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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#634: Delivering seamless experiences with CDP, featuring Beth Scagnoli, Redpoint Global
00:30:32
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Beth Scagnoli
The agile brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show
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Co-host/Interviewer
are brands
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Greg Kilstrom
that lack a robust customer data platform strategy, losing the ability to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences in an increasingly data driven world. Today we're joined by Beth Scagnoli, Vice President of Product Manager at redpoint Global, a company at the forefront of data
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Co-host/Interviewer
driven customer experience solutions.
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Greg Kilstrom
Beth's experience spans customer data platforms, data quality and marketing automation, making her uniquely positioned to discuss how organizations can harness the power of clean, observable and composable data to create transformative customer experiences. Welcome to the show, Beth.
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Beth Scagnoli
Thank you so much.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, looking forward to talking about all this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give us a little more about your background and your current role at redpoint Global. And for those less familiar with redpoint, can you talk a little bit about what you offer?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, absolutely. So I start with sort of redpoint, my current role. So I, like you said VP of Product Management, which ultimately means responsible for product vision and strategy and all that comes with it. Right. So making sure that we continue to align with with our customers and what they need and what they want to do around the CDP space. I've been at Redpoint for 10 years. This month I think I've done all the things. I started in sort of operations, service desk, moved into services, some account management. We're dabbling in training. So I do think I have a pretty holistic view, let's say of our customers. So been here a While and really Redpoint was founded back in 2006 with the goal of, let's call it, driving personalization at scale. Right. That's really what everyone wanted to do, but it was sort of done in sort of a bifurcated way is what we had found. So we wanted to create this customer data platform product suite to solve that. Call it the CX Challenges right across data Insight, action. Kind of the theme that you're probably seeing across the board at cdp. So what we provide are capabilities around sort of the end to end. So when thinking about CDP it's data ingestion, quality, identity, resolution, segmentation, activation, GA orchestration all the way down. Right. As well as real time personalization. And really what we lean into is liberation of data. We are obsessed with data, potentially to a fault. So really thinking about how we can ensure that all of our customers, all of our users are making the best use of their data and really understanding why data is so critical and having our composable model, which we can talk about later, as well as deployment model that's pretty flexible, we allow for even regulated industries to use our solution. We can be SaaS, we can be private cloud, we can be hybrid. So really as an organization we are trying to be the best fit for the organization wherever they are. So meet them where they are and continue kind of down that path.
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Greg Kilstrom
Great.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Well, you are definitely the right person to talk with about this topic, so
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Greg Kilstrom
let's dive in here.
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Co-host/Interviewer
We have talked about customer data platforms on this show, but I think, you know, with, with everything moving so quickly and you know, to your point, the, the pressure really to deliver on personalization at scale, I think it's, you know, it continues to be a timely topic and really much at the forefront in a lot of marketers minds from your perspective and, and kind of just to start from, with, with the basics, so to speak, what makes a customer data platform so integral to delivering a great customer experience?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean I think at the most basic level, understanding your customers, your constituents and communicating with the one, the way that they want to be communicated with is paramount to that business model. And if you have six versions of your customer, right. You have BETH in your E Comm, you have BETH in your CRM, you have BETH in your web data, you are never really going to know the true beth. Right. Who is beth? What does BETH actually want? So sort of the main premise of a customer data platform is. Yes, sort of consolidating that data and creating a hub from which all other marketing activities can extend. But it's even beyond that consolidation. Right. It's not just throwing things in a pile. I think. You know, anyone that has children, you ask them to clean their room, they throw it in a Pile. It's not cleaning. Right. That's not helpful. Right. We want to make sure that when you bring all the data together, then you're also thinking about data hygiene, data quality, identity, resolution. That is correct to need to make sure things are always on. So I think, you know, customer data platform that is done correctly. Right. That's bringing the data together correctly is then going to allow you to know, yes, this Beth on Ecom. Is this Beth in my ecrm is this Beth over here on the web. And we're going to able to see that full picture and really deliver the experience that Beth wants, not each of these individual little bets along the way.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, well, and I think a couple things there, I mean, so, you know, I work with a lot of enterprise brands on things related to customer data. And you know, so two things here that I see, I mean, one, there are software platforms that are called CDPs. There's also this concept of like a customer data platform may extend beyond a single platform. But there's also the, the bad part of that is we've got many data systems and siloed data systems that, you know, it's one thing to have a broad sense of a customer data platform. It's another to have a bunch of disconnected and siloed systems. When businesses start making the, the, the switch from, you know, so many siloed and, and start consolidating, what are some of the most immediate benefits that they can expect from implementing a cohesive cdp?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean, I think it's having the right information about someone. Right. I think it's, there's a few different aspects to having those siloed systems. Like, like I said, one is you're just having, you don't have that holistic view, that unified profile. I know who this person is, you know who they are in different segments and different, you know, parts of their journey. But then, you know, additionally it's thinking about latency. Right. If you have your E comm system and so you can see that I made a purchase, but then getting that information about my purchase over to whoever I'm using for email or for push notifications is that 24 hours later, is that 60 hours later? Is that 10 minutes later? Right. So I think with a CDP done properly, you should be able to get to real time or near real time, which I think that, you know, improvements in data clouds, right, like the snowflake model and otherwise have made a huge difference here in terms of, you may have all these different systems, but if they're all pushing data ultimately to the same place. And that data is constantly being refreshed and updated and that profile is constantly being updated. You're going to know that Beth has made a purchase. I'm going to send a, you know, thanks for your purchase. I am going to remove Beth from, you know, any of my, my Google Ads, my Facebook ads and otherwise. Right. So some of that additional scale. Spend that additional overhead on making sure that we are communicating people with. On the right channels. That will be. That will go away. Right. Because you know, now you have that corrected version of, of the customer of the constituent. It's up to date, it's in real time or near real time. And now you can focus your attention on other things as opposed to shifting and moving data back and forth and kind of hoping for the best.
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Co-host/Interviewer
You recently wrote a blog about data observability. And you know, you mentioned how critical it is to ensure quality and accuracy. What is data observability? You know, is that. I think it's some of what you've already mentioned. But you know, what's, what's the, what's the definition of data observability? And you know, how does this support the effectiveness of a cdp?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, yeah. You know, thrilling stuff.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Data observers to some of us.
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Beth Scagnoli
You know, I think it's thrilling. I will say I did write down. So I think Gartner actually has a nice definition which is the continuous monitoring analysis of data pipelines and data quality to ensure data is reliable, consistent and usable for business purposes. So Right. Really covers kind of the full gamut. It's the timeliness, the accuracy, the completeness of your data and, and making sure that, you know, are those processes in place to ensure that that is happening, but also make that available to an end user. Right. You can be confident marketer you're sending to the. Right. Greg, because look at all the things we've put in place to kind of make sure of that. Right. And I think that's baseline just to a solid customer experience, you know, no matter what. Right. Send me the right email with the right personalization, but frankly it's required in a lot of regulated industries. Right, right. You can't send a prescription reminder to the wrong person about a. Right. You have to really think about, you know, with especially, you know, new security and privacy compliance laws always coming down the pipe. Right. You need to make sure that the data you have is fit for purpose in that way. I really, you know, I talk about it as the foundation like a, like a house. We use a Lot of analogies at Redpoint. Pretty cool like that. And we always talk about, you know, good data. Then those data observability concepts are the foundation. Right. So you're building a house, you pour a foundation, decide to pour only half. Yeah, I use play. D'oh. Sure. Probably not great ideas. Don't care how cool your design is, your furniture, everything else, if you don't get that foundation correct, everything is going to crumble. So really a lot of what we think about with data observability is, yes, making sure we have the ability to put those processes in place, to make sure they're there and always on. But also how can we let people know and not just say trust us, it's happening. Right. How can we show that? How can we prove that all of this is going on behind the scenes?
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, because I mean, isn't that, I mean there's lots of reasons for data silos and people doing one off things, but I mean one of the reasons for that is you hit on it already is marketers or those dealing with customer data just don't necessarily trust the source of that data. And so that's what I like about the observability concept is yes, it's also about accuracy of the information, but it's kind of the work about the work. Right. So it's like, here's why you should trust it to be accurate.
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Beth Scagnoli
Right, Exactly.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah. So how do companies start here or if they've already started, how do they continually identify and address some of these gaps in data observability so they can build towards what we're talking about here?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, and I think continually is a key word that you said there. Right. So I mean you start with the basics, right? Look, look at your current, the data that you have, right? Look at your, you know, if you have a CDP or something similar, right. Where you're consolidating data, you know, what is that process? Do you know where everything's coming from? Do you have access to all the data that you need to support whatever business outcomes you are trying to achieve? Do you know when that data is coming? Do you have always on data quality does identity resolution, is that using probabilistic and deterministic matching? Right. You can get super granular. And of course I could talk for 10 to 15 business days about this. But really start with the data. Start with understanding the landscape of your data and creating some sort of cohesive data strategy. And I would encourage that to be done not just in the IT vacuum. Right. This, even though it they're the ones you go to about data generally. We need to start extending this into business users, into marketing teams and beyond so that they also can really understand and weigh in on. No, I need this data because this will support X, Y and Z. So you know, that initial audit is of course my recommendation. And then really from there leaning into the basics and you know, making those basics programmatic, making them automated. Like I said, always on data quality, always on identity resolution. Data is fluid. You can't do this once and be like cool, we're done, everything's great. It needs to be continual, evolving process.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah. So another topic, top of mind for a lot of organizations now is composability composable. Being talked about a lot and not just in CDPs but a lot of areas of Martech and the enterprise. Written about composability as well and talked about a flexible approach to managing customer data. How do you see a composable data strategy empowering brands to be able to, you know, do do all the things they need to adapt quickly, adapt to changing customer expectations and even you know, other other technology opportunities that arise?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, composability on its face sounds great. You've swapped things in and out. It's Legos, it's super easy. I pick what I want and I just pop it in. What could be hard and I think that could be the case. Right. I think that you know, composability just, you know, level set. Where I think about it, it's just that modular approach. Right. I got to build a solution I want to use best of breed. If anyone's seen that the Scott Brinker Martech map that is just mind blowing with proliferation of just stuff. Yeah, I want to be able to get the cool, the newer, the faster, the better, the cheaper. But composability does come with risks. Right? Composability. Then you need to have an IT team, especially in this case that really does understand API driven architecture, how different applications integrate with each other. Right. Composability can be great if you want to say I want to use one tool for my segmentation and I want to use a different tool for my identity resolution. Great. How about it? That's wonderful. That's not going to be super helpful if you know the tool you're using for identity resolution. It's a six day latency between getting that unified data over to segmentation tool. Right. So really, yes you could, they can be super adaptable if you have, you know, select the right solution that does either from a single vendor or multiple vendors allow you to sort of expand and contract and expand vertically and horizontally across different areas of a cdp. Because you can. Right. I think especially in the case of those downstream channels. Right. As new ways of communicating pop up, being able to bring in those communication channels pretty easily. Right. Think push button connectors. That's where I think composability does have the greatest advantage. It can be dicier. I wouldn't be swapping in and out your underlying data model and data ingestion processes on a daily basis. But I think thinking about data as the hub and then those composable aspects as the augmenters, the senders to the various channels, it makes a lot of sense.
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Co-host/Interviewer
We've talked about observability and some of those challenges there. Let's talk a little bit about. You wrote a blog as well about marketing autom and the, the importance of clean data. And so, you know, we've talked about observable data. Okay. Now it's got to be clean too, right? So you know, how does, how do you look at this, you know, and, and clean data's ability to influence ROI and, and other benefits.
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean, I'm a broken record. Right. But, but ultimately without that clean data that has, you know, yes, it's clean, but also has been properly unified, you could buy the coolest automation tool on the planet. You could have the finest content that money can buy. But if you are, you know, servicing that content to a consumer that does not care about it because you don't have all the information about that person, it just doesn't matter. Right. So ultimately the return on the investment, you need to have the basis in your data, in your data strategy in order to then leverage all of the benefits of, of a marketing automation tool or otherwise.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. And so one of those benefits is certainly personalization. As you know, as we talked about at the top of the show, you know that delivering that personalization at scale is certainly top of mind, I think. You know, I feel like we've been talking about personalizing and one to one and stuff for like decades at this point, maybe it's been a decade. But it's, we've been talking about it for a while. But I do feel optimistic that, you know, with everything from some of the benefits of like gen AI and some other things, like we're, we're looking at really being able to make this happen. How, what, what part does the CDP play in? There's lots of, there's obviously lots of tools, you know, at play in one to one personalization at scale. But what's, what's the role of the CDP to help to, you know, deliver across all those touch points and everything like that.
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, and I think, you know, a lot of this depends on who you ask about the definition of a cdp, because I see that as being a moving target too. But you know, I'll say obviously the unified profile is the first step, right. So that you know everything there is to know about this particular customer. But then I think most CDPs, at least at this point, do have the concept of dynamic segmentation. Right. So you're not building segments once a month and then, you know, kind of hoping that they don't buy anything because they're in the lapsed map per segment or something. Right. So you should, as a part of your journey, orchestration how you manage your campaigns, be able to have that level of dynamic segmentation that is then based on that updated in real time or near real time unified profile. Right. So we should not have to think about how old my data is when I am thinking about, you know, more of always on type campaigns, evergreen, like a welcome message or your strategy with, with Google Ads, with Facebook ads and otherwise. Right. All CDP should manage that for you. You should feel confident that whatever I deploy today, everyone who's in that targeted audience is going to be, you know, qualified. They make sense to appear in this audience. Right. So things like abandoned cart, you don't want me to put things on my cart. And then 10 days later you're like, hey girl, sorry, there's something in your cart. I'm like, what are you. That was 3am I don't even remember that. Right. You need to be making sure the cadence at which you communicate can be aligned with what the customer is expecting. And that won't happen unless you have your data. Correct. You have that dynamic segmentation and you have the ability to then communicate with those downstream channels really as quickly as they can be communicated with. And I agree. I think that thinking about segments of one, we're seeing, especially at Redpoint, the idea of micro segments and really getting down to you don't need to use just the straight up RFM type scores anymore. We could really shrink this and get to what does Greg want to see right now, today, you know, as we're recording this, what, what would make you go ahead and, you know, click that call to action. And I think that's going to keep getting to your point with Gen AI more and more important, right. We can't expect anything to Be static ever again.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, well, and the, you know, the, the end result there, obviously, you know, if you sell products, it's, you know, you want to sell more of them. But I think, you know, the end, the end goal is really it's loyalty, right? It's, it's customers that buy more, buy more often and refer others and, and stuff. So for those that may be, I don't know if they're skeptics so much as there's a lot of priorities in an organization. So those that are not prioritizing this, you know, how do you make the case for just the, the, the connection between this clean data, observable data and available data to things like customer loyalty?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we talk a lot about this with our existing customer base. Right. You know, we, we talk about, you know, what are your goals, how do you, you know, what do you want to do with your customers. And I think one thing just as an example that comes down a lot is sort of a reduction in friction. And a lot of that comes down to call it, you know, call center engagement or front desk or, you know, other clientele. Right. How annoying is it if you call somewhere, you give your information and then you're transferred from here to there to there and you're giving the same information over and over. It's just like what is happening? How, how am I down in this, you know, seventh circle of hell. So like for example, we have a hotel chain that uses, you know, our CDP data within their journey really to reduce that friction when you come to the hotel, right? So we are driving communication on check in. We are sending you push notifications like hey, it's happy hour. We know that you enjoy a happy hour. We're sending you receipts on checkout, we're sending you follow up emails for hey, you forgot to pay your bar tab last night. Right? So not, none of this maybe is a specific NPS score on, you know, your bar tab on paid email. But knowing, you know, who I am, you know, within reason, not creepily, right. And I'm not repeating myself. Constantly providing IDs, providing my phone number 15 times is going to make me a more loyal customer. It just, it just is, right? I, I think about my, even my local mechanic, right? You know, is he the cheapest in town? No. But every time I call, he says, hey Beth, he knows exactly what I drive, exactly sorts of problems I have. And that's going to make me go back to him because I trust him. All of it is leading up to do I trust this brand and I think CDP plays a huge role in, and that level of trustworthiness between, you know, a consumer and the brand they're dealing with.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, so we've touched on a little bit, but you know, I do have this. I should just codify the rule here. But you know, we've got to talk about AI because, you know, it's in 2024 it was like, you know, we had to, we still do. It's 2025 now. So, you know, what do you see? You know, we've, we've touched a little bit on this and you know, there's AI, there's a very broad umbrella, but we touched a little bit on gen AI. There's obviously some other AI tools at play with some of the data tools and everything. Where do you see, given it's 2025 now and we've been talking about at least Genai for a couple years now, where do you see some of the role of AI playing in enhancing a CDP's capabilities?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean, so AI, you know, not gen AI, but right, AI, machine learning, that's been around for 50 years or something. Right. You know, this needs to be there. Right? You, you should have, you know, you know, AI as a function of identity resolution. Right. AI is a function of machine learning for, you know, generating models. Right. So predictive analytics. Yes. I think that, you know, what I'm seeing now is previously you'd kind of send out your data and then a month later you'd get it back scored and it's like, cool, I hope nothing's happened in that month. But, but here we are. Right. So I think that it's becoming table stakes. Right. You need to kind of come bearing gifts of, of here's the five different models we're going to score your data on. Are they all going to be relevant? Probably not as a generic model. A good idea, probably not. But again, we need to have a starting point especially for, you know, those organizations that maybe are just starting. Right. They're just evolving their Martech Stark that they're dipping their toes into the wonderful world of Martech. How can we start to help them understand their data? So I do think, yes, hopefully, you know, genericization of models will become less generic. Right. Using AI in, you know, but, but ultimately that, that does need to be a part of a standard cdp, I think. And I think from a gen AI perspective, you know, it's trust but verifier. Right. We all use ChatGPT and Claude and otherwise and it's Great. And it is insane sometimes some of the things that it comes up with. So I think that, you know, what we did at redpoint is really thinking about AI to augment what you already have. Right. So using natural language to generate a segment. Right. You know, if you're someone, you're a business user, you don't know relational databases, ands and ors in parentheses. I don't want to write code, I just want to tell you what I want. And I want you to show me what you built. I think that kind of a use case makes a lot of sense and I think, you know, content generation or at least as a starting point, right. Write me a cool Black Friday email, make it moderately funny and less than 300 characters or something like that. Right. I don't want to put anyone out of business, but I think some of the overhead that comes with AB tests that is just, you know, a variation on a subject line. How can we use AI to start to augment that a little bit more as well?
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, well. And where do you see the future of CDP is. I mean, you know, as they've been. I know the, the, the Magic Quadrant hasn't been around for that long, but CDPs have been around for. Sorry, Gardner. But the, the, the CDP has been around for, you know, over, over a decade at this point in some, in some capacity.
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Greg Kilstrom
What do you see on the horizon
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Co-host/Interviewer
for, you know, what, what will a CDP look like in, you know, in a few years?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the same. To the extent that the basic functionality. I do think, yes, there will be more AI, you know, both for the hype, but also as AI gets better and as things like Snowflake Cortex, right, where it's just sort of built into the product, so why not use it? I do think there's going to be more of that, more of kind of chatting with your cdp, letting your CDP tell you more about your data, as opposed to kind of vice versa. And I think privacy, right. I mean, more and more, you know, there is this hyper vigilance around privacy and data regulation and security and compliance. I think there'll need to be more of an evolution around that to make sure that you can very confidently say, yes, my data is being handled securely and it's compliant and it's ethical and making that available in the context of the cdp. Again, you know, similar to data observability as opposed to just trust us. No, show me, show me how this is happening and then, you know, real time forever, Right? Real time who knows what that means, right? Real time can mean that day. It could mean within 30 milliseconds. We've seen it both ways. We should be able to handle it both ways. So as you know, maybe if TikTok may be going away, who knows. But making about the attention span of consumers, you can't wait a week. You can't give me, make me wait a minute for something. Right. I need something immediately and when I want it. So I think moving, you know, continuing to move toward improved real time data processing especially is definitely something that we are, we are heading toward, among other things.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love it. Well, thanks again for all your insights, Beth. One last question for you. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Beth Scagnoli
Yeah, I mean I read the things, I listen to the podcasts. Right. I think that, you know, LinkedIn, as much as it can be a bit of a cesspool, sorry, LinkedIn. There are a number of, I guess influencers that I do follow that had interesting thoughts on the evolution of product management, especially as it, you know, starts to merge or unmerge in various places with product marketing. I think that role in and of itself is shifting and really just talking to others like me, I'm in a number of sort of product management focus groups and women in product and that sort of thing. And I think just talking to real people, doing real jobs is another way that I try to stay on top of things. But otherwise it's yeah, chatting with customers, reading the books, listening to the podcasts like this.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, love it. Well, thanks again. I'd like to thank Beth Scagnoli, Vice President of Product Management at Redpoint Global, for joining the show. You can learn more about Beth and
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Greg Kilstrom
Redpoint Global by following the links in the show.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Notes Notes
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Greg Kilstrom
thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greg kilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op from ideation to creation. They craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Beth Scagnoli
The agile brand.