Enhancing the Big E - experience - that a CMO now owns: With Glen Hartman, Accenture Interactive

Watch Glen Hartman, Managing Director at Accenture Interactive talk about delivering meaningful experiences with a new type of capability - one that combines all the greatest parts of creative, branding and marketing linked to technology, analytics and data. According to him, the core components of CX are empathizing with the customer, providing context and personalization. Glen’s career began in direct marketing, advertising agencies and digital start-ups where he led award-winning campaigns and omnichannel experiences for Fortune 500 clients. He received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and completed the graduate program in music and film composition from the Grove School of Music.

Watch Glen’s interview at https://www.martechadvisor.com/interviews/performance-and-attribution/enhancing-the-big-e-experience-that-a-cmo-now-owns-with-glen-hartman-accenture-interactive/ .

Check out these memorable moments from Glen’s interview:

0:09- What is the value proposition of an ‘experience agency’ and why is there a demand for this kind of service?
2:33- What should a CMO be looking for in a customer experience partner?
3:37- Will such agencies own ‘technology’ the way agencies previously owned ‘the creative idea’?
7:16- What exactly is customer experience and what are the core components of it?
8:35- Should a CMO focus on one big goal or multiple KPIs?
12:14- What are the challenges with personalization at scale?
CI:

WHAT IS THE VALUE PROPOSITION OF AN ‘EXPERIENCE AGENCY’ AND WHY IS THERE A DEMAND FOR THIS KIND OF SERVICE TODAY?

GH:

It's a very exciting time out there for marketers and brands. The demands from customers - B2B or B2C or even employees as they're engaging with brands - are changing so quickly.

“The demand is very high for very personalized and meaningful and useful experiences. To be able to deliver those experiences you really need to have a new type of capability - that combines all the greatest parts of creative and branding and marketing which is now inextricably linked to technology and analytics and data”

and even understanding how to organize a company’s different operating models etc., that needs a management consulting type skill as well. So, when all these come together, they're needed to be able to deliver those new types of messages.

So, for Accenture Interactive, we're really excited because everyone knows Accenture for being a very strong player in the technology space and in the analytic space for many years and largely for serving the CIO. We're trying to do what Accenture had done for years for the CIO and back-end technology for all of the things that the CMO cares about - and all of the ways that a brand could touch a customer. It's bringing together all these things that really make that possible.

When I say experiences, when we're talking about the new evolution and the way the CMOs role has changed, it's not just messaging or branding, advertising, it's what we call the Big E, experience, which we think the CMO now own. That could be marketing, sales, customer service, loyalty - the full customer journey is really what we're seeing the CMO is addressing head-on. When we talk about experience, it's not so much experience design or UX or something tactical - we really mean the full customer.

CI:

WHAT SHOULD A CMO BE LOOKING FOR IN A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PARTNER?

GH:

“They really should be looking for a partner that sits at the intersection of brand and creative with technology enablement and analytics and understanding of the change management and the organizational structures to be able to reverse engineer around the customer.”

Everybody's been talking about customer centricity since forever. It's not a new idea to be customer-centric but the way to enable that now is really why Accenture Interactive exists. It's a new type of provider, it's a new way of looking at creative. We actually call it the new creative. In that sometimes when people think of the way that a consulting firm would approach something is maybe more from a process standpoint and not necessarily the creative side.

CI:

WILL SUCH AGENCIES OWN ‘TECHNOLOGY’ THE WAY AGENCIES PREVIOUSLY OWNED ‘THE CREATIVE IDEA’?

GH:

Yeah, it's a great question and it's been around for a long time. There are always new technologies and in the promise of technology to solve things, it's always going to be there. But we are really focused on something a little different.

“When we look at technology, it's truly as an enabler to drive the best experiences on the planet. “

When we talk about that and we start to reverse engineer around different types of customer journeys and asking how the technology can enable this kind of journey - how can it help someone check into a hotel easier, how could it help them buy groceries better, how could it help a B2B firm do sales enablement or an insurance company to help their agents - whatever the experience might be, we're actually focused on the end experience in a very different way.

So - what we do now, I think the best example of this would be a new way that we look at performance. There are many companies out there, they can install all the technology stacks that are out there. Take any one of the leading providers - campaign management or content management or e-commerce or all those things. The important part for us is the coming together of all them to drive some kind of business outcome. When I say we're looking at performance differently, let me give you a more tangible example. So, we're working with an automotive manufacturer today, it's a global project. We have all of their marketing, omnichannel marketing, mobile, social, paid, earning, on media, all the campaigns, email, the whole thing and we're trying to promote test drives and we're actually working with the dealers as well. We're also helping manage some of the transactions around the sales, like from test drive, getting leads in and having people actually buy cars. So, there's full technology enablement around every part of that - service providers, content and commerce, online and offline and the systems that they use in the dealer, lots and lots of technology. And we get paid on performance only - net new cars sold. Not time and materials or fixed pay contracts or some ways that you would think of consulting and not even necessarily on something like marketing online.

It's where we work with the CMO in this evolving role that they have. To have she or he walks over to the Chief Revenue Officer, the Chief Sales Officer and says ‘Listen, I want to sign up for your number together, let's team up’. This helps drive a whole new different set of outcomes and KPIs. It allows them to look at a service provider like Accenture Interactive in a new way. Since we're willing to sign up just for a business outcome, the technology becomes secondary.

“They rely on us to be able to pick the right technology and to be able to install it and integrate it and run it - but it's less important for them to look at features and functions and figure out how this stack is going to fit with that stack - because we are promising that we'll be able to do that.”

But we measure the success not in uptime or reliability or some of the service level agreements to come with software licenses but instead with business outcome - did we acquire customers; did we get more test drives, and did we sell more cars over the previous quarter? So, this is a new way of looking at it.

EXPERIENCE PARTNERS:

HELP FOCUS ON BUSINESS OUTCOMES
BRING A DIFFERENT FOCUS TO THE END CUSTOMERS AND THEIR EXPERIENCE
HELP MANAGE TECHNOLOGY BUT IT IS SECONDARY TO OUTCOMES
CI:

WHAT EXACTLY IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CORE COMPONENTS OF IT?

GH:

The Big E means something more. Not just the full lifecycle - which is important - but it also stands at Accenture Interactive at the heart for empathy. So, the idea is when you start to look at the experience it's good to have the right message at the right time to the right person and do personalization and that's all very important. But we're kind of taking this stuff one step further when we're trying to empathize with the customer and provide context about what they're trying to do and the goals they're trying to have. So even when you start to look at this full customer journey and customer centricity, a lot of companies are still looking at things in terms of the company's success - did we acquire someone, did we convert them, even this language sounds. No one wants to be acquired or converted, right. But if we change the language to be more empathetic -, did we help them, or did we service number, did we understand them - this way of thinking has a different kind of context.

ADDING A LAYER OF EMPATHY TO EXPERIENCE AND ENGAGEMENT CAN DELIVER A HUGE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE TO BRANDS
IT IS A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT EXPERIENCE AND SUCCESS (FROM THE CUSTOMERS POINT OF VIEW)
CI:

SHOULD A CMO FOCUS ON ONE BIG GOAL OR MULTIPLE KPIs?

GH:

I believe that they need to think about how marketing KPIs or outcomes are influencing other parts of the firm. So, this is different for B2B or B2C - understanding exactly what the outcome might be that they can start to influence - but it has to be more than just marketing ROI and return on investment for advertising or other kinds of marketing techniques. The tangible nature of business outcome is changing as well.

It's interesting because a lot of times we're talking to CMOs, they have a great vision, they know what to do. Having us educate them on new creative ideas on how to be customer-centric can be funny because they are obviously the best in class and they know their customers really well.

“But it's getting to that vision - the speed to the vision and being able to even get there at all is sometimes the biggest challenge. “

So, you can pick metrics that would help you get to that end vision and that could be that one big goal.

“The one thing that I would add to that though is that in this environment it's very important to set up a way to do test and learn while you're going after that big goal because there's a lot of dynamic changes within the market and with what your customers want, and as new products come out it's a variety of different things. “

So yes, you can set one big goal and I think it's great especially if it's a shared goal across different parts of the organization like technology or sales or other which is great. So, people can all rally around that one North Star but it's very important to understand the need to innovate and have a way to innovate. So right now, get something set up, you're going after that goal and you try different experiments and test and learn in different environments. Providers like Accenture Interactive could set it up so that we can learn and course-correct. There may be multiple paths to get to that end goal that is not linear or maybe somewhat unexpected. Especially with all the new types of technologies that are coming into play, every one of them seems like the next panacea. It's hard to go to a conference now without talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence and blockchain and all the rest of these things that are supposed to change the way everything w. We've all known from history that's not the case and that they're great enablers but that still need to test and learn and of course correct to be able to figure out how to use the old technologies, the current ones and then that new on the way to that goal.

That's where the CMO really becomes valuable because everyone else is trying to standardize on the key things they can repeat over again in this nuance. Actually, it's not a nuance anymore,

“Its core understanding of how to be flexible, how to create living experiences for the customer. It's really CMOs biggest challenge and opportunity at the same time.”

WHETHER THE CMO’S FOCUS IS ON ONE NORTH STAR GOAL OR MULTIPLE KPI’S, THE SYSTEM SHOULD BE SET UP TO TEST, OPTIMIZE AND RESPOND FLEXIBLY TO CUSTOMER AND MARKET DYNAMICS

CI:

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES WITH PERSONALIZATION AT SCALE?

GH:

Personalization is very important and the next generation of that is really around context in understanding the intent of someone. So, you can look at their demographic data or their purchase information and tell a whole bunch of things about someone that are very relevant.

“Not having that context will be the biggest challenge and the big difference is understanding not what a customer wants or what they do or what they bought. “

So, you can look at their purchase information and see that they bought these three things. Maybe they would like similar things. Not what they bought but why they bought it. So yeah they bought shampoo but why did they buy that, in that context it's something we have developed here at Accenture Interactive called the Customer Genome which takes all the demographic information and all those things that people are talking about forever - the 360-degree view with all this data, new data sets - and that's important but then adding this context around it as to why they would buy something - leads to a much different approach and it helps marketers move across brands. If you understand that people like a certain taste or a certain smell or certain feel or tactile thing that would help drive sales from shampoo to clothing and different kinds of decisions for other products.

“So that's why machine learning and artificial intelligence is all important. It’s very valuable - but without that context - without the human connection, without really empathizing and understanding what those are - the personalization will fall flat or won't evolve to anything more than ‘well, I bought a book, so let me recommend another one’. “

There are lots of things that are related to taste in a way the experience would actually manifest itself on top of that.

It's a different approach than just learning more and mining more data by delivering a personalized message and it's felt well by the customer.

FOCUSING ON WHY CUSTOMERS BUY VERSUS WHAT THEY BUY IS A CRUCIAL NUANCE OF PERSONALIZATION
THE SAME CUSTOMER WILL HAVE DIFFERENT NEEDS IN DIFFERENT SITUATION –YOUR SYSTEM SHOULD ALLOW FOR TESTING AND FLEXIBILITY WITH PERSONALIZATION
APPLYING ANALYTICS IN REAL-TIME TO THE TECHNOLOGY ADDS TO THE CONTEXT OF THE EXPERIENCE

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