicig

Here are the generational connections, outlined in this Think Link, that marketers are beginning to understand.

Understanding generational differences Taking all these questions to the different generations means paying attention to what they each want at each touch point in your sales cycles. This will set you apart from your competitors and garner you more business. I say same but different.

Canada Post researched how the different generations prefer to be treated and engaged with its Generational Report. Now it’s up to you the small or medium-sized business to respect what the generations are saying. Canada Post presented this research early 2018 and is available through its web site. Some of the highlights are below.

Carol Wong-Li of Mintel shares generational connections for Canada Post in her Think Link drawing. Millennials are those individuals who were born after 1981, according to the Pew Research Center1. Millennials are self-critical, including being self-absorbed reported an earlier

A deeper dive into consumer behaviour, presented in this Think Link, shows that household compositions and lifestyles drive mail to homes.

December 2018

Reach marketers & financial executives Our magazines are must-reads for key executives in core corporate competencies.

Can you help our readers: • Create a strong financial structure and healthy economic ecosystem to ensure capital and cash flow keep their engines running?

• Determine who their customers should be, how they can reach them most effectively, and how they can turn data-driven marketing into profitable sales?

• Build efficient and effective financial systems to enhance payments and billings between their companies and their customers and vendors?

• Convert all the data and information they collect from every contact point into tangible benefits that increase revenue and reduce costs?

• Equip their companies with the tools, technology, systems and hardware needed to manage their operations, to create new services or products, and deliver them to their market?

• Manage their customers with smoothly functioning support departments that are properly staffed and equipped to solve problems, foster loyalty and retain customers?

• Make any or every step in that chain better, faster, cheaper, and more profitable?

We can help you tap into the ecosystem at the points that will drive your campaigns.

To advertise or get more information and media kits:

Mark Henry 905-201-6600 ext 223 | 1-800-668-1838 | mark@dmn.ca Visit our websites:

DM Magazine, www.dmn.ca Contact Management magazine, www.contactmanagement.ca Payments Business magazine, www.paymentsbusiness.ca

Canadian Treasurer magazine, www.canadiantreasurer.com Canadian Equipment Finance magazine, www.canadianequipmentfinance.com Financial Operations magazine, www.financialoperations.ca.

// 16

Courtesy: Doug Ettinger Canada Post Corporation

Feature

This Think Link shows that Millennials will respond to physical marketing if connects to them in a meaningful way.

Pew Research study2. They trust online reviews more than in person reviews, said Canada Post’s Generational Report.

Generation X are those individuals who were born after 1965, said Pew Research. They are what is called “the sandwich generation” as they have kids while many of them are also taking care of aging parents. They are therefore in financial tugs of war.

The “Boomers” are those born after 1946 according to Pew Research, and some of the Generation X have a foot in the Boomers as well. I consider myself in this category. The Boomers are about sweat equity and rather give credit to others than themselves. They like technology but they also like tech help close in case they need it.

Ani Ieronicig of Canada Post takes a deeper dive; her Think Link shows some interesting tips to take into 2019. Namely it’s the composition of the households and their lifestyles that dictates mail to the houses, not the generations.

Kids impact the use of physical advertising as parents are looking for deals.

Two generations that are not being talked about are the Generation Z (Gen Z), who were born after 1996 and the group ❱ DMN.ca

that follows, as defined by Pew Research. These generations are, and will be, super-comfortable with technology. For example, they are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) with a fair percentage of Gen Zers indicating they would like to seek careers in the AI field. Shortly this group will be buying our services and how will that impact how and what we offer.

Doug Ettinger shared about Millennials liking physical things when it connects to them in a meaningful way. That can mean mail or relevant pop-up shops. We recognize as well that our brain reacts differently to physical mail.

Doug shares other tips in his Q & A Think Link as well.

As a marketer you need to talk to the three groups differently in order to succeed. Collectively, all people love to get mail and see their name in lights: providing it is relevant mail. The consumer values the journey you give them and values the experience of things. As a marketer you sell the experience more than anything these days. I see the same but different over the ages again here too.

AI and machine learning will become more prominent in the near future according to Daniel Newman CEO of Broadsuite Media

Group and contributor to Forbes in his article from July 23, 2018: Three AI and Machine Learning Predictions for 2019.

What does machine learning look like for the print and mail business?

It looks like it could streamline production and delivery and enable more accurate targeted mailing: which are always good things.

Dan also predicts a “further evolution of human and machine interaction” as more companies realize that AI and machine learning are not just for mundane tasks. Many corporations will then need to find the balance between machines and humans.

I believe AI will be more prevalent in the customer service area as we move through 2019.

More and more companies are using AI-driven chatbots to gather information and to help segment what we consumers are looking for, so they can gently guide us down a buying or content path.

Dan then addresses the “rise of the AI assistant”. Even the car manufacturers like Kia and Hyundai are planning to include AI assistants in their new cars in 2019. The spread of AI assistants is taking place at a time when Alexa from Google is becoming usable in criminal cases, with the

logs associated with the devices assisting police in laying charges.

Will this development have some saying that the privacy line has been crossed? Or will some welcome this as an extra layer of security and protection? Only time will tell. The nuances could be different for Canada versus the U.S. or Europe as well.

Dan foresees AI and machine learning being used together across multiple industries. He points out that the U.S. Army is currently using machine learning to predict when combat vehicles need repairs. It has placed sensors in the equipment and it is using an AI assistant to keep track of data such as temperature or RPMs. If our own cars did this, it could likely mean that the Canadian Automobile Association and other companies and organizations that provide and market roadside assistance may have to evolve and or change.

Marketers need to keep in the back of their minds whether these innovations are helpful or intrusive. Determining how your client wishes to be served your content and respecting it will be what sets you apart. Again, I find this same but different. Canadians may view AI differently than Americans or Europeans and it will be up to the marketer to determine the balance.

One thing is certain AI will only be limited by marketers’ creativity and will only be growing in the future.

Packaging is evolving The landscape of what is being received in each household is definitely changing as well. The Millennials would really rather be their own boss than to work on someone else’s dream. Small businesses are popping up in the online world because of it. We like the world of immediate so we order today and we want tomorrow.

This is opening up a new world for branding on packaging, like what Amazon is doing, along with the possibilities of co-branding.

We used to hide the brand on the inside, but now with the explosion of subscription boxes the companies get extra bang for the marketing dollar with branding on the outside of the parcels. For Continued on page 25 December 2018

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 4 • 2018

The

Technology Issue

❯❯Specialized service: the future of contact centres ❯❯How to deliver an impactful omnichannel experience ❯❯Filling the CX gap ❯❯Chat before you bot

Technology

Specialized service: the future of contact centres

By Matthew Clare

I

n our data-driven world the need for more effective automation and personalized customer experiences is greater than ever. In some cases, a company’s customer experience journey may be even more important than the actual product or service.

Today, contact centres are crucial with Millennial buyers who expect companies to have context on their customer experience journeys. The last thing consumers want to do is pick up the phones and talk to someone— especially after waiting on hold for at least 15 minutes or more—to explain their issues.

The right contact centre model, with the necessary tools to understand customer interactions and provide the best ways to respond, is therefore critical for positive consumer experiences and the retention of customers.

Offer a cohesive experience People today expect the omnichannel experience, even if they aren’t familiar with the term. Customers may interact with companies on their web sites, via social media or in-store. In turn, companies need to deploy the right mix of tools that integrate these touchpoints and can move seamlessly between them in order to meet customer expectations.

It’s no longer enough to look at these as individual interactions; instead, they must be viewed with a more holistic view. This is imperative for the success of the integrated omnichannel experience.

Some omnichannel contact centre tools now leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and for good reason. People now expect agents to be technologically savvy specialists who can resolve problems when they get on the phones to talk or interact over chat tools, as opposed to being connected to generalists who can only speak to company solutions. If the agents are equipped with AI and machine learning solutions that support customer service efforts, they will have more time to provide a deeper and more personalized and ultimately more satisfying experience for the customers.

Accuracy: AI versus agents Accuracy is a key consideration—but also a challenge— when it comes to integrating technology into the customer experience. Automated customer experience technology with an accuracy of at least 95% is essentially delivering the same level of accuracy as a human contact centre agent.

Given many customer support questions are relatively standard, basic interaction ownership can shift to an AI or machine learning-powered solution that handles the response. This lowers overall customer interaction costs, while allowing the human agents to spend more time handling complex support inquiries. The budget allotted for building a contact centre support team can then be better spent on hiring and compensating technologically 2 | Contact management

savvy specialists who are deep customer experience experts, and who will provide more valuable troubleshooting and interaction for complex customer issues.

This is the main reason Mitel’s partnership with Google Cloud works for today’s evolving contact centres.

Mitel can now provide smarter and more accurate virtual agent solutions through the power of Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, including natural language processing and machine learning technologies.

As more companies implement virtual agent capabilities over time they will reposition their centres to focus on more specialized support, rather than generalized service.

Companies will then experience reduced costly agent churn as the work becomes more satisfying, while the size of contact centres can be lowered; both factors will net cost savings and productivity gains that outweigh the increased wages for the higher-skilled staff.

Consistency is critical Another major contact centre innovation being developed by Mitel, with the support of Google Contact Center AI, is Agent Assist. Agent Assist uses AI to feed information to support agents—think of it as traditional whisper coach functionality being done by AI rather than a live supervisor—which is particularly valuable considering contact centres have some of the highest turnover rates. With average handle time remaining a top contact centre metric, Agent Assist allows new agents to onboard faster and deliver more consistent and effective information to customers.

There’s nothing more frustrating than finally getting through to someone: only to realize they just started the job two weeks ago, have limited knowledge and are unable to resolve your issue. Agent Assist helps reduce these incidents by providing a more seamless and consistent contact centre experience, regardless of how experienced the agent is. It

also allows companies to improve their knowledge bases for all workers, so agents can consistently provide the most accurate interaction data for a specific customer problem or situation. Agent Assist is a valuable training tool and also provides consistent quality assurance for experienced agents as well.

In addition, more and more contact centres are integrating analytics and real-time reporting into their systems, enabling companies to make data-powered decisions to satisfy the needs of their customers.

Using data companies have already collected on their customers they can provide more intelligent customer experiences that remain consistent across every product or service level.

This is a key feature of Mitel’s MiCloud Engage Contact Center, which was released in late August 2018 for the U.S. market and is planned to be available globally in 2019.

Deliver a proactive experience The last challenge—and opportunity —for contact centres is delivering proactive customer experiences.

Contact centres are historically reactive. A customer buys a product, they have an issue with it and they call the customer service line for assistance. By harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT), companies can leverage data on customer usage and behaviour patterns to deliver proactive support. This means getting ahead of the customer to deliver solutions before they even know they want or need them. In other words, companies should be delivering the information customers need before they ask for it.

A company’s greatest strength today is their understanding of the customer journey. This entails having specialized contact centre agents complemented by technology that can deliver an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.

Matthew Clare is director of contact centre solutions, Mitel (www.mitel.com).

Issue 4 • 2018

Technology

How to deliver an impactful omnichannel experience

By Rebecca Martin

B

rand loyalty is cultivated when companies continually adapt to changing customer preferences.

Today, those preferences rest largely on the availability of digital self-service options. Grocery stores now allow consumers to order items and pay directly from mobile apps, while ride-sharing services make it easier than ever to get refunded for poor experiences.

Customers are increasingly communicating via digital channels and these interactions are expected to overtake voice interactions. As this trend continues into 2019, brand loyalty will be defined by a company’s ability to deliver such options seamlessly.

To meet increasing digital expectations, companies are scrambling to set up new self-service channels: but without ensuring that a strong internal infrastructure is in place. This neglect leads to chaos. A recent report from Calabrio, The Danger of Digital, found that 93% of business leaders think it’s important to provide a seamless, quality experience across all channels; however, less than half think their companies are very effective at doing so.

To keep up with rapidly changing customer demands, companies must slow down and take a step back to optimize the entire process.

First, they must understand what channels their customers are on and audit their existing strategies to ensure these align to customer preferences. Second, they should establish strong internal frameworks and align data sources and people to ensure support for the omnichannel strategy.

Here are three ways companies can deliver an impactful omnichannel experience: 1. Rethink staffing and training. Not all channels should be treated the same. As companies rush to add new self-service options, they are failing to deliver a superior customer experience across those channels. While more than half of business leaders say adding a new channel is easy and they have a set process in place to follow, if those processes don’t involve channel-specific training and onboarding agents won’t be set up for success.

A strong omnichannel customer journey requires seamless and positive interactions across all touchpoints, from start to finish. With the contact centre operating as the nucleus for the customer experience, contact centre agents should have specialized skill sets to support these individual channels. While some agents are strong at engaging with customers via phone their skills may not transfer to chat-based interactions.

Through channel-specific training, companies can equip agents with the tools they need to deliver the best possible experience. And, by applying quality assurance (QA) methods across all channels, they can identify agents’ areas of strength and assign Issue 4 • 2018

them to the channels where they’ll see the most success.

2. Analyze the data. Adding a new channel should be justified by showing how it will benefit the overall health of the company.

Simply deploying digital self-service options because competitors are doing so, or a company executive wants to be there isn’t reason enough.

While just under half of leaders say direct feedback from customers is why they added channels, numerous other influential factors come into play. These include input from senior decision-makers, data and analytics, industry and media discussions and pressure from internal stakeholders.

And there’s another issue: 43% believe customer forums and surveys give them a good understanding of how people view their ability to provide a consistent quality experience.

However, such measures of success are often biased and offer incomplete views of the full customer story.

Instead of looking at individual metrics from disparate sources, companies should take a comprehensive look at the customer journey.

The contact centre is the one part of the company that touches every customer channel and can act as a centralized hub for such data and insights. Contact centre data allows them to understand how customers communicate and the channels they’re interacting with the most. With the help of analytics, companies gain insights that can be used to improve service and enhance sales and marketing across channels.

3. The right technology. An omnichannel strategy is only successful if the right technology is in place. Utilizing analytics solutions that

integrate new data sources allows companies to quickly and easily establish new channels without disrupting existing processes and monitor each channel’s activity.

By incorporating insights from across all touchpoints, companies can ensure all departments have a consistent view of the customer journey to drive business direction.

Digital self-service options are popping up left and right as companies try to get ahead of the changing customer experience: and the competition. However, omnichannel success depends on a company’s ability to incorporate channels and insights across the organization. By taking a step back, companies can create a seamless channel experience that delights customers and moves the business forward.

Rebecca Martin is chief marketing officer, Calabrio (www.calabrio.com).

Calabrio recently released a new version of its Calabrio ONE enterprise workforce optimization (WFO) and engagement suite. Here are the highlights: • Improved workforce management (WFM) features, including advanced forecasting improvements, sophisticated prioritization rules to ensure proper scheduling and improved schedule creation options; • Easier and improved administration including simplified user administration, improved network capacity management for on-premises deployments, system monitoring coupled with proactive server maintenance processes and closed loop performance management notifications; and • The latest evolution of speech analytics, significantly improving transcriptionbased speech recognition and analysis.

Calabrio customers can transcribe audio at up to 150X speeds and benefit from a significant boost in speech recognition accuracy while seeing a reduced overall hardware footprint and total cost of ownership.

Contact management | 3

Technology

Filling the CX gap

By Jonathan Eisenzopf

E

nterprises are finding themselves in a constant state of digital transformation. They’re looking for the best ways to meet the needs of their customers in the channels that are most meaningful to them at any given time. Many executives will say that, as a result of these efforts, they feel their companies are doing a pretty good job in the area of customer experience.

But when you talk to their customers, you’re likely to get a completely different story. A recent study by PwC revealed that only 49% of U.S. consumers say companies provide a good customer experience today1. It’s clear that companies are consistently failing to keep pace with the expectations of customers, resulting in a widening gap between them when it comes to delivering a truly effortless experience across channels.

Knowing that they must compete on the basis of the customer experience (CX), companies have embraced customer analytics, launched new channels, such as chatbots and they are beginning to enjoy the business applications available to them with applied artificial intelligence (AI). But still they fall short.

The tangled infrastructure

bot developers: and fails to deliver truly natural interactions with the customers that actually solves their problems.

Another side effect (and a potential opportunity) of this “piece part” approach to CX is that a business’s customer conversation data—a leading indicator of where and why a brand is succeeding or failing—isn’t integrated into core customer-facing solutions, especially as they cross functional lines. That’s because there has simply been no systematic way to do so.

There are upwards of millions of valuable historical and ongoing

Companies are consistently failing to keep pace with the expectations of customers.

Courtesy Discourse.ai

One factor making customer success elusive is that the typical enterprise CX infrastructure connecting customers to automated and live agent applications has become a

tangle of third-party software and hardware components. As technology innovations like chatbots become available they are grafted onto the CX “systems” like CRM, IVR, and other contact centre voice and customer analytics applications, but often with unintended and less than optimal results.

Much like working on a car as you simultaneously drive it down the Autobahn, the outcome is not likely to be the desired one. Highly anticipated “add on” chatbot development platforms are typically immature and require (costly) time-consuming and tedious manual tasks of the

4 | Contact management

Issue 4 • 2018

Courtesy Discourse.ai

Technology

multichannel conversations that are recorded and archived in databases with no connection to operations or CRM or enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. They’re just waiting to be taken advantage of, but the task of consolidating that data into holistic conversation data repositories that can be leveraged for analysis, decisionmaking, and real-time and proactive communications has been elusive. That is because companies are faced with the massive challenge of organizing, classifying and managing so much unstructured data.

Conversation data democratization The problem waiting to be solved is to provide true conversation data “democratization”, whereby all of those valuable conversations, are available universally and immediately for analysis and insights across the business.

They hold rich information about a business’s customers, products and the actions of customers and the business that drive revenue, retention and churn.

Here’s an example. A large payments company has committed resources and budget for an eight-month project just to establish a customized ontology (database schema) and to transcribe and annotate a portion of their conversation data. However, this means they won’t be seeing and applying the value of that data for nearly a year.

Can they really afford to wait this long?

We believe conversation data is an increasingly critical enterprise asset with value that is on par with intelligently integrated ERP and CRM platforms. But how best to take advantage of this unstructured data? What can be done to speed the time to value of the very words customers have shared?

We recommend a fresh approach to address these challenges so businesses can finally benefit from the value of customer conversations across any business systems: • Leverage conversation- and domain-specific ontologies as contextual schemas to inform the structure of a Conversation Data Hub (or Hub). The Hub is a graphical database that serves as the system of record for all customer conversations, regardless of source and structure; • Ingest the company’s historical conversations into Issue 4 • 2018

the Hub and enrich them using a semi-supervised annotation process to create a semantic conversation graph; and • With all of the conversations now available in a structured format, data scientists, business analysts and bot developers can query the Hub to see the patterns, dominant paths and dialogue flows aggregated across millions of conversations (e.g. live chats, voice calls, bots). This functionality will aid them in their analysis and development efforts.

Applying new approaches The Conversation Data Hub is the core of our overall Cognition Platform, which permits conversation democratization. The platform also has a Cognition Dashboard that includes an Annotator tool, which simplifies and speeds the annotation process for training the conversation model and a Conversation Insights tool for use by data scientists and business analysts.

The initial focus of the product is on the analysis, design and development of chatbots. For example, Conversation Insights provides the ability to visualize millions of conversations, see the dominant paths and even drill down on a conversation type to explore the flow in more detail, providing great insights for bot application design.

Once a business has identified and prioritized opportunities for automation with the help of

these new conversation insights, integrations of Cognition with leading bot development tools (e.g. IBM Watson, Google Dialog, Salesforce Einstein) help to simplify and speed the bot development process.

Finally, Cognition’s Runtime API can be used to help guide bot responses in real-time conversations with customers, providing next best intents or responses that are based on a statistical analysis of the millions of conversations in the Hub. Our vision is to fill the CX gap with the Conversation Data Hub, a single system of record for customer conversations. With the Cognition platform, businesses are finally able to leverage all of those customer conversations to inform the delivery of a proactive and personalized experiences for the end customers.

And the rich insights that are typically inaccessible to businesses are available for use in the strategy, design, development and execution of intelligent self-service. The Conversation Data Hub creates the foundation for a true data-driven approach to the customer experience and business insights.

Jonathan Eisenzopf is CEO and founder, Discourse.ai (www.discourse.ai).

Jonathan is an expert in the semantic web, structured and unstructured knowledge extraction, speech recognition and natural language conversational systems.

1 David Clarke and Ron Kinghorn, “Future of Customer Experience Survey 2017/18”, PwC, survey.

Contact management | 5

Technology

Chat before you bot

By Marie-Louise St-Jacques and Eric Dauphinais

T

echnology has never evolved at such a rapid pace. Newly implemented solutions can become obsolete or dated in an instant. The panic of being left behind has many companies adopting new technologies for the sake of newness, with little thought as to why these solutions are needed, how they can be best used or how they should interact with other critical applications.

In 2018, artificial intelligence (AI) reached critical mass attention with just about every tech company announcing 6 | Contact management

the launch of AI enabled solutions and partnerships with AI institutes.

Working in Montreal, a world-leading AI hub, it’s impossible to ignore the enormous potential benefits of the technology.

One of the AI solutions gaining in popularity are chatbots. Chatbots instantly handle routine and repeatable customer contacts, freeing contact centre agents to manage more complex sales or service inquiries. As a consumer,

you have likely interacted with an AI chatbot without even realizing it.

Google Home, Siri, Alexa and within the contact centre space, Genesys’s recently-launched Kate and Nuance’s Nina, are examples of integrating AI to customer experiences. The futuristic world promised by the 1960s animated series, The Jetsons, finally seems to be a reality. It’s no wonder that contact centre organizations are eagerly looking to these solutions with wide eyes.

Issue 4 • 2018

Technology Properly implementing digital channels As front-line administrators of the relationship between the company and their customers, contact centres hold tremendous power in orchestrating the customer experience. Contact centre agents have a bevy of tools that deliver customer insights, improved response and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

For many companies, the advent of AI chatbots is a natural and necessary progression from more established digital channels, notably chat and SMS/text messaging, to help them achieve their goals.

But companies that invest straight into AI chatbot technology with zero previous experience with these other tools will likely lead to failure. The old adage, walk before you run, rings true for a reason.

Let’s take a deeper look at chat and SMS/text messaging.

When part of a strategic response plan,these technologies can be important tools in your toolbox. More than a customer convenience, chat provides instant and on-thespot interaction with follow-up questions taking place in real-time, leading to faster issue resolution. When integrated within your contact centre solution strategy, the potential for increased sales and, improved customer service and loyalty are boundless.

But too often chat or SMS channels have failed to deliver on their customer service promise. The lure of new technology is so strong, that unfortunately contact centres often move too quickly and without a structured strategy, or they choose separate technologies for digital versus voice channels.

The lure of new technology is so strong, that unfortunately contact centres often move too quickly.

Choosing a tool that is separate from your overall contact centre technology will leave your agents in a silo and force supervisors to manage multiple tools, creating an imbalance of work that leads to long call wait times for voice agents while chat/SMS agents sit with empty queues. The last thing you want is to have the new chat queue generating additional calls due to a poor customer experience. Do end users really prefer voice over chat/SMS? Or is the design and administration of the tool the real issue?

When contemplating a digital channel, companies must consider the design and operational impacts of the solution.

Interfaces that cause redundancies and errors will not be utilized. These dynamic, evolving and live channels touch many aspects of contact centre operations and must be part of an integrated contact centre strategy with a clear understanding of how the solutions will be used. When, and why, does someone choose to chat or SMS? Is the end-user on a mobile or desktop device?

By understanding existing channel analytics, you can create a response strategy based on common requests and can start to predict new inputs and address them before an Issue 4 • 2018

interaction is initiated. Ultimately, this proactivity will increase contact centre efficiencies and end user satisfaction. Your digital messaging should support this response strategy and not dictate it.

they wanted to achieve before there was any talk of technology. Once the desired outcome was clear, its strategy was to use chat as a main component in their plan to reduce live call support volumes. With an integrated plan

So, the question is not whether chat or SMS/text messaging are valuable tools, but how to properly implement digital channels within your contact centre organization.

So, the question is not whether chat or SMS/text messaging are valuable tools, but how to properly implement digital channels within your contact centre organization to maximize benefits. The goal is to understand how they will be used within your ecosystem and to define what you want accomplished with a clear vision of the end-result. Only then can you select the right digital messaging technology and have an implementation methodology that will serve your end goals. Otherwise, all you will have is an isolated tool that delivers zero internal or external value.

Build digital right and achieve success To understand the greater value of digital when built right, let’s take a real-world example of a company’s help desk that was dealing with a high volume of service requests with no chat support. Its front-line agents were faced with a significantly large number of live support calls and a low first call resolution rate. Self-help was non-existent with the burden placed completely on the agents to manage an overwhelming amount of contacts per month.

The challenge was immense with implications affecting many stakeholders beyond the agent level. The company took a step back and gathered the necessary metrics to build a clear and accurate understanding of its current situation.

Using baseline best practices, it developed a focused strategic plan with clearly defined targets and objectives.

The company determined what

that directed clients away from live agent support and towards chat, it altered the voice-path to make it less attractive as a first path resolution and implemented knowledge-based, self-help web pages.

Post-strategy metrics are impressive, to say the least. The company generated 50% fewer contacts per month, 80% of which are now chat-based. It saw a 40% reduction in service request volume and its first contact resolution rate increased by 17%. Not only did the company leverage use of its web site and increase the agent and customer experience, it was able to repurpose its agents towards more proactive activities that better utilize their expertise, allowing them to become more engaged. Mapping out and then driving customers towards the appropriate channel eliminated the heavy burden placed on the agents, ensuring that the right calls went to the right agents at the right time.

Now that the help desk can clearly identify common tasks completed by their agents, and the input/outputs have been tested with chat/SMS, when ready, an AI chatbot can be implemented in an effective way.

Without a plan or clear direction, you may lose sight of your objectives.

Don’t let technology, current or new, dictate your path. Remember, as smart as Alexa, Kate, Nina and Siri are, if you don’t properly phrase your question, you’ll never get the right answer.

Marie-Louise St-Jacques is channel manager and Eric Dauphinais is senior consultant, contact centre solutions at Quovim C3 (www.QuovimC3.com).

Contact management | 7

// 24

Date:

July 4, 2013

AD:

Client:

Cleanlist.ca

AM:

Docket:

3540

Version:

F6

Application:

Print, 4x4.325", 4C

Media:

Direct Marketing Magazine

FULL SERVICE OPERATIONS

Carter

Resource Directory

PLEASE NOTE This file has been optimized for its intende application only. For uses other than inten please contact Seed for alternate formats.

Sinclair

LIST SERVICES

BETTER DATA

FRom CANADA’S LEADER iN CoNTACT DATA SoLuTioNS Data Cleaning • Address Correction • Mover Update • Deceased Identification Data Enhancement • Phone Append • Demographics

1-800-454-0223 sales@cleanlist.ca

)

Prospect Databases • ResponseCanada • Consumers, Movers and Businesses

Ask for a FREE EvALuATioN and pricing!

cleanlist.ca

Custom Solutions

an interact direct company

CL_ResourceAd_4x4.325_v04.indd 1

LIST SERVICES

Global Verify Address, Name, Phone & Email

+

@

Clean, Update & Enrich Your People Data to Improve Targeting, ROI

Data Appends Phone, Email, Demographics, Firmographics & Property

NCOA

list brokerage list management consumer/business lists data processing printing and mailing services

postal/prospecting lists alternative media/CASL email lists data append services database prospecting modeling and profiling services

Contact: Kim.Young@nadminc.com • Jannett.Lewis@nadminc.com • Jacqueline.Collymore@nadminc.com

U.S., Canada & International

Leads & Lists Consumer, Business & Specialty

To advertise Contact Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca

Get a Free Quote Now

www.melissa.com/ca 1-800-MELISSA

// 25

Resource Directory LIST SERVICES

CALL CENTRE PRODUCTS / SERVICES

YOU SHOULD BE HERE

DM Magazine

represents all areas of the DM industry: from small businesses to Canadian Business 1000 companies. No matter what our reader's size, resources or strategies, each and every organization we reach is driven by data, powered by orders and striving for loyal customers.

To advertise in DM Magazine Resource Directory Contact: Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca

To advertise Contact Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca

Effectively marketing pop-up retail spaces

Marketing in 2019: same, but different Continued from page 16

Continued from page 8

positioning alongside them can help businesses to leverage each other’s foot traffic.

Brands are looking for the right space for their pop-up event but to make the right decisions, landlords need to present them with the right facts. By providing impressive statistics brands will not only be interested in tapping into the audience of this area but will also be able to build a

consumer profile to ensure that they’re positioning themselves in a space that will be accessed by the people they are trying to reach.

Linda Farha is founder and chief connector

of pop-up go (www.popupgo.com), which is an online “meeting place” for pop-up space seekers and the landlords.

1 Nielsen, “Purchasing Behaviour Characteristics Across Canada”, April 26, 2018.

2 Walker, “Customers 2020: A Progress Report”, 2013.

3 Walker, “Customers 2020”, Ibid.

example, Purolator shows its softer side with a compassionate socially responsible tag line “Tackle Hunger”.

Today, like yesterday, consumers buy on emotions and the experience. If they can feel good about spending money and are also supporting a great socially responsible company this is very important. This strategy may help set your company apart from the competition too.

It has never been a more exciting time to be a service bureau than now. Data Direct is definitely open to serving up and executing your campaign in style. Helping you

navigate so there are no barriers to reaching your clients in whatever manner you choose using our main pillars of operation: data, print, laser, lettershop and fulfillment and distribution.

Proudly serving you since 1994 the same but different each and every day with respect, grace and dignity.

All the best for 2019 from Data Direct.

Debbie Major is president, Data Direct (www.datadirect.ca).

1 Michael Dimock, “Defining generations: Where Millennials end and post-Millennials begin”, Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018.

2 Pew Research, “Most Millennials Resist the ‘Millennial’ Label”, survey, September 3, 2015.

To send press announcements, please direct them to

Brendan Read, Editor, at brendan@dmn.ca

To subscribe go to

dmn.ca

// 26

Excellent Execution

Making payments painless

M

Mia Huntington is senior vice president

and general manager for Elavon Canada (www.elavon.ca).

arketing agencies can be the lifeblood of their clients’ businesses. You help tell your clients’ stories and elevate their brands. Your services are strategic, and your ideas facilitate the creative process: well worth the time invested.

But what’s not worth the time investment is collecting payments, though a necessary part of doing business. Sending quotes, converting them to invoices and following up on outstanding accounts is a distraction to servicing your clients, taking time away that is better spent being…creative!

You may think of payment processing as a retail play, but technologies have evolved, and many options are now available to assist across many aspects of the business. What if the cumbersome process of quoting, billing and invoicing clients was revamped, allowing you to spend more time on the work and less on the books? And how many times have you had to say “no” because a client has asked to pay with a corporate card?

One way to alleviate these gaps is to work with a provider of integrated payments technology: giving you a more transparent and streamlined way to manage your business.

On the go payments and invoices Solutions now exist that allow you to send quotes or invoices directly to clients via e-mail. Then, with just a few clicks, they can accept or reject quotes or pay invoices directly by using a secure hosted payment page.

You can even send quotes and invoices from your mobile device on the go: in no time at all. Once a client receives a notification, they enter their payment information in a matter of seconds, resulting in funds being available as early as the next day. The client sees a zero balance and immediately accidental duplicate payments, or

❱ DMN.ca

cheques delayed in the mail are a thing of the past.

Of course, these technologies not only positively affect the way marketers do business it also allows for accepting payments the way your clients want to pay. In today’s world of real-time online activity, people want to pay invoices securely and with instant confirmation.

Peace of mind with secure systems and processes Maintaining data security can be a headache. But having robust security in place to protect your business and your clients’ financial data is one more area where help is available. The right payments provider that can handle all of that on your behalf, allowing you to focus on your day to day while keeping you up to date and protected against costly data breaches. What’s more, when clients log on to your branded secure payment page, they are assured they are in good hands.

Once you’ve decided to source a payment processor, an important consideration is to ensure that you are not limited to a certain number of quotes or invoices that you can send per month. There should be no cap on the amount of clients or projects that you are able to take on or on the number of internal users that your business needs.

Marketing agencies that partner with a processor to implement integrated payments technology can rest easy knowing that the billing and invoicing process is taken care of. Often this feature feeds into finance software and systems, allowing integration into accounting and accounts payable at the same time. All this leads to increased productivity as you can focus on your core business, ensure funds are available quickly to help you better manage finances and provide greater transparency between you and your clients.

December 2018

Do you make decisions about your marketing operations?

Are you responsible for customer acquisition, retention or loyalty?

Is your department in charge of fulfilling orders or customer service?

Sign up NOW for a free subscription to DM Magazine.

Visit our website at www.dmn.ca and learn more about the magazine DM Magazine is a Lloydmedia, Inc publication.

Lloydmedia also publishes Contact Management magazine, Canadian Equipment Finance magazine and Payments Business magazine.