Adaptive Marketers Unite

Alterian Hosts elevateCX Customer & Partner Event in Bristol

Posted by Roger Luxton

­The first UK elevateCX proved to be a welcome addition to Alterian Adaptive Marketers™ and proved a great forum to bring together our customers, partners, and staff to share knowledge, tips, and ideas.

CTO Chris Nolan opened proceedings by welcoming attendees and explaining how Alterian is positioning the Chameleon™ Adaptive Customer Experience™ Platform to recognize that marketers need to adapt to customer behavior in real time, across any channel, whilst having the insight to personalize that experience for every individual.

Proven ROI

Alex Thompson and I then continued this theme for the group by sharing ways in which Alterian is used to deliver business ROI. In addition to Alex’s top tips for success, I provided three use case stories as examples of the real business value that our customers are enjoying, which included demos of how Chameleon directly supports this success.

• “Ali Has So Much Data” examined predictive modeling
• “Jo is Not Informed” ran through multichannel automated and personalized campaigns
• “Jules Needs to Know” covered automated and interactive reporting

If you’re anything like our curious and eager attendees from elevateCX, you can learn more about these capabilities from our Insights and Campaign Manager product briefs. Rob Lamb from Bank of Ireland, John Holmes from Thomas Cook, and Peter Hall from GBG were all avid participants in this discussion, asking excellent questions to encourage a deeper level of understanding on these topics for the entire audience.

Two-Track Mind

After a quick break to continue discussions over drinks and pastries, it was back to one of two simultaneous streams. Alex led one, running through the new customer opportunity methodology that Alterian has developed. Based on practical experience, he ran through a sequence of tools and models designed to identify where to focus resources to optimize ROI. When he shared a customer engagement band to segment customers, it was good to hear experiences from customers working in as diverse sectors as travel, publishing, finance, and retail.

Next door, Odette Borsten and Mal Roberts provided an update on support developments and what Alterian is doing to make it even easier to raise and track feature requests and how they are evaluated for future releases. Following on, Tim Shire, Senior Technical Support Consultant, ran through a hypothetical support request delivering great hints and tips on what took look for, how to triage the issue to help customers, and how partners can identify and rectify issues quickly and efficiently.

GDPR: The Acronym on Everyone’s Mind

The hot topic of the moment, GDPR was on the elevateCX agenda in the afternoon session. After an introduction from Odette—managing to weave in a Game of Thrones meme and Star Wars intro—guest speaker Zach Thornton from the DMA talked through the implications of the legislation in detail. While it might feel scary, like that dragon ice-fire, it’s not so daunting; in fact, it’s a huge opportunity to review how you engage with your customers. Put the customer first. How would they feel about your use of their data? It’s not too difficult to put yourself in their shoes since we’re all consumers as well as marketers.

The scale of fines possible under GDPR are up to 4% of turnover. This certainly captured the room’s attention as Zach compared how a recent fine of £400k under current rules could now be £59m! Ultimately, the initial tension over GDPR throughout the room eased as our customers and partners became more comfortable and confident in the journey ahead. Zach has spent a lot of time in European parliament lobbying for data privacy issues; the audience loved his handling of detail, his expertise, and his engaging delivery and took the opportunity to ask questions throughout. Odette then closed the session by covering the practical steps that Alterian have already put in place and are completing to ensure our compliance with the new regime. We recognize that there is a lot of work to get aligned, but we’re always here to support our clients. And, as Zach assured, we have the guidance of the DMA as well. See? Not so scary after all.

Alterian Solutions

We then again split into two streams. Thang Nguyen took clients and customer through Alterian’s campaign manager health check workshop, highlighting the key benefits the workshop delivers including, improved solution performance, optimized data model and benchmark improvements against industry standards.

In the other stream, then Mike Read shared our Adaptive Customer Experience methodology, already used to good effect at several clients including ScottishPower, for which we’ve completed three unique case studies. Mike talked about how we use three models to easily turn client ideas into prioritized strategies: Opportunity Trees™, user stories, and service design. Stepping through these models, he explained he each worked, why they were useful tools, and how they’d helped to ensure success on recent projects.

Relevancy Over Reach

After a further chance to top up caffeine and sugar levels, the elevateCX delegates came together again for the final two sessions of the day. First, Alex Simonson, VP EMEA, and Matt Sawkins, Senior Product Marketing Manager, examined the changes in marketing, particularly within email. The primary assertion: Relevancy is becoming more important than just reach. Rarely does Alex miss out on having an animal in his presentation, and this time it was the humble fruitfly, as a way of highlighting the need to adapt.

Sharing Forrester research as well as our findings on inbox deliverability, the duo then covered how personalization using fast and slow data, Real-Time Adaptive Email (which can be updated in real time after send, open, and reopen), and a focus on inbox placement were becoming more important. The pair closed by examining the opportunities presented by ad tech and martech coming together, which will be very important in the coming months, and artificial intelligence, which needs to be guided and early adopters may waste time.

The Alterian Roadmap

In the final session, CTO Chris Nolan and product owners Mal Roberts and Pete Trevitt shared our roadmap. After a few slides to show how much the team will deliver during the coming months, they bought some of it to life with demos. Chris showed off Dynamic Decision Engine from a customer experience perspective as they interacted with our fictional retail brand, Acadian, across multiple channels in real time whilst Mal showed how the data was captured and the decisions triggered.

The pair repeated the approach in showing off Real-Time Adaptive Email, providing the ability to update email content in real time post-send. Lots of investment is also being made into our Insights and Campaign Manager functionality, and Pete showed our increased ability to deliver into any channel, highlighting Facebook, Twitter and apps in his demo before sharing how our new and improved insights will look and appear. Many of those in the audience currently running campaigns appreciated how this will make it even easier to understand a campaign audience as it’s selected, as well as how it responds. The final element of the session saw the team sharing again, in real time, how we are also now able to link Chameleon into the ad tech world to target display advertising directly at individuals.

Thank you

Thanks for all the enthusiastic contributions from our customers and partners who really made the day a success:

We hope that our attendees found elevateCX as valuable as our team did, as it offered such a balanced opportunity for us to teach and learn. I’m pleased to say the discussions continued over wine, beer, and nibbles well into the evening and I’m very much looking forward to the next event. If you’re interested in discussing prevalent marketing and customer experience topics, learning about Alterian solutions, and having a bit of fun, let us know. We’d love to invite you to a future elevateCX.