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vol. 30 • No. 3 • March 2017
The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations
Direct mail
courtesy of Canada Post
Power channel for the digital age ❱ 8
From left to right: Andy Bruce, Sarah Simpson, Mark Morin and Elissa Moses discuss the power of direct mail.
2017 marketing Data now available Data. Analytics. Insights. Results.
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Vol. 30 | No. 3 | March 2017 EDITOR Sarah O’Connor - sarah@dmn.ca PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca
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Marketers are automating ourselves to death
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Rethinking the marketing ecosystem A systems thinking approach to solving marketing model conundrums
In The Mail
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Drowning in data?
Contact Management
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Direct mail emerges as a power channel in the digital age
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Win the path to purchase through analytics and artificial intelligence
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Emily Nielsen Mike Aoki Hank Nothhaft, Jr. Anthony Botibol Jim O’Reilly Jason Davies Nesh Pillay Claude Galipeau Michele Sexsmith Casey Kostecka Rob Warner Sachin Kothari Olga Zakharenkava Jennifer Lee Geoff Linton LLOYDMEDIA INC. HEAD OFFICE / SUBSCRIPTIONS / PRODUCTION:
Marketing automation
Mobile direct marketing
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The state of mobile in Canada
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Practical ways to drive agent engagement
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Organizational success in seven steps
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What is mobile Innovations in storage direct marketing? The consultant’s corner
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Mobile wallets: The next channel for marketers march 2017
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Win the path to purchase through analytics and artificial intelligence 2017 Jennifer Lee is the national retail & consumer analytics leader at Deloitte. She helps companies leverage analytics to drive a differentiated physical and digital experience, in addition to improving margin and efficiency. Jennifer sits on the global retail executive team at Deloitte.
All retailers need to constantly refine, learn and adapt by continually monitoring their consumers along the complete path to purchase.
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is shaping up to be the year that artificial intelligence (AI) goes mainstream, impacting an ever larger share of our daily life and transforming just about every business and industry, including retail. Combined with the power of big data analytics, AI opens up new possibilities for retailers to understand consumers at the individual level and to differentiate themselves from their competitors by creating a truly personalized, omnichannel shopping experience for each of their consumers. Getting that consumer experience right is critical. Even retailers who have shifted to discount understand that competing on price alone is no longer enough and that driving experience is the new battleground in the fight to attract and keep consumers. The key is making that experience relevant to each individual. That means retailers must understand each consumer’s path to purchase and completely personalize the journey. That path to purchase has changed dramatically in recent years, as digital technologies have enabled consumers to interact with retailers and brands across more touch points than ever before, and for longer periods of time. While some consumers still shop the old way—enter a store, look around, make a purchase and leave—many more, especially younger tech-savvy consumers, engage with retailers over several days through the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase phases. And they do that across multiple platforms, including company-owned websites, mobile apps, thirdparty marketplaces (such as Amazon) in-store and via social media platforms where they share information and discuss products and the consumer experience with their friends. Fortunately, retailers have never had more access to data about their consumers or more ways to get their message to them and measure responses at each of those touch points. But having all that data is useless unless you can sort through it all to gain meaningful insights and then be able to act on those insights in a timely manner that resonates with a particular consumer. Artificial intelligence is a key tool to help retailers aggregate data from all of their touch points, understand and digest that data, and communicate with individual consumers in the most effective way via the most appropriate channel. This is particularly important as we move away from simply segmenting consumers by demographics towards segmentation based on social values, and as more consumers acquire Internetconnected devices that become part of the path to purchase for a growing array of products and services. These new paths to purchase have many places where consumers can come on or drop off. Retailers who want to keep consumers on a path to purchase from them rather than from a competitor need to recognize that each path is as different as each consumer and design their omnichannel offering to be flexible enough to allow each consumer a personalized journey to the
same end point. That means a compelling, seamless experience that includes both traditional and digital commerce and allows consumers to move from one channel to another, leave for a while and pick up where they left off on whichever channel they want when they come back. Here’s one example of how that might work. A consumer sees a print ad or receives one via email or a social media platform. Curious, she goes online while commuting to work and checks out the retailer’s website for more information, then searches on Google for product reviews and consumer testimonials. Her interest piqued, she does a price check during her lunch hour via the retailer’s mobile app and compares that with offers available from some competitors’ sites and Amazon. A few days later, she visits a store to see the product for herself, then does another price comparison using her smartphone. Before making her final decision, she consults her friends on Facebook and Twitter. Finally ready to buy, she returns to the retailer’s mobile app on her commute home, places her order and arranges to pick it up at a store near where she lives. At any point along this path to purchase, she could give up in frustration if it’s not easy to navigate any of the channels offered by the retailer or if the information she needs isn’t readily available. She could be deterred by bad reviews of the consumer experience that she gets from Google or her social media contacts. Or she could be lured away if, during her price comparison on another retailer’s site, she finds that consumer experience more pleasant than the one she is having through the original retailer. And she might not have even begun this particular journey if another retailer had used its detailed insights about her to target her with a more enticing offer in the first place. In 2016, Deloitte’s Omnichannel Consumer Experience Index found that, while some retailers already have extensive omnichannel offerings and are reaping the rewards of their efforts, some have barely started and many others are somewhere in between. The Index also found that retailers in the United States have more extensive omnichannel offerings than those of Canadian retailers, a particular concern given that Canadian shoppers—three-quarters of whom regularly cross-border shop—want digital offerings and experiences in the same way U.S. shoppers do. It’s critical for retailers to find and nurture omnichannel consumers, as they are between three and five times more profitable than non-omnichannel consumers due to their loyalty to a retailer, the frequency of their purchases and the lifetime value of the relationship. Retailers can use a resource like the Omnichannel Consumer Experience Index to see how they stack up against their competitors—where they lead, where they lag and, most importantly, what investments they need to make—in technology, Continued on page 17 March 2017
DIRECT MAIL DIRECT MAIL DIRECT MAIL DIRECT MAIL PRE-ROLL PRE-ROLL PRE-ROLL PRE-ROLL DISPLAY DISPLAY DISPLAY DISPLAY EMAIL EMAIL EMAIL EMAIL
WHAT GETS PEOPLE TO BUY WHAT THEY BUY? Ct Connectivity
Ph Da Physicality
Data
To answer this question, Canada Post has recently completed extensive neuroscientific research. The results suggest an integrated marketing campaign that includes direct mail is more effective in driving consumer action. In fact, campaigns including direct mail can drive greater consumer attention, more emotional intensity, and higher brand recall than single-media digital campaigns. Read the research that confirms, what we call, the connectivity effect.
Download our whitepaper Connecting for Action at canadapost.ca/getconnected
TM
Trademark of Canada Post Corporation.
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Rethinking the marketing ecosystem A systems thinking approach to solving marketing model conundrums By Geoff Linton
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any c-suite executives are uncertain about the current state of their digital marketing. There is a lot of talk by marketers but many companies don’t have a clear road map of their digital marketing strategy and end-to-end marketing model. Part of the problem is that a department-focused marketing approach leads to a multitude of unaligned digital marketing initiatives. Lots of so called “activity” also creates disconnected data. But the bigger root problem is that many divisions focus too narrowly and don’t take the time to align their marketing initiatives. This article outlines the common pitfalls that executives see in their marketing strategies and how they should rethink their marketing model. The current state of data-driven marketing Many marketers are overwhelmed and feeling they are constantly on a treadmill. There’s never enough time to get stuff done and there’s increasing pressure for accountability. New technology, increasing competition, fickle customers plus integrating innovative practices are all major challenges. Trade publications have lots of stories about recent marketing failures and there is significant risk if a company misses the digital marketing mark. Silo mentality is a problem in many organizations. Marketing departments typically use multiple MarTech platforms that are often not linked (and are controlled by different teams). As a result, data is spread across numerous disparate systems. Without consolidated data many marketers have blind spots and only a vague notion of who their customers are (and their real behaviour). A recent Harvard Business Review article emphasized that “new disrupters know more ❱ DMN.ca
about customers, because they have access to better data.” Established marketers need to adapt and get a wider perspective. Tunnel vision during planning can also be a nasty habit. Through our work as campaign operations experts with a number of Fortune 500 companies, we often find ourselves in meetings working with the various agency stakeholders on tactical initiatives. Sometimes the discussions can spiral into unnecessarily micro details. The danger is that planning time turns into marginal incrementalism that doesn’t factor in the bigger picture and thus won’t “move the needle” (i.e. get the
validate assumptions and gather key learnings. Note the model needs to be visual and practical. Step 1: Start with a high level of abstraction (so that c-level executives can understand it) There are several ways that a marketing model can be divided. The traditional marketing model is in four parts: demand generation, acquisition, relationship building and retention. For today’s datadriven-marketing world, digital marketers like to talk in terms of what’s unknown versus known. Known is any marketing where you can identify and profile the individual plus message
Many marketers get handcuffed because their planning process is backwards and they lock in technology solutions too early.
the quality of the profile and behavioral information. Are the lists and data consolidated in an actionable data mart? Describe your priority profiles.
Tip:
Draw a database symbol and highlight your current reports and analytics that you can access. Step 3: Cross-check your unknown audience profiles To what level of targeting and profiling are you applying your digital ATL programs? Any key learning? What are the best performing segments? How does the unknown profile compare to your known profiles?
Tip:
Colour-code several different segments who are desirable. Step 4: Draw your marketing activity loops What email, other direct communications programs and interaction points currently exist? Draw the activities as loops.
results that the c-suite wants). So, is it surprising that the common complaint of many CEOs is that they don’t have “visibility” into how their marketing is supposed to work? They don’t want cloudy, vague uncertainty from various marketing reports. From their 30,000 foot view, CEOs want to see a clear model that is interlinked. Marketing industry veteran Geoff Craig believes the key is a “systems thinking” approach [see sidebar].
them directly. Email is the most powerful known marketing tactic because of its ability to drive response but also collect important data. But marketers can also learn from the anonymous customer through their unknown marketing (e.g. display ads, website visitors, etc.). Ideally, the known and unknown digital marketing efforts are linked so that data is shared and this leads to constant refinement on both sides.
Clarifying the marketing model In 2017, a new style of data-driven marketing has evolved. It involves adopting lean marketing practices. In the engineering design world we call this going back to first principles and creating from there. It starts by identifying all the major components and broadening your perspective. The key is to constantly
Starting with a blank piece of paper, divide the paper into Unknown and Known. List the scope of all your ATL digital activities and show what type of tracking you currently perform on them.
Step 5: Look for the data connections Once the model is drawn, doublecheck to ensure that all the pieces are connected and highlight any areas where data may not be linked. Is there any opportunity to link anonymous data points with your known profiles? Do you have a clear understanding? Can you accomplish progressive profiling?
Step 2: Identify your known assets Assess the lists you have and
Enabling the ecosystem As discussed, marketing leaders first
Tip:
Tip:
Starting with your database list the major types of campaigns, journeys and triggers. Highlight where your marketing team spends the most resources on these.
March 2017
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Feature
This is a sample of a high-level view of a marketing ecosystem. It is an end-to-end view of the core digital marketing activities. Using a diagram like this you will be able to identify marketing gaps or bottlenecks and where you get your best bang for your buck. Which areas deliver disproportionate value?
map the desired end-to-end flow and craft their strategy. Next comes the IT/Operations phase where the tech blueprint can be designed as an underlay/support model. Many marketers get handcuffed because their planning process is backwards and they lock in technology solutions too early. A premature search for tech not only can waste a lot of time and distract teams but it also can limit your future capabilities. Beware of committing to major platform vendors if you don’t already have a plan. Identify what capabilities you really need. Bruce Biegel of the Winterberry Group believes that more companies are leaning toward “swappable tech.” It gives them flexibility. Open source solutions are configurable and cost efficient. Swappable tech is great for quick execution and can be upgraded later. Outcomes and benefits of ecosystem planning From a strategic perspective, march 2017
organizations that embrace marketing ecosystem planning find that they have better team buy-in and it also fosters deeper conversations with stakeholders. This ensures everyone is clear about your true marketing model. Clarity generates tighter execution and allows you to pinpoint “valueadd” areas as well as specific areas to optimize. Ideally, marketing teams should take the time to meet stakeholders to review all the activity occurring and how programs are really working. Once your team has identified the key areas where value is added then IT/ Operations can start talking about tech solutions. Some of the proven benefits of ecosystem planning include: ❯❯ The elimination of poor performing marcom vehicles; ❯❯ Improved customer experiences and intimacy (increases NPS); ❯❯ Better profiling improves future targeting (higher ROI); ❯❯ Shared learning saves budget dollars;
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A 360-degree view of the customer; and More balanced and aligned marketing decision making.
As discussed, siloed strategies are not only inefficient but can also lead to tunnel vision which kills marketing’s credibility in the c-suite. A clear marketing model gets everyone on the same page. Ecosystem planning helps you to build a marketing machine that is a driver of business outcomes. It is a strategic approach that
reinforces discipline and ensures that stakeholders embrace systems thinking. Geoff Linton is the owner and CEO of Inbox Marketer Corporation and a data-driven marketing expert with more than 26 years of applied experience in both client and agency roles. He is a thought leader in digital marketing strategy and analytics measurement. Geoff holds both a P.Eng and MBA from Queen’s University in Canada.
Systems thinking “Systems thinking” is a concept created by Geoff Craig, chief marketing officer of the Heart & Stroke Foundation and a former Unilever executive, that encourages marketers to think about the shortterm and long-term impact of their actions on the entire ecosystem. In a digital world everything is hyper sensitive. Some actions may be positive for one stakeholder but negative for another. The key is that organizations need to understand their entire marketing ecosystem and be cognizant of the impact of every digital marketing activity.
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In the mail This column sponsored by
To learn more about Canada Post’s integrated direct marketing solutions, please visit canadapost.ca/smartmailmarketing.
Direct mail emerges as power channel in the digital age Combining physicality, data and connectivity is like lightning in a bottle By Rob Warner
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irect mail is enjoying a renaissance with the nation’s brightest marketing minds, as new neuromarketing research extols the product’s
virtues. Canada’s leading marketers actually view direct mail as a triple threat: It is effective on its own, it’s persuasive in combination with other media and it’s especially powerful when strategically sequenced with other channels. Established marketing experts point to recent research that suggests direct mail may be even more powerful in today’s digital age than ever before. Direct mail on its own Ipsos, one of the world’s top three global research companies, examined the role of direct mail and digital channels in optimizing consumer attention, emotional engagement and brand recall. The 2016 study found that direct mail on its own “held participant attention for 118% longer and stimulated 29% higher brand recall than digital advertising.” Connecting for Action, the neuromarketing report based on the research, was released in the Fall. The whitepaper was a collaboration by Ipsos and Canada Post, and it confirms that direct mail “triggers consumer emotions and action.” The findings build on last year’s seminal report, A Bias for Action, which found that the physical attributes of direct mail make it easier to understand, more memorable and more persuasive than digital advertising. Breaking through the Noise, a separate ethnographic study released by Canada Post in 2015, found that ❱ DMN.ca
direct mail remains deeply embedded in consumers’ daily rituals and is noticed, opened, read, shared, displayed and kept for extended periods in the home, multiplying brand recall and engagement opportunities. Elissa Moses, CEO of the Ipsos Neuro & Behavioral Science Center of Excellence, says “the sensory aspects of direct mail stimulate all different kinds of neurons” and its physicality gives it a “tremendous power to persuade.” Direct mail in combination Michael Chase, chief marketing officer of St. Joseph Communications, is convinced the winning formula in marketing today has three pillars: physicality, data and connectivity. That’s what Canada Post calls Smartmail Marketing, a term it introduced to the advertising lexicon in 2015. In Smartmail Marketing, physical-digital connectivity links consumers to product and brands through multiple channels. What Chase calls the intersection of the Gutenberg printing press and the Internet is simply a recognition that “digital and physical work together.” When they do, there can be an “explosive, dynamic resonance in the marketplace,” he says. That resonance is what marketers covet and the thing Chase insists Smartmail Marketing can deliver. But there is a more pragmatic reason for marketers to incorporate direct mail into their ad campaigns, he says. “If you were to say I’m just going to be a digital pure play, you’re going to miss people. You’re going to miss them in the places where they want to actually read your stuff.” March 2017
From left to right: Andy Bruce, Sarah Simpson, Mark Morin, Elissa Moses and Michael Chase.
For marketing consultant Sarah Simpson, that’s the crux. Direct mail, she says, “is able to enter into that customer’s home to talk to them in the most relevant way and to engage with the brand and motivate them.” While some marketers view physical mail as slow, non-interactive and complex, younger customers don’t see it that way, says Simpson. “It’s new to Millennials, right? It’s so exciting for the younger generation—it’s like you have a little present that somebody sent you.” To doubters, she offers some simple advice: “Test it. Take 20% of your budget, five per cent of your budget. Why not test it?” Andy Bruce, co-founder and CEO of The Mobile Experience Company, an Oshawa-based marketing solutions provider that specializes in digital, believes another Smartmail Marketing pillar—data—is the most important thing in marketing today: “It gives you an unprecedented amount of power to be able to tailor messaging and content.” He speaks specifically about data that can be leveraged: “This person on this day received this piece of mail—here’s their digital footprint and cookie-crumb trail going all the way through to this store.” Mark Morin, president of the award-winning Quebec-based Strategies Relationship Marketing, agrees “being able to make the connections between these things throughout the customer journey is really, really important.” He welcomes the ability to use data to create march 2017
hyper personal messaging. Chase adds: “If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it won’t resonate with them, it won’t be relevant to them and they won’t connect with your brand.” Adds Morin: “And if you don’t think strategically about it, then you’re going to end up doing a bunch of stuff and some will stick and some won’t.” The unstated message—make it all stick—is as powerful as Chase’s spoken word on connectivity, another Smartmail Marketing pillar: “If you’re not doing omnichannel today, if you’re not looking at your entire holistic marketing mix, you’re missing people.” Ipsos research showed that integrating direct mail into digital campaigns drives 39% more attention (time spent), 10% higher brand recall and a five per cent stronger emotional response than single-media digital campaigns. “When you really look at physicality, connectivity and then harnessing data and really using it the right way—if you combine everything—BOOM! It’s like lightning in a bottle,” Chase says. Media sequencing matters Ipsos also looked at email, online display ads, pre-roll videos and direct mail—independent of one another and in a physical-digital combination. It also studied the impact on consumer engagement of the order in which these media are used. It found that consumer engagement with
courtesy of Canada Post
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integrated campaigns may be strongest when direct mail follows digital advertising. Specifically, the Ipsos study found that compared to the average for other single and combined media campaigns: ❯❯ Brand recall was 40% higher when direct mail followed email; ❯❯ Arousal was 26% higher when direct mail followed digital display; and ❯❯ Motivation peaked when direct mail followed pre-roll. Not surprisingly, Connecting for Action reports that the sequenced combination of media can “be a powerful campaign formula for driving consumer action.” The research left Moses with two important new insights: “First, each media channel is like an instrument in a symphony, with its own unique impact profile and role to play. Second, digital advertising provides value in its own right, but greater value when it’s combined and properly sequenced with direct mail.” Connecting for Action concludes that the combination of physicality, data and connectivity make direct mail “the power channel for customer activation.” Together, digital and direct mail are “greater than the sum of the parts,” Moses says. Put another way: Reports of direct mail’s death are greatly exaggerated. Rob Warner is a senior writer and editor at Canada Post Corporation. DMN.ca ❰
Mobile direct marketing
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The state of mobile in Canada By Claude Galipeau
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or the second year in a row, Flurry Analytics has released its report on the state of mobile app usage in Canada. Yahoo’s Yannis Dosios, vice president of platform & exchange presented the 2016 trends at Toronto’s AdWeek on February 2nd. Flurry Analytics is a tool used by developers and marketers to measure and analyze consumer activity across their application portfolios. Flurry currently supports iOS and Android operating systems; as well as Apple TV and the Apple Watch. At Yahoo, we’re focused on building a strong portfolio of solutions to help advertisers connect and engage with consumers through the combination of data and technology. Over the years, we’ve made significant investments in Yahoo’s advertising technology portfolio which brings together the strengths of Yahoo, BrightRoll and Flurry, all of which are available to our clients and partners in Canada. In Canada, Flurry Analytics is used by over 4,200 companies, installed on over 14,500 apps, across 38.6 million devices (yes, more devices than Canadians!), measuring almost seven billion sessions per year. Globally, Flurry has a footprint of 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion global apps, holding an unparalleled look into the world of mobile app usage. When looking into mobile usage locally, one major trend emerged in our report: Canadian mobile usage looks a lot like global usage did 12 months ago, still ascending on the growth curve. So in 2016, Canadians’ app usage grew by 74%. Sports and Messaging and Social apps saw the most year-over-year session growth with 172% and 98% increases respectively. Some interesting trends in app usage emerged across four of Canada’s major cities: Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. While Social and Messaging app usage stole the show across every major city, second and third places show that some cities have varying priorities when it comes to Productivity. We’ll let the data speak for itself here, about which cities like to work more and which like to play more. Compared to 2015, global app usage grew by 11% in 2016. In previous years, we’ve seen all app categories grow in tandem; however, for 2016 year the story is different. In 2016 mobile apps started eating their own, with session and time-spent growth in some app categories occurring at the expense of others. While Messaging and Social apps use rose yearover-year by 44%, Personalization apps (like emoji keyboards) declined by 46%. One possible reason for the steep decline is that Personalization features were increasingly included in operating systems throughout the last year. App category deep dive When we looked into 2016’s most notable categories, here’s how time-spent trends shook out both globally and in Canada: ❱ DMN.ca
“Communitainment” is eating the lunch of legacy media, and of many pure digital publishers. March 2017
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Mobile direct marketing 2016: The year social ate media: Time spent in Messaging and Social apps grew by 44% globally, proving to be the driver that helped mobile achieve its yearover-year time-spent growth of 69%. For Canada, time-spent in Messaging and Social apps grew by an impressive 98%. All of this is the result of a trend we call “Communitainment,” or the social sharing of user-generated content and media, from articles to video. But there is only so much time in the day, meaning minutes spent on Social and Messaging apps are minutes not spent in other app categories like News. In other words, “Communitainment” is eating the lunch of legacy media and of many pure digital publishers. Sticky apps tied to daily habits: Some of the most successful app categories throughout the years have tapped into the mobile addict population. They’re also apps that rely on live data, such as Business and Finance (up 43% globally in time-spent) and Sports (up 25% globally). The Sports category was especially popular in Canada with time-spent increasing by a whopping 172%. It didn’t hurt that Canada’s largest city, Toronto, had an incredible sports season with both the Blue Jays and Raptors making the playoffs. Video killed the gaming star: Gaming, the app category once known as “the darling of the mobile industry,” saw time-spent decline by four per cent globally, compared to a three per cent decline in Canada.
Top Canadian trends
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Sports app usage by Canadians last year grew by 172% Phablets saw a 26% year-over-year uptick in adoption in Canada Canadian mobile trends are on a 12-month delay compared to global usage figures
One reason is user habits— rather than play through obstacles, users are just paying their way through games. This may explain the strong increase in gaming revenues reported by Apple’s app store. Also, gaming remains a hit-driven industry. Last year’s main hit, Pokémon GO, faded relatively fast as consumers lost daily interest in the game, only returning for marquee holiday events. Another notable hit, Super Mario Run, was released too late in the year to make a difference in the overall engagement numbers.
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Shopping apps spell doom and gloom for brick and mortars: It was hard to miss the disappointing post-holiday news from major retailers; however, the story is quite different in the mobile world. In 2016, Shopping apps continued to gain popularity, growing 39% in Canada compared to 31% globally. Form factor refresh As forecasted in last year’s global report, phablets (devices with screens between five and 6.9”) are becoming the dominant form factor around the world, capturing 41% of market share. In Canada, phablet adoption jumped 26% in 2016. This nicely correlates with the growth in Communitainment, as phablets are ideal for social sharing and consuming media. We expect that phablet share will continue to eat away at medium phones and completely eliminate small phones. Value add for marketers At Flurry from Yahoo, we interact with thousands of companies every day; from developers of small messaging apps to large game studios, everyone is looking for the right growth recipe. While there’s no magic ingredient, we’re the ones investigating the key parts of mobile growth and can help advertisers and marketers best leverage Canadian specific data to elevate their campaigns. Just last year, mobile and native ad spend grew 34% with the highest spend going to FinServ, followed by Retail and Auto. Surprisingly, the least amount of spend went towards Entertainment.
For online advertising opportunities contact
Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca For online editorial opportunities contact
Sarah O’Connor, sarah@dmn.ca
Claude Galipeau is the country manager for
Yahoo! Canada. march 2017
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Mobile direct marketing
What is mobile direct marketing? Q&A with Dilshan Kathriarachchi, chief technology officer at EQ Works By Nesh Pillay
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ge has never been a limiting factor for Dilshan Kathriarachchi. He has assembled his life and career around emerging mobile technology, specifically when it comes to marketing. By the age of 15, he became an instrumental part of the roll-out of Sri Lanka’s first e-commerce platform in conjunction with the country’s Commercial Bank. By age 27, he had already launched a brand that has become a leader in Canadian mobile technology. Now, at the ripe-old age of 31, Kathriarachchi is the chief technology officer of EQ Works, where he uses mobile location data and insights to pioneer some of the marketing industry’s most unique capabilities. Q: Where is mobile marketing, specifically direct marketing, now as opposed to where it was 10 years ago? A: Much more accurate. We have so much data that we didn’t have 10 years ago and I think a lot of that has to do with how widespread different devices have become. Ten years ago we just had desktop devices and we had the traditional channels, so that has changed completely. People don’t really engage in traditional channels like they used to. Instead, they are entirely focused on mobile devices, connected T.V. and interacting with passive variables. I believe that your ability to market directly to someone, even on mobile, is entirely dependent on what data you have on that person. The amount of data we have on an individual customer has grown exponentially. Data is driving ❱ DMN.ca
direct marketing right now. Q: So what’s the best way to access that data? If that data is all over the place, how would a marketer access it? A: I think we need to figure out a way to distill all the different data sources into a single profile, whether it’s a prospective customer persona, whether it’s a an already-known customer profile or someone that’s talking about your brand on social channels. Increasingly, what we are seeing is that there are advanced brands that have invested independently in these channels so they have very strong products. While this gives a good understanding or emerging understanding of what a particular consumer looks like online, there is no way to cross-pollinate those data sets to remove silos within organizations. So that’s a big part of a problem I see often. My team is able to source data from both internal resources and publicly available information. And finally, and most excitingly, we have found a very public and very successful data set that has emerged within the last four years or so—location data with mobile. Many apps or mobile services are location dependent. Social networking has been using location very successfully. So naturally, location has become a very important feature of mobile. This has created a huge invisible layer that spans every single user, every single location, every single industry. We are now tapping into that location data as a layer that we can add onto existing information. Once we compound these different data points together into a single profile we can enable
direct marketing, whether it is personalized messages to engage users or unique and niche messages to a niche audience much more successfully than anything we have seen before. Q: If this is all new, how can other industry leaders attempting mobile direct marketing refine their strategies? A: First of all, mobile doesn’t have cookies, the same way we have on desktop. So a lot of the mobile stack struggles there, because a lot of the existing technologies essentially fly in from Mars, look at a user and ultimately depend on those cookies to have historical data. So then what happened was you had mobile-specific technologies that emerged independently and then there were a lot of existing technologies that were able to do things on the web. With that distinction, some marketers were very good at the mobile site, but didn’t have that ability to replicate that success on other devices and other experiences. Or, they had a really strong base within the traditional cookie world and couldn’t recreate that success in mobile. What my development team at EQ has done is to create what we call a cross-device profile, so we can map a person’s mobile phone, their tablet, their laptop or desktop into a single unified profile. That allows for a single, unified strategy. Usually where things really start to fall apart is when you know how to convert someone really well on Facebook, you know how to convert someone really well when you send them an email, but you don’t know how to convert them through display. You know, you have a very successful display strategy that works on computers,
on desktops, on browsers but you don’t know how to replicate those displays on in-app experiences. And then what that does is create a glass ceiling for the brand. Q: So what’s the next step for direct mobile marketing? A: So now, my team is analyzing all the location data available. Initially, location data was solely used by drawing these things called geo-fences. So we take a point of interest that consumers find interesting and we will map out the boundary of that location. Q: Based on their mobile devices? A: Based on the geography of that location. So it could be a store, and you would map out the boundary of that store. Now if you have an idea of my location, you can tailor messaging, or call to actions for your product within the vicinity of that store. It would be amazing, extremely successful, right? However, the reality is that very few of those people would fall into a category that indicates they would be interested in that product. The non-digital equivalent of that strategy would be a brand that is trying to grow itself purely taking up shelf space, all shelf space, in a retail environment. That is often insufficient, right? What you need to be able to know is where does that consumer live, work, play? Where do they consume content? Then, reach them outside of the store so you can track them into the store. What my team does now is, we take that as a single and not necessarily a rule of delivering messaging. We can look at the store and say, who has been into this store? What does that tell us? Then we attribute March 2017
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Mobile direct marketing
Once we compound these different data points together, into a single profile we can enable direct marketing, whether it is personalized messages to engage users or niche messages to a niche audience, much more successfully than anything we have seen before. that to that user’s profile so that we can—three days later, a week later—still place value on the fact that they went into that store. Let’s take a location like Starbucks. The fact that a consumer went into a Starbucks is probably a lot more valuable than the fact that this user is physically at a Starbucks right now. Because the amount of users you reach using that methodology is very limited compared to what can be reached if we think about reaching the entire Starbucks audience.
So audience versus proximity is kind of one thing that’s coming up down the pipe. The other aspect that is coming down the pipe is now that we understand what kinds of locations people are interacting with, we want to match the facts together to create a complete user profile. If we can see you at a university, for a certain number of hours a day, we know that you are probably a student, right? The fact that you are shopping at Whole Foods can tell us that you are probably in a higher
income bracket in a spectrum of household income. And then the fact that we see you at a GO station can tell us that you’re probably a commuter. Compound those facts and we have the behaviour profile of a probably a higher income household student who is probably commuting to university. Those sorts of insights are built on top of atomic segments to create much more powerful personae and insights than ever before. Marketers who would have initially started buying that audience while
72%
they were directly in a specific location are now transitioning to location-based behaviour data that is far more powerful and direct to consumer. After obtaining a Master’s degree from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Nesh Pillay begun her career as a writer in New York where she covered all things marketing and advertising. Currently, she resides in Toronto and leads EQ Works’ marketing team, spreading the good word of cutting-edge marketing strategies. @PillayNesh
of US consumers are open to purchasing from Canada.
The Internet has removed the barriers to shopping across borders. The data is clear – the US is fertile ground for Canadian merchants looking to find new customers. How can you get your share of this pie? Focus on the reasons US consumers are interested in Canada’s products: unique merchandise and better prices.
Only
20% have done so.
For more information, visit bronto.com.
march 2017
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Mobile direct marketing
Mobile wallets: The next channel for marketers I By Jason Davies
n an age where cash is in decline, a smartphone is in every pocket or purse and there seems to be an app for everything., mobile wallets are a convenient, connected alternative to enable an evolved shopping experience. As digital wallets gain popularity in Canada and around the globe, there is an increasing opportunity to explore brand new digital channels to communicate with customers. Getting the execution right, however, depends on marketers who can either hit the bullseye or risk completely missing the mark. Mobile has become the new front door for retailers. The quality of a retailer’s mobile experience will impact customers’ decision to buy online and even to visit a store in person. A mobile-optimized website is a start, but many retailers are going beyond that and creating their own mobile apps. Apps that let customers complete the entire journey, from research to purchase, without ever leaving are creating true shortcuts and evolving the shopping experience. By integrating a one-tap digital wallet solution like Masterpass into
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an app, the customer’s payment or shipping information is already loaded, even the first time they use it, making the process even easier and more seamless. As more and more consumers uncover and experience the benefits of a one-tap digital wallet solution to help with their everyday online shopping, a significant opportunity also presents itself to marketers. Mobile wallets not only allow marketers to communicate with customers directly through retail applications or mobileresponsive websites, but also to start a very specific conversation with them. Mobile wallets will enable marketers to find out more about customer’s preferences— individual details based on a person’s payment history, for example. As a result, the access to this kind of data will enable marketers to deliver value-added services such as loyalty rewards and discounts that are relevant to each individual. As marketers shift their focus from “mass” to “me,” mobile wallets will be a channel of low tolerance to generalized offers, giving way to more targeted, meaningful and local ones. The frequency in which the
engagement between consumer and offerings occur is also an important aspect to be taken into account. How many times a day do you open your physical wallet? Multiple times, I assume. Similarly, with the growth of mobile wallet use and mobile shopping becoming the new norm, the number of interactions customers will have with their digital offerings displayed through their digital wallet could rival the likes of Google or Facebook. The result? A powerful tool to drive interaction and loyalty with individual customers. As a marketer, having access to a whole new channel of communication with millions of customers at your fingertips is an amazing opportunity. The mobile wallet also offers a much wider span than a merchant-specific application. Take retailer American Eagle, for one. As a customer, I may feel it’s ok if American Eagle communicates with me through their app when I’m interested in engaging with it. However, it may feel odd and give the wrong message if they chose to engage with me when I’m visiting a Shoppers Drug Mart, on the other hand, as I’m not looking for the products they would
like to offer me at. If I’m opening up my wallet and offers are presented to me right as I’m interacting with it, it may feel like a more natural way to engage with me. If American Eagle displays an offer about a 50 per cent off sale when I’m in the act of shopping and using my mobile wallet, I may feel inclined to check out the sale, leading to a sale right then and there. That feels more organic to the consumer and demonstrates the value of the mobile wallet being the sharp end of the spear when having conversations with customers. As we look into the future at the intersection of mobile wallets and digital marketing, I would like to challenge marketers and the retail industry to ask themselves if the right capabilities are in place in order to create offerings that will really stand out from the crowd and speak to customers in a way that actually matters to them—not to everyone else. Mobile wallets are here to stay and should be seen by marketers as a real opportunity for conveying their messages in a meaningful way.
Jason Davies is vice president and head of digital payments at Mastercard Canada. March 2017
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Marketing automation
Marketers are automating ourselves to death By Hank Nothhaft, Jr.
P
eter Drucker once said: “The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being—muscles, senses and mind—is engaged in the work.” Marketers and salespeople have an insatiable appetite for automation. Most corporate social media accounts were automated into meaninglessness years ago, but employee accounts are quickly following suit. As evidenced by Buffer’s popularity, today’s marketing professionals are more likely to schedule their own tweets than engage organically in a live conversation. I call this “factory social.” It’s the result of a decade of social media automation. We use data to determine the best time to send tweets and we pre-script our “dialogue” long before we can observe the contours of a conversation. Yet, we celebrate the rare moments when a brand like Oreo is able to spool up a timely ad in response to unfolding events. Every social platform knows all too well how automation erodes the value created by their network. They were designed to prompt conversation—a two-way exchange of ideas and information. Yet here we are as marketers, automating our efforts to broadcast jargon-ladled copy to a network of equally disengaged broadcasters. This year, we’re going to see a broad backlash against these failed social media strategies. The organizations that make the necessary changes will benefit disproportionately in both customer relationships and top-line revenue generated by social. Here’s what you need to be thinking about if you want to be on the right side of this trend. march 2017
1. Automate business processes, not engagement I’m always amazed by the obsession most marketers have with tools. There’s a tool to automate every facet of social media and the bulk of them have even automated engagement—like scheduled tweets, canned responses and keyword-based listening. I’m not anti-automation. But I do know there are appropriate places for automation and inappropriate places. To hand over the human act of authentic dialogue to machines is akin to putting robot actors on Broadway. It undermines the fundamental purpose of humanto-human communication—to make a real connection. It’s hard to walk back the scale and reach of a fully-automated social strategy, but there are other ways to get the efficiency benefits of automation without forfeiting any chance of authenticity. For instance, if you can automate the process of finding content for employees to share on social, you eliminate much of the research burden that goes into social engagement. You can also automate much of the tracking and reporting on the flipside, so that your people aren’t spending their time measuring and compiling data for PowerPoint slides. If you really consider what goes into a memorable social interaction, there are many steps that can, and should, be automated. Just leave engagement to the human. 2. Augment your people but leave their voice alone Have you ever noticed the customer support responses to complaints on social? It’s a copy and paste reply that has been prewritten and approved, so agents use it no matter what the customer complains about. You see much of the same when a company makes a big announcement—employees share the same pre-scripted copy from all their social accounts. Their followers’
eyes likely glazed over before they finished reading any of it. Instead of telling your people what to say, companies are beginning to harness the power of each employee’s unique voice. In the same way you wouldn’t recommend a product to a relative by shouting the slogan at them, you shouldn’t put words in their mouths. Pre-scripted social content was intended to increase the odds that your people would post about your company. Today, it not only decreases the odds they’ll post, it increases the odds that their followers will tune them out. Meanwhile, the untapped potential of your employees’ unique, individual voice remains buried beneath desperate attempts to scale distribution. Give your people an array of owned content, third-party content and original art to use at their discretion. Arm them with materials that inspire them to use their voice to engage their audience. Give them something to be proud of and their voice will carry it farther than even the most poetic canned copy. 3. Scale dialogue, not distribution Remember when monthly traffic was the only relevant KPI for company websites? Today, we’ve grown more sophisticated and take into account pageviews per session, time on site, average shopping cart value, conversion rates, usability scores and we even have survey tools to gauge visitor satisfaction. In desperate attempts to scale distribution and reach at all costs, most businesses now find themselves stuck in a loop of gaining and losing followers on social. It’s a wasteful cycle driven by vanity rather than business logic, particularly for businesses that aren’t dependent on raw brand awareness to make sales. Factory social is a slave to those vanity metrics. Because it fails to engage people authentically, anyone overseeing such a program would by definition have to
double down on a spray-and-pray approach to demonstrate value. As any business operator can tell you, if you orient your team’s efforts around the right goals, the rest is just details. Make dialogue—a two-way conversation between your people and your customers—the North Star of your social efforts and you’ll quickly put an end to factory social. Set a measurable social engagement goal for your sales teams. As Peter Drucker famously said: “What’s measured improves.” Handle with care If nothing else, it’s clear factory social has pushed social networks to their breaking point, but the backlash has begun. Companies like Hubspot and IBM are demonstrating a smarter approach that is generating stronger results. And many social media marketers have wisely sounded the alarm that irresponsible use of these networks will break social channels permanently. Social media, once heralded as the most promising new channel for customer acquisition since the rise of the Web itself, is not beyond saving so long as we accept the responsibility to handle it with care. Factory social is an abuse of the network—a race to the bottom that should no longer be appealing or acceptable to business decision makers. And that’s why I’m so confident that the backlash is coming—it’s always about the bottom line. If a backlash doesn’t materialize, the only alternative is executives turning the lights off on these programs altogether. Hank Nothhaft, Jr. is CEO and founder of Trapit,
which makes social selling and employee advocacy easy. He developed Trapit while serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI International, where he focused on applying artificial intelligence to new markets. Previously Hank served as group product manager at WebEx, where he led the company’s flagship service to an acquisition by Cisco. DMN.ca ❰
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Marketing automation
From mass media to targeted distribution
How analytics helped Yellow Pages optimize its products and distribution strategy
Yellow Pages is Canada’s most consulted print directory. The company publishes more than 300 Yellow Pages directorories in every province across Canada and more than six million people have downloaded the YP app.
By Michele Sexsmith
L
ike many of its 240,000 small business customers across Canada, Yellow Pages (YP) has been challenged by the digital age. While many consumers and advertisers are embracing online search and social media, traditional print media remains an important component of the marketing mix. In an effort to better meet the needs of its users, YP wanted to determine which of its customers preferred printed directories, which liked to let their fingers do the clicking on the YP.ca website and which would rather use e-books—YP’s printed directories in a digital, searchable form. With this information, YP planned to optimize its products and streamline distribution, in both the physical and virtual world. But the sheer scale of YP’s production and distribution operations is daunting in itself. With 43% of Canadians using a Yellow Pages directory, the company compiles nearly 300
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different directories covering every province and territory in Canada—from urban to rural communities—all available in both print and digital-replica formats. Every year, the company delivers over nine million white and yellow page directories to homes and businesses. More than six million people have downloaded the YP app and a growing number qualify as dual print and digital users. With this large and varied audience, YP needed to make sure it was targeting the right product to the right customer through the right channel. Indeed, the days are long gone when YP could simply drop a directory on everyone’s doorstep. And for some greenminded consumers, that change is a welcome one. Concerned that too many directories end up in landfills, some 200,000 households have opted out of receiving YP printed products. To ensure that its advertisers earn a
good return on their investment, YP needed to reduce the number of directories that went directly from doorway to recycling bin. “We wanted to find a tool to identify the individual who wants our product and get rid of the waste in our supply chain,” says Dwayne Rutherford, YP’s senior manager of distribution. “The better we can target, the better we can get advertisers to achieve their ROI.” The solution came in the form of a custom segmentation and geo-spatial tool developed by Environics Analytics (EA), the Toronto-based data and analytics company. In early 2016, YP and EA began an initiative to better understand YP’s users. Analysts integrated the company’s opt-in and opt-out data with third-party survey data from Numeris to identify the heaviest users of YP’s print and online versions. The Numeris information identified consumers who not only used YP directories but also engaged
in activities related to YP’s top advertising categories, such as home improvement. “We wanted the users who would take action with Yellow Pages,” says Franca Nassivera, YP’s senior product manager, product optimization. “It was a mix of external data and internal data that provided us with good segmentation and options.” Analysts identified several target groups of users, noting differences between those living in cities and rural areas. The biggest fans of Yellow Pages are middle-aged and older families with mixed incomes living in smaller, semi-urban and rural markets. But the company also found strong users of Yellow Pages among older singles and families with below-average incomes in the suburban and urban communities of metro areas. Meanwhile, YP found average Yellow Pages users among those slightly younger, middle-aged families with above-average March 2017
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Marketing automation incomes who lived in urban and suburban neighbourhoods. “A lot of book users are in the non-urban markets,” explains Nassivera. “The smaller markets will have an older demographic and part of the story may be that they may not have good Internet access or, as older people, they’re just not as web savvy. There are pockets of book users in the urban markets, too, which is why the targeting and modelling helped us out.” Once they’d defined YP’s target groups, analysts then mapped neighbourhood delivery routes across Canada so YP’s distributors knew where they should drop off books at homes, stock them in racks on street corners or offer them in grocery stores. As Nassivera puts it, “We wanted to make sure that a user has a book if they want it—and in the medium of their choice.” YP’s large staff—including 1,000 people on the sales force and 1,200 on the distribution team— found the data especially useful in understanding the nuances of local markets. “The data had to go down to the street level with the routing and targeting 365 days a year,” Nassivera continues. “We have the distributors bringing our product to consumers and businesses all the time.” As part of the project, EA analysts also created an innovative modelling application that automatically creates routes and associated packages to support both delivery and planning. The process drew on three essential factors to create the most costefficient routes: Yellow Pages’ consumer opt-in and opt-out information; the presence of target households within that specific market; and the quantities of books assigned to that specific market. The analytical tool included a zoom-in feature that allowed distributors to better plan deliveries in rural areas when higher-level maps proved unusable. One key feature of the project involved “a continuous feedback loop,” allowing EA analysts to incorporate information from distributors, advertisers and customers to refine the analysis and targeting. EA used tools like Alteryx and Python to bring new information from the field into the methodology. march 2017
Win the path to purchase through analytics and artificial intelligence Continued from page 4
Yellow Pages teamed up with Environics Analytics to develop customer target groups and identify which ones preferred print directories, which liked to let their fingers do the clicking and which would rather use e-books. Analysts them mapped neighbouthood delivery routes that indicated where YP distributors should drop off books at home—and where they shouldn’t.
The analysis also yielded some surprises: Some maps showed where YP should have been delivering books but hadn’t in the past. “We heard reports from some people that they were happy to be getting books for the first time in years,” says YP’s Rutherford. “And we’re getting fewer complaints from households that received the books even though they didn’t want them, which is a good sign. We also found that in instances where local knowledge from distributors conflicted with the data, the data really held up, which is a really good sign.” The data-based analysis also helped YP save money and improve logistics by reducing the volume of books it places in the marketplace—while saving a lot of trees as well. Now that the company knows more about the habits and interests of the book users, it has incorporated those insights into their editorial content to keep the directory relevant and deliver engaged audiences. And it’s recently begun to profile the YP.ca users in order to provide better content for them. The analysis will help YP understand who those users are, where they live, what they’re doing and how to reach them with the online app. Early results from the analytics initiative are encouraging. Even though fewer directories are being printed and distributed,
advertisers have not experienced a decline in the level of customer contacts, according to Rutherford. In fact, YP’s Canadian experience has become a model for Yellow Pages companies in other countries. Not long ago, Rutherford’s team shared their analytics approach with their counterparts in Australia. “They’ve adopted a similar approach to identify their users, understand their characteristics and develop a methodology for targeting users,” he says. YP’s experience also offers a promising message for marketers concerned that new media is causing consumers to bypass traditional products and channels. Instead, consumers today enjoy more options for engaging with businesses, which means it’s more important than ever to understand what they want and how they want to get it. Data analytics illuminates the paths that consumers are taking, helping businesses connect with them in myriad ways. “Every time one channel closes, another one is opening up,” Rutherford says. “That’s how we’ll stay relevant with YP users.” Michele Sexsmith is senior vice president and practice leader at Environics Analytics, specializing in the media, retail, real estate and entertainment industries.
systems and talent—to have the maximum impact. No matter how they compare, all retailers need to constantly refine, learn and adapt by continually monitoring their consumers along the complete path to purchase. This includes using leading technologies, including artificial intelligence, to bring all of the data together, drive insights and deliver outstanding consumer experiences. This isn’t as daunting as it sounds. While some retailers may want to do it all themselves, others will prefer to rely on the current big AI providers such as Amazon, Google or Apple. Both approaches have risks, however. The complexity and cost of integrating AI and analytics into a retailer’s operations means only the biggest retailers can contemplate the go-it-alone approach and even then they may lack the skills needed to pull it all together. Those who align themselves with an existing AI provider could find they are left behind if another, better provider comes along in future. The best option is to build a model that is always plugged into the network and ecosystem and which relies on being flexible and nimble through partnering with others to help meet each consumer’s personalized needs. By using a proof of concept approach, retailers can start small, fail fast, learn from those experiences and quickly move on to try new things. Wherever retailers are on the omnichannel spectrum, taking steps now to harness technology to provide a better consumer experience will lead to a better payoff in the form of more loyal consumers, higher sales and a greater ROI and ROA.
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Marketing automation
Drowning in data? Marketers don’t need to become data scientists, they just need better tools
By Anthony Botibol
D
ata is the fuel powering the direct marketing industry, helping to make campaigns more targeted, personalized and efficient than ever before. As a result, marketers must now get their heads around a baffling array of new tools and approaches to information management and direct marketing. For many, this change represents a significant challenge, with marketers forced to prioritize data analysis over more creative (and admittedly more fun) aspects of their roles. Direct marketers are increasingly transforming into data scientists; analyzing reports, sifting through data sets and attempting to build complex, holistic profiles for each of their customers. In an attempt to keep on top of their new analytic duties, BlueVenn’s research suggests that many marketers now spend as much as 80% of their time purely working with data, leaving little time for the more creative aspects of their roles. It raises the question: is analyzing endless reams of data really what marketers signed up for? Or should they instead be focusing on crafting genuinely interesting content and campaigns? What’s holding marketers back? Given the vast amounts of data currently facing marketers, it’s no surprise that they are struggling ❱ DMN.ca
to identify which sets are most valuable to their organization. Currently, over half (54%) of marketers claim that poor quality data has damaged their campaigns, making them untargeted and ultimately unsuccessful. This issue is only going to get more complex, as legislation such as the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in 2018 sets new standards for compliance and consent, making data collection even more complicated for everyday marketers who are already struggling to sort, clean and maintain their ever-growing customer data sets. In addition to the quality of data, many marketers are also struggling to create a “single customer view” (SCV)—an accurate profile of customers that unifies multiple channels, platforms and data sets. The ability to collate these data sets together to form an SCV will not only deliver an impressive ROI but can also provide the basis for a highly effective direct marketing campaign. Despite this, BlueVenn’s research suggests that attaining a SCV is generally considered one of the most difficult objectives for direct marketers to achieve, with 82% claiming that they are unable to develop a single view of their customers. Instead, many marketers are still forced to deal with customer data trapped within individual organizational silos, analyzing their various data
sources (email, social, POS) in isolation. This is something that 62% of marketers claim that they are worried about, making it a significant barrier to successful data-driven marketing.
are simply outsourcing their data analysis to IT departments or expensive external agencies— both of which lack the depth of customer knowledge needed to build an effective direct marketing
Many marketers now spend as much as 80% of their time purely working with data, leaving little time for the more creative aspects of their roles. New tools versus new skills In 2017, direct marketers need to drastically rethink their approach to customer data, both in terms of the skills they develop and the tools they adopt. Given that 72% of marketers think that data analysis will be the most important skill set over the next two years, (more than social media, web development, graphic design or SEO), many marketers feel under pressure to re-skill in order to remain competitive. Rather than attempting to transform into data scientists, my view is that marketers should instead look to adopt new tools and technologies to support them in their evolving roles. As it stands, too many marketing departments
database. By investing in better tools internally and automating much of the process of data management, marketers can do the work of a data scientist without the need to drastically update their skill set, leaving them time to focus on creating effective marketing campaigns. Anthony Botibol is the marketing director at BlueVenn, overseeing the marketing strategy for the organization across the EMEA and North America regions. With 15 years in the technology industry he has worked with some of the biggest brands in the B2C and B2C selling markets to uncover their requirements and understand their strategies, enabling the BlueVenn technology and data products to match their needs.
March 2017
THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 • 2017
The
Innovation Issue ❯❯ Practical ways to drive agent engagement ❯❯ Organizational success in seven steps ❯❯ Don’t fall into these privacy traps ❯❯ Innovations in storage ❯❯ The key to disrupting the contact centre industry
The innovation issue
Practical ways to drive agent engagement Q: What can agents do to respond to abusive customers? David Tsang, director of customer care, Elte
Anu Aduvala, director of customer service, Toronto Parking Authority
Shai Berger, co-founder and CEO, Fonolo
By Mike Aoki
F
or agents to deliver their best, they need to feel engaged and dedicated to your organization. What does it take to fully engage your front line team? The Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre Association (GTACC) and Fonolo held a joint webinar on January 26, 2017 to find out! Sangeeta Bhatnagar, GTACC chair and principal consultant at SB Global, moderated this event. She interviewed David Tsang, director of customer care, Elte; Anu Aduvala, director of customer service, Toronto Parking Authority; and Shai Berger, co-founder and CEO, Fonolo to find out how they drive agent engagement. The following are highlights of their conversation.
2 | contact management
Q: In reference to a recent Toronto Star newspaper article titled, “Call centre workers speak out about abuse by public,” what can leaders do to support their agents? David Tsang thinks “being part of the contact centre community, we have the responsibility to talk about this and create much needed awareness.” He continued: “Employers need to realize when abusive (customer) language is used, it impacts their employees emotionally. It can be very damaging to employee engagement and morale.” Anu Aduvala built upon that idea and suggested leaders, “talk about abusive behaviour and let people know they are supported.”
“Ensure they have a script, so they know what to say” in response to abusive behaviour, Anu says. Include phrases such as, “I really want to help you; however, I cannot continue this conversation if you are going to be abusive.” She does not recommend having a process whereby an agent has to disconnect on a customer since they usually call back even angrier. Instead, “Always have a plan” for abusive behaviour, such as an escalation queue where the call is transferred to another, more senior agent. Another tip is to provide proper tools and training. David’s department brought in an external trainer who advised, “don’t push back against angry people. Do not get into an argument with them. Instead take a step back and provide a warning (about abusive behaviour.)” A separate suggestion, for departments that do not have an escalations queue, is to give one or two warnings regarding abusive behaviour before disconnecting the customer.
Q: How can you develop an agent training plan to deal with abusive callers? “Work with front line employees to develop a plan. They will believe in the plan because they were part of that development,” David advises. He added agents need to know when to escalate a call. “The moment an agent senses the conversation has become abusive or if behaviour does not change after a warning, that is an indicator it is time to escalate to a manager.” While some companies believe the customer is always right, Anu pointed out, “Customers are NOT right to abuse your employees,” however, some abusive interactions can still occur. To prepare them, Anu Issue 1 • 2017
The innovation issue believes in setting her agents up for success during the hiring process. She wants to, “give the candidate the ability to choose if they want to work in an environment that includes (customers who may be upset)” so agents are not surprised by it.
Q: How can we avoid customer rage? Prevention is the best approach. “Listen to your existing employees,” Anu suggested. “They know what is annoying your customers. Many of the things causing customer pain are quick fixes.” Encourage agents to bring those to your attention. Listen and respect their ideas. That builds engagement. Another key, according to David is “continuous improvement of your KPIs [key performance indicators].” The fewer errors you make as an organization, the fewer escalations and incidents of customer rage will occur. You may also need to “fire” a chronically abusive customer in the interests of protecting your agents.
Q: How do you prepare for evolving customer expectations? Shai Berger thinks rapidly changing customer expectations cause anger. “Expectations for customer service are VERY high. They are used to getting very rapid responses and solutions.” Shai recognizes that “there are a growing numbers of channels that customers can interact upon. Voice is getting displaced by these new channels: email, chat, SMS, video, etc.” That means customers may not know what channel to use. So by the time they speak with an agent they are already upset. Seventy-six per cent of respondents in one survey said, “just one unpleasant contact centre experience is likely to make me take my business elsewhere.” Two of the biggest customer frustrations are long waits on hold and boring hold music. That just makes them angrier, so when they finally get an agent they are enraged. Another survey found 63% of customers prefer getting a callback versus waiting on hold. Therefore, that type of technology can help reduce anger.
Q: How do we engage our agents? Anu’s secret: “Listen to your agents. They want to talk to you. Eat with them in the lunch room. Get to know them
Issue 1 • 2017
Seventy-six per cent of respondents in one survey said, “just one unpleasant contact centre experience is likely to make me take my business elsewhere. as individuals. They will naturally bring up ideas and concerns about the company, as they feel more comfortable with you.” When it comes to listening, David says “consider including the voice of employees” on potential changes. You can use an employee council, employee surveys or interviews to capture their ideas; however, that is only the first step. You need to actually do something with their feedback. David notes that “employees will become quiet and disengaged if they can’t see any action.” Instead, incorporate their ideas and make changes. Communicate those improvements to your employees and include the results so they know they make a difference. That will increase employee engagement Q: How do we keep agents motivated and excited? The key according to Anu is “ensuring your leaders have the right training and skills to keep your agents motivated. We are failing midlevel managers unless we give them the tools they need to keep agents engaged.”
Q: In summary, what are the key lessons for contact centre leaders? 1. Ensure employees feel supported and safe at work; 2. Deploy regular agent and leader training to help them handle abusive customers; 3. Focus on the voice of the employee and do something with the information you gather; 4. Be visible and available, while always listening; and 5. Make sure callers are not enraged, so your agents will stay engaged. Mike Aoki is the president of Reflective Keynotes Inc. (www.reflectivekeynotes. com ), a Canadian training company that helps contact centres improve their sales and customer retention results. A call centre expert, Mike has been interviewed by the Customer Experience Show and the Globe and Mail. He also serves on the Advisory Council of the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre Association (www.gtacc.ca ) and was master of ceremonies for four of their annual conferences.
contact management | 3
The innovation issue
Organizational success in seven steps By Casey Kostecka
B
uilding and maintaining successful organizations is no small task. As the tentacles of the business expand into new and different areas, this task becomes exponentially more urgent and difficult. There are seven areas in particular that, when identified and examined, allow business leaders and entire teams to focus energy and resources on the right aspects of the business at the right time. The process starts with a comprehensive gap analysis of seven critical components of the business—targets, talent, techniques, training, tools, temperament and tracking— comparing the current versus desired state. Once the gap analysis is complete, leaders prioritize next steps and actions using the “Priority Matrix,” which ranks tasks based on impact and urgency. We call the entire process the 7-T Success System, and this is how it lays out. Targets: The first thing a leader must understand and communicate are the goals (or targets) of the organization. For a sports team, that may involve winning every game, making the playoffs, winning more games than last year, etc. A company’s targets may be to turn a profit for the first time, beat last year’s revenue by X per cent or develop five new products. Perhaps it’s all three. Clarity of goals will ensure alignment and the most efficient use of human and capital resources. Techniques: Organizations utilize many techniques to reach their targets. Sports teams have a playbook and for every play each team member executes on those trained techniques, whether it’s passing, blocking, catching or running defense. Businesses utilize trained techniques as well. They are marketing, branding, sales, customer service, budgeting, disaster recovery, testing, etc. By continually analyzing and improving all techniques within the organization, the organization gives itself the best chance to “win.” Talent: Organizations must ensure they have the right people in the right positions and that those people have the skills and experience necessary to execute the techniques. One example of a talent “best practice” is establishing a succession plan for each key position. Too many organizations are caught off-guard when key personnel leave the organization and waste months or even years filling the talent gap. Structure around the talent component of the 7-T System drives its success and involves: • Organizational composition (how many employees are needed at each position); • Recruiting, screening and hiring; • Key staffing ratio management (CSR to Supervisor, CSR to QA, etc.); • Succession planning ; and • Exit interviews (given by a third party and reviewed internally). 4 | contact management
Training: Once the right talent is in place, then the organization must train each individual and work group on the techniques identified for success. And training goes deep in the bench. Champion sports teams ensure that not only are the players trained throughout the year, but so are the coaches, front office personnel, support staff, etc. Business enterprises should also commit to a training schedule that teaches each person the proper techniques. Tools: Tools are the physical things that employees use to execute many of these techniques. For sports teams, it takes the form of equipment, training facilities, stadium, etc. In business, think of the facilities and offices, computers, phones, printers, delivery trucks, packaging materials, etc. The best companies, like the best sports teams, invest in state-of-art equipment and facilities. Temperament: Every winning team and organization has a very distinct, positive and reinforced culture. Characteristics of “winning” temperaments include high expectations, trust, participation, accountability, ownership, dedication and hard work. Winning organizations go to great lengths to form, define, communicate and reinforce their desired culture in every interaction with internal and external stakeholders. Tracking: The last component of the 7-T Success System ensures each of the other “Ts” is being executed as desired. To stay on course, it’s important to track the collective performance of the organization versus each separate component (or “T”). Successful sports teams have learned that tracking and analysis are necessary for peak performance. Tracking within the 7-T Success System involves these three steps for each area: 1. Identify all the components that make up that area. For example,
if you’re working on Tools, make a list of the tools your organization has currently. This may include: office parking, office security system and/or personnel, telephone system, agent computers, training facilities, break room and restrooms. 2. Conduct a gap analysis for each “T” area using a chart that includes component (e.g. agent computers), current state (outdated, slow), desired state (current tech, speed), actions to bridge gap (purchase new) and cost to bridge gap ($1,200/ agent). 3. Assemble your 7-T Success System project team and prioritize the action items in the chart, based on the highest impact and urgency. By identifying the composition of each of these seven areas of business, companies can build from a common understanding and end goal in mind. Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Perhaps the greatest positive impact on an organization using the 7-T process is the heightened level of focus, awareness and engagement that the process inherently creates in everyone involved. Casey Kostecka is chief business development officer for Convergent Outsourcing Inc., a customer engagement outsourcing company that delivers the people, processes and technology to improve efficiency, ensure compliance and increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value for our clients. Our contact centre solutions support customer acquisition, customer care and retention, welcome programs, accounts receivable, back office processes, crisis response and other critical communications. Casey may be reached at ckostecka@ConvergentUSA.com.
Issue 1 • 2017
The innovation issue
Don’t fall into these privacy traps By Sachin Kothari
T
here are no shortage of headaches for call centre managers. Finding and retaining staff, optimizing efficiency and keeping clients (external or internal) happy never takes a day off. If you’ve been paying attention to the papers, though, you know that privacy is becoming a constant concern for any organization handling customer data. With everything else going on, the last thing you need is a privacy incident to harm your customers or your firm’s reputation. Your call centre might even be doing some breach remediation work. You wouldn’t want to jeopardize that by having an embarrassing breach yourself. So, it’s important to know where a call centre’s vulnerabilities are and how to prevent them.
Social engineering Terms like “phishing, “spearphishing,” and “whaling” all refer to the practice of data thieves tricking employees, even high-level employees (the whales!), into giving away important information voluntarily. While it’s tempting to view “hackers” as devious geniuses behind high-powered laptops, it really only takes a simple phone call to get some unsuspecting employees to hand over a user name and password or other compromising information. That’s why enormous effort must be put into training employees to stick to clear and direct policies about how information is handled, and to think critically about what it is they’re being asked to do for a customer. Because you’ve also likely trained these employees to provide great customer service, sometimes their good intentions can have bad results. Maybe an “important” client calls up and tells you he wants to make some adjustments to his account. Right in the middle of verifying his identity, he says he’s got to rush away to an important call and tells you his secretary will finish up. Well, no, of course she doesn’t know her boss’ password, but you just heard him on the phone, right? It’s hard to fault an employee’s instinct to be helpful. This is an important client! It’s vital, however, that you drill your employees with these kinds of scenarios and emphasize the importance of verifying identity to the letter of the policy. Criminals are smart. If you give them just a little crack in the door, they’ll walk right in.
Who can see what? Call centre employees need to write things down. It’s a part Issue 1 • 2017
of the job that will likely never go away. My question: Is there a policy in place for destroying that piece of paper? Do employees know to shred all their paper notes at the end of a shift? If not, the janitorial staff could be selling access to your network to the highest bidder. Ideally, you’ve got a janitorial staff that’s also been trained to identify and destroy compromising information, but these are often third-party vendors. What’s your contract with them look like? Does it require that they be trained in information handling? Tech solutions can help here, too. You may have software that redacts information based on role and scenario, so you can limit the amount of information an employee sees in the first place. Use it.
Procedures for escalation Maybe the biggest issue I see in the industry, however, is a lack of good planning on what to do should something bad actually happen. Say your employee gets a call from a customer in a panic, saying someone accessed their account, or someone is using their phone to make phone calls: What do they do? Often, a call centre representative doesn’t know to whom to report the incident. The breach people all say the same thing, though: Speed is of the essence. The faster the security folks know something is wrong, the faster they can do something to mitigate it. Just one customer with a breach could mean there’s something else brewing, or a systematic style of attack you can see coming. Unfortunately, it usually takes many of these smaller individual issues before someone realizes there’s
a bigger problem that needs to be addressed. It’s vital that all employees, from the frontline staff to shift managers right up to the chief information officer know what the response plan is. Letting information fester in the wrong hands is a great way to turn a small problem into a big deal.
Conclusion This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are whole books on this sort of thing. And I’m hoping you’ve got auditing capabilities already and smart procedures in place for screening potential employees to make sure they are who they say they are. If not, do that, too! People make mistakes. Data sometimes seems to move of its own volition and accord. That’s why I recommend extensive and regular training. When everyone knows what to do right away and they are encouraged by management to know the drill, good privacy policy becomes second nature and bad actors move on to softer targets. Sachin Kothari, CIPP/US, director of online privacy and compliance at AT&T, is a subject matter expert in corporate privacy practices. His team of privacy practitioners manages privacy and compliance for the company’s consumer and business product-focused e-commerce operations. Mr. Kothari brings 13 years of experience in privacy with a digital focus. He instituted a Privacy By Design program that brought the company on the forefront of a resilient and flexible privacy framework that can meet data protection regulations around the world and allow marketing and sales to function with transparency.
contact management | 5
The innovation issue
Innovations in storage
By Jim O’Reilly
A
fter three decades of boring incremental improvement, storage is exploding with new ideas. The old workhorses, such as RAID arrays and NAS filers, are being supplanted by new approaches, new interfaces and, above all, by solid state storage and the cloud. From a customer perspective, this is like getting an upgrade from a Ford to a Ferrari, but there are all sorts of implications for data centers and computer systems. Let’s take a look at the leading edge of storage today!
Hardware There are several macroscopic trends occurring. We are leaving the RAID SAN era, replacing arrays with small appliances containing a mix of solid state and hard drives. These are somewhat transitional, insofar as a move to all-flash solutions is now
6 | contact management
Issue 1 • 2017
The innovation issue occurring rapidly. Typical all-flash arrays are super fast and offer performance in the millions of IOPS. At the same time, SSDs are supplanting the enterprise hard drive in servers. The advent of all of this performance means that servers can support a heavier workload. This punctures the myth that SSDs are more expensive than hard drives. Actual prices are close to parity for enterprise drives, while the performance and reliability difference leads to a reduction in required server count that more than offsets any SSD premium. 2017 will see an explosion in SSD capacity as 3D NAND takes over from current unilayer solutions. Vendors are already talking up 60 and 100TB capacity drives, though these are likely to be in the 2018 timeframe. When they arrive, only the most reactionary IT operations will continue to buy hard drives. Other storage devices of note are the new NVDIMMs. Having a persistent main memory in a server has long been a goal and these flash-based products are already changing systems design. Used as a DRAM extender, they make in-memory systems more affordable but they also allow new solutions such as systems with a sub-second restart capability to be created. The technology of NVDIMMs and DRAM is evolving extremely quickly and the next year will see very large capacity NVDIMMs, reaching into the 10TB range or more. New interfaces are in the offing, based on the Hybrid-Memory Cube approach, where the DRAM bus becomes serial and massively parallel. The aim is to move bandwidth up to one terabyte per second, while cutting memory and CPU power usage by a big factor. First products are expected within months. In the networking area, Ethernet with RDMA is fast becoming the preferred connection scheme for networked storage. Fibre-Channel is also adding an RDMA capability to its bag of tricks, but the result, with a move from SCSI to NVMe, looks so different from old FC that one must ask if Ethernet, with a long track record in RDMA, isn’t the best solution. Both RAID and SAN are seeing a market decline as the migration to the all-flash appliance gathers speed.
Software On the software front, we have several notable trends. First, we have the move to open-source storage software. Ceph is the best example recently. Coupled with both open-source and unbundled commercial code, COTS hardware is driving appliance prices downwards. We are moving towards software-defined storage (SDS) which will uncouple data services from platform hardware and in the process should commoditize most storage. SDS is very much in response to the server and networking automation deriving from cloud technology. Within five years, large datacentres will employ a full orchestration system that allows users to control their provisioning and costs. Most operations will use prestructured templates and conform to policies set by central IT admin.
Cloud storage SDS is a virtualized environment, so it will add a new dimension of scaling agility to IT. As such, it is a natural segue into discussing the impact of the cloud on storage. We originally deployed cloud storage as a slow-access archive or backup solution. This is no longer the case, as improvements in security and the obvious cost and agility Issue 1 • 2017
The five year horizon looks to me to be built around solid-state, Ethernetconnected small appliances, running a hyper-converged environment. advantages of the cloud approach have made the cloud business proposition irresistible for large parts of the workload. In fact, most big datacentres are embracing the hybrid cloud approach to get cloud advantages even with in-house computing. Companies like ClearSky and Zadara are addressing the performance issues across the public-private storage boundary in the hybrid cloud. Their solution is to use the cloud as a portable primary storage and use highly cached gateways to access that data from in-house servers, which is the inverse of what many thought would be the optimum solution. One key in these offerings is that data moving into the cloud is deduplicated and compressed. This is compute intensive so hardware/ software acceleration is in the pipeline. The result is significant reduction in network traffic and raw storage used, resulting in big savings in costs and time to transfer the data. As we look out a little further, the first viable alternative to flash is going to appear in six months or so. This is the Intel/Micron 3D X-Point solution. This is a phase-change memory product that provides byte addressability. While the code needed to drive byte addressability is likely to be out in 2018, the concept of a DRAM-like interface to persistent memory using single CPU instructions for a registermemory operation is a major game changer. Now I/O operations can be achieved in nanoseconds, rather than executing the thousands of instructions that make up existing file stacks.
Hyper-converged systems
the same product (a result of COTS technology), we have a distributed storage model where the drives are in each server node and shared over the cluster network. These networks have moved to RDMA Ethernet solutions and are driving the move to 25GbE single and 100 GbE quad-link solutions. Storage management is also changing. Automation is the watchword, as the agility issue in a containerized world press for answers. We are seeing the start of orchestration tools and the onset of SDS approaches. These will really pick up pace in 2017 and in 2018 will be the solutions of choice for clouds and clusters. The five year horizon looks to me to be built around solid-state, Ethernet-connected small appliances, running a hyper-converged environment. Servers will use NVDIMM type memory for the fastest storage tier and either very fast NVMe SSDs (for primary storage) or very large 2.5 inch SSDs for cold/cool storage. Jim O’Reilly has been an executive at a number of corporations and startup companies. Recently, he was vice president of engineering at Germane Systems, creating ruggedized servers and storage for the U.S. submarine fleet. He has also held senior management positions at SGI/Rackable and Verari; was CEO at startups Scalant and CDS; headed operations at PC Brand and Metalithic; and led major divisions of Memorex-Telex and NCR, where his team developed the first SCSI ASIC in the industry, now in the Smithsonian. Jim is currently a consultant and writer, focusing on storage, infrastructure and software issues. His book on the future of storage, Network Storage, has just been published.
Another major innovation is the hyper-converged system. Realizing that servers and the new compact storage appliance are essentially contact management | 7
The consultant’s corner
The key to disrupting the contact centre industry By Emily Nielsen
L
ast year was the year of “disruptive” technologies. Trending technologies like cloud, analytics, SIP, self-service, voice biometrics and omnichannel were all the buzz; however, I had to ask myself, are these technologies truly disruptive? To answer this question let’s define what disruption is. According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, “to disrupt is to interrupt the normal course of.” Disruption is a radical change. So, are these technologies interrupting the normal course of the contact centre? Have they radically changed our field? It is my opinion that these technologies aren’t disruptive. Rather, these technologies are driving the contact centre through its normal course of evolution. 8 | contact management
My opinion aside, history has shown that radical change within our field will come from something else. So, according to history, what exactly will it take to radically change the contact centre industry? The answer to this question can be found in the accomplishments of three men who truly challenged and disrupted the status quo. Let’s begin with a lesser-known university dropout who recently and radically altered one of the biggest industries in the entire world.
How an engineer and a nuclear physicist disrupted the taxi industry Meet Travis Kalanick. A computer engineer and programmer who dropped out of the University of California to launch the now obscure Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file sharing service. After Red Swoosh’s demise, Travis set out with a fellow co-founder and a think tank composed of a nuclear physicist, a computational neuroscientist and a machinery expert to fundamentally change the entire transportation industry, worldwide. Issue 1 • 2017
The consultant’s corner practitioner of Zen Buddhism. A man who, like Kalanick, dropped out of college. Unlike Kalanick, this man had very little technology “know how.” Rather, his “know how” appears to be rooted in spiritual enlightenment (he spent seven months in India looking for it) and, at one point, experimenting with psychedelic drugs. Despite his counterculture ways, this man would go on to challenge IBM and change the computer industry forever. His vision for an affordable personal computer with a simple design and ease of use—an idea which partially came from the teachings of Zen Buddhism—was, at the time, radical. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about the co-founder of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs. Who in 1977, with Steve Wozniak, launched the first successfully mass-produced personal computer: the Apple II. The key to disruption here can be traced back through Steve’s counterculture thinking and unconventional ideas of the time. Like Travis, Steve was an outsider who challenged and radically changed what was the predictable course of the computer industry.
An illegitimate son who disrupted Europe in the 15th century
And that’s exactly what they achieved when they created the peer-to-peer transportation app known as Uber. Now, I want to point out that none of these men identified themselves as taxi drivers or taxi company owners. They were complete outsiders. Their disrupting idea (Uber) created such disruptive competition that taxi drivers, taxi company owners and world governments protested, filed class-action lawsuits and even went so far as arresting Uber executives in France. That’s radical. That’s disruptive. And what it took was a group of outsiders to shake things up! The idea of Uber wasn’t conceived inside the taxi industry. It came from the outside.
How Zen Buddhism disrupted IBM The next technology disruption has its roots in a Issue 1 • 2017
This disruptor believed that his greatest blessing was his illegitimate birth. Being born out of wedlock in 15th century Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was barred from attending school and pursuing traditional careers. Left to himself, as a young boy he wandered the woods around the village of Vinci, with pen and paper in hand, drawing in intense detail the beauty of the nature around him. Young Leonardo produced drawings so astonishing that he served an artist’s apprentice at the age of 14; however, unlike his peers, he developed a deep interest in the sciences and crafts: engineering, mechanics, chemistry, sculpture, architecture, hydraulics and anatomy, to name a few. And he learned each field to a depth that equaled mastery. This mastery of the crafts and sciences enabled him to make connections competing artists of the time never made. Essentially, da Vinci became the first of his time to bring the outside subject of science into art. Throughout his life,
he went on producing astonishing works of art Europe had never seen before. Techniques he pioneered allowed him to paint with absolute realism, a feat which was the first of its kind. His masterpieces were so incredibly powerful and unique they transformed the culture of Italy and Europe forever. Because of his unorthodox path in the sciences Leonardo was an outsider—like Jobs and Kalanick—and his outsider’s knowledge permitted him to radically alter the course of European art and culture forever.
The key ingredient required to disrupt History has shown that it usually takes an outsider to disrupt a field. A person with unconventional thinking, expertise and the ability to connect insights from seemingly unrelated subjects. All of these men disrupted by bringing these seemingly unrelated ideas into the areas they radically changed. Kalanick, the computer engineer, disrupted the transportation industry by bringing into it his outsider knowledge of internet based peer-to-peer transactions. Jobs brought his counterculture experiences and beliefs into the computer field to take on the then monolithic IBM with the radical idea of a personal computer. Da Vinci, historians claim, radically changed art by bringing the sciences into it. In short, the key to disrupting the contact centre industry is by taking a look outside. Unfortunately, since we are the insiders we may never get the outsiders’ insights required to fundamentally change it. Until then, the current technologies being developed within the industry will, more or less, continue to drive the contact centre through its normal course of evolution. Emily Nielsen launched Nielsen IT Consulting Inc., one of Canada’s top unified communications (UC) and contact centre consulting firms, in 1999. Carrying an impressive portfolio of 100+ projects and having managed $65 million worth of UC and call centre solutions, she regularly acts as a trusted advisor to some of Canada’s largest organizations. Emily can be reached at enielsen@nielsenitconsulting.com or by calling 519-473-5373.
contact management | 9
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Two tweaks that will win mobile consumers By Olga Zakharenkava
T Olga Zakharenkava is passionate about marketing and excels at helping businesses choose the right technology to solve their challenges. She spent the past 15 years immersed in marketing, tech and leadership, building great products and teams in startups and established enterprises. At Telmetrics, Olga helps marketers interpret rich data from consumer phone interactions and optimize their advertising campaigns to convert more callers into satisfied customers.
he buyer’s journey has become quite complicated as consumers jump from device to device throughout the day. Marketers are looking for new ways to reach consumers where they are—mobile or desktop—and for more opportunities to engage. In an effort to reach consumers where they are, marketers build a complex mix of tactics and channels that are not easy to measure in terms of their individual ROI. Cross-channel and cross-device attribution no longer means measuring “digital” direct response. It means tracking all leads—both online and offline, including phone calls and text messages. The concept of “response analytics” is becoming more relevant to marketers as they realize that they must track every possible type of response to know which campaigns deliver the best ROI. Moving from all this theory to practice, let’s look closely at the two phases of the buyer’s journey—the research phase and the purchase phase—and how making two simple tweaks, accepting and measuring calls and texts, will drive more conversions. Mobile devices dominate the research phase In a mobile-first world, ironically, the buy moments aren’t happening on mobile. Consumers still spend 84 cents out of every dollar online on desktop. So, even with 80% smartphone penetration, only 16 cents out of every dollar are being spent on mobile. So why bother targeting mobile if they’re not buying? That number of mobile purchases used to be zero but it is steadily increasing and in some areas is nearing desktop purchases. More critically for marketers, mobile devices dominate in the research phase. Consumers are using their mobile devices to research products and some are even using their phones in-store to research the product right in front of them. Fortynine per cent of in-store sales are influenced by digital according to a Deloitte study. Soon enough, those consumers will be able to use a picture of the product to research in-store. Pinterest just introduced a beta version of Lens, the Shazam for objects, that suggests related items. Once it is rolled out across all search platforms it promises to transform the way consumers search. Win mobile consumers through calls and texts The changes you can make are in line with the natural, intuitive behavior of mobile consumers and with our research and the experience of our clients, the large brands driving direct response. Their results confirm that consumers want these changes and are responding better. At their most basic level, the two tweaks are simple: adding “call us” and “text us” CTAs to ads and landing pages. Let’s take a look at how to do this right and what to consider. Offer the option to call the business In the “I-want-to-know” moments, mobile devices
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have overtaken desktop as the most preferred platform—60% of online shopping happens on mobile. Here, the device they spend time on is shaping consumer behavior. Twenty-nine per cent of shoppers prefer to call a business when they have a question about a potential purchase. To reach these consumers and influence their decision making during this consumer-driven stage, AdWords is setting the standard with call extensions. It’s a fluid and effortless experience for consumers— one click of the “call now” button at the bottom of an ad opens up their dialer app, facilitating the completion of the call. With the right information on the screen in front of them, consumers will go with the product that’s the best fit for them, whether it’s price, features or branding. Engage consumers on mobile with ads targeted for the research phase and make it easy for them to contact you with their questions. Improve conversion rates by offering text messaging In October 2016, AdWords rolled out message extensions globally after a successful beta test run with astonishing conversion rates. Auto & General saw an 80% higher conversion rate with message extensions. Our own client saw similar results with text messaging but with one crucial enhancement—our client’s contact centre responded to incoming texts with the chat platform they were already using. Through our integration with that chat platform, we facilitated the flow of incoming texts to the chat software and provided lead attribution for every single text that went beyond the click rate to track if the text was actually sent. Enhance effectiveness with AdWords device bidding and expanded text ads Two new updates to the AdWords platform make targeting ads to consumers in the “I-want-to-know” phase that much easier for marketers. One is device targeting—introduced in May 2016, marketers can choose which ads will appear on mobile devices versus desktop to reach consumers in the research phase of their buyer’s journey. Expanded text ads make it that much easier to give consumers the information they need to assess whether your product is right for them and meets their needs. With the additional space, you can provide more information to engage consumers. These two tweaks to your marketing, adding calls and texts to all possible channels, will help you generate leads in the research phase and in the purchase phase. If 187 million consumers in the U.S. are checking their phones at least five times an hour, why not give them the ability to call and text from your ads? Become a pro at measuring call and text response and see your direct response marketing campaign ROI soar. March 2017
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