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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#692: The lifetime value of milliseconds in the customer experience with Jaxon Repp, Harper
00:24:34
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- [00:00]
Greg Kilstrom
What if your customer experience and culture strategy didn't just create value but actually funded your growth? I'm inviting you to join me in a powerful mastermind group I'm co leading with Journey Spark Consulting. It's called the CX and Culture Connection, creating a self funding growth flywheel and it brings together CX and culture leaders who want to drive change, build stronger internal collaboration and actually reinvest efficiency savings into growth driving initiatives. This isn't just theory. You'll get monthly virtual sessions, one on one coaching, quarterly workshops and access to the Value Accelerator tools focused on strategy, cultural alignment and voice of customer. Plus you'll connect with leaders across functions from marketing to product to ops who are facing the same challenges and pushing towards the same goals. Up to four team members can participate from your organization so you're building alignment while building momentum. Want in, learn more and sign up at journeysparkconsulting.com that's journeysparkconsulting.com mastermind let's turn your CX investment into a growth engine. The Agile Brand 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. Now onto the show. Agility can often get framed as driving massive transformation, but sometimes it's the milliseconds that matter. When every digital moment counts, small gains in speed and efficiency can have a disproportionately large impact on customer lifetime value and brand loyalty. If you could speed up every digital interaction your customers have with your brand by a full second, what would that be worth to your business? Today we're going to talk about how even seemingly minor improvements in speed and performance can have outsized impact on customer experience and revenue. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Jackson Repping Field CTO at Harper Jackson. Welcome to the show.
- [02:51]
Jackson Repp
Thank you very much for having me today.
- [02:53]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I should say welcome back to the show because you're a returning champion here. So good to have you here. For those that didn't catch your last appearance here, can you give a little bit about your background and what you're doing at Harper to help brands improve their digital performance?
- [03:09]
Jackson Repp
Sure. I am the field CTO at Harper, which basically means I'm a grown up sales engineer that rather than not caring at all about the money and the revenue and the business model behind like solving the awesome problems we get to solve every day, I have at least some awareness of the fact that we do need to be profitable and deliver return on investment for our customers.
- [03:32]
Greg Kilstrom
Got it, got it. Nice, Nice. Well, yeah, let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things today. But I want to start with what I touched on at the intro and just the speed, efficiency and experience that customers are really expecting and in some cases demanding. So in a world where 70% of consumers say speed impacts buying behavior, how do you think brands are and why are brands still missing the mark when it comes to performance?
- [04:01]
Jackson Repp
I think like all things in business, there, there are points of diminishing returns where I can absolutely set up one server per every customer and personalize everything and make it super fast. Is it's just literally you alone asking a database a question and getting back information and personalized content that does not scale. It's not any way to run a real business. So as you begin to do different things to appeal to your wide customer base, vertically scaling and adding resources to solve those problems in a non distributed application format is, is always going to fail at a certain level. So the more we can distribute that load, the more we can do, and I think brands are rightly, perhaps intimidated by the prospect of distributing that load and figuring out how to give an acceptable experience with an acceptable cost structure for that widely distributed audience base. So it's not that brands don't know what they want to do, what they want those numbers to be, how they want to personalize, you know, what a B tests they want to run. It's how do I deliver that for an audience of, you know, 100 million users, you know, spread around the globe and delivering, you know, a proper return on that investment.
- [05:30]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, when we talk about agility, I mean, you know, I work with a lot of large organizations on agility and transformation initiatives, these big picture, large scale things. I think that's what a lot of people have in their minds, and certainly there's a lot of those going on and in progress. But what we're talking about here is it may be large scale, but it's made up of a few milliseconds at a time, right? So how can a few milliseconds change customer behavior at scale?
- [06:06]
Jackson Repp
Well, in short, they add up, right? So every, every function from, from querying my shopping cart to delivering me a bit of content in the product description that is perhaps tuned just for me based on an advertising campaign or a cohort or something, you know, about me, all of those things add up to am I able to click the button once you've finally convinced me? And am I even still on the page because it took too long to load? Because it's hard to make it perfect for every single person? So you begin to identify cohorts of individuals. These 10,000 of my 10 million users respond in this way. And how do you isolate, identify, deliver that content to them? And then when you are doing it 10 milliseconds faster or 100 milliseconds faster, not even a second, you begin to look at what those response rates are. And Amazon and lots of people have done very real studies that say for every x milliseconds, your conversions will increase by this much. What a conversion is for you obviously will map to revenue for some of our more sophisticated customers. They know exactly when we save 100 milliseconds on delivering page content or customized content or AB testing. They know exactly how many millions of dollars that might make them over the course of a year. Others, it's very much a lagging indicator. So is a more performance site that is indexed more rapidly by a search engine. I'm going to end up with a better score, which perhaps ranks ahead of a competitor. And now all of a sudden you're third instead of fifth. And all of a sudden I've got a revenue uptick. And so it's really data driven. But you map it back ultimately to those performance metrics.
- [08:04]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's, let's talk a little bit about composability and, you know, modern web infrastructure, you know, we talk quite a bit on the show about, about composability and, you know, just the benefits of flexibility and best of breed and all those kinds of things. There's less conversations about speed when talking about composability. How do you see performance fitting into the broader conversation about composability?
- [08:32]
Jackson Repp
I think being able to assemble a host of functions that Perform whatever the outcome is for your user is very appealing. You think back to every language ever has had the concept of, you know, NPM has packages and Ruby had gems. And like everybody has ways to things make things easier, but you get into inevitably like, this is the package I want to use, but it doesn't do exactly what I want to do. So how do I build on top of that to make it do exactly what I do? And now you're seven layers away from the actual core functionality. And I, I don't need everybody to write all their back end in C. But at the end of the day, what we focused on was we know we want to make something extensible. How do we allow that abstraction to not take away from the underlying performance? So when we built our platform, we combined, you know, the database, the API layer, the in memory cache, the modern and the, the interfaces, HTTP, HTTP or streaming, and we basically put them all into one package so that no matter how you composed those individual attributes of your project, they were all sitting directly on top of that persistence layer, which at the end of the day, the data drives everything. So we wanted to make sure that those individual functions that you write are as close to the bare metal as possible in a modern application structure where nobody's really sitting on top of bare metal anymore. But we wanted to at least make you give you a head start toward a performance solution, because lots of us can build prototypes that function, but as soon as you go to scale, everything falls apart. And that was really the problem we were trying to solve for.
- [10:21]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, and I mean, it seems like it's similar, but different challenge. I mean, in a composable environment, you've got a number of different sources with a number of different perhaps approaches to speed and performance even, or just maybe different tolerances for that. So, I mean, it becomes really important to choose the right part as opposed to the monolithic. You know, you kind of get what you get, I guess. But you know, in a composable environment, speed and performance, I mean, that should be a very important aspect of choice, right? In addition to features and things like that, Correct?
- [10:59]
Jackson Repp
Exactly. At the end of the day, we want to allow you to be as flexible as possible. We want you to just be able to write the function that seems to make the most sense. And when that function is directly on top of the data, we might argue about your for loop, we might argue about the structure of your reduce function, but at the end of the day, all of that's going to be relatively fast running in ram. But how can we make sure that it plays well with all the other components, that they all interact well together and that they all sit at effectively the same level so that I don't have a hierarchical tree of functions that kind of cascade in efficiencies across my cluster?
- [11:45]
Greg Kilstrom
Want to learn more and join the discussion About Marketing and AI? Attend the premier conference dedicated to marketing and AI. That's Meacon, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference. From October 14 through 16 in Cleveland, Ohio. Meikon brings together the brightest minds and leading voices in AI. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with a dynamic community of experts, visionaries and enthusiasts. The Agile brand is proud to be the lead media sponsor of this important event. Register today@marketingai institute.com that's marketing AI institute.com and use the code Agile150 for $150 off your registration fee. I can't wait to see you there. So there's a lot of marketers and folks listening to this show. They're very focused on customers and so, you know, they know customers want fast access and availability, but they're also often looking at the features of an application, not necessarily at the speed and performance. You know, they're assuming someone's looking at that and that it's, it's performance and all that. What should marketing and CX leaders be asking their tech teams who are inevitably, you know, being charged with some of this evaluating performance, you know, what should they be asking when it comes to ensuring both scalability as well as performance in a composable stack?
- [13:16]
Jackson Repp
I think every developer at one point or another has built the perfect application that would have scaled flawlessly across the entire universe. And then the marketing team comes in and adds like 27 measurement scripts to your application and you don't feel like you're getting everything that you built communicated. And all of these other things kind of sit out to the side. So I really kind of want to say, and we ask this of our customers all the time, what are the real numbers that you are after? Because there's a chance that a really well structured application can capture all of the metrics that you're after. We're not going to be a Google Analytics. You're going to push stuff off. Everybody has a dashboard that's perfectly formatted for what they want. But if we can be that kind of first principle source of truth, then we can push that raw data in. And a lot of times there aren't need for a ton of client side stuff. If we can extract performance metrics, query metrics user metrics from the back end and reduce kind of the pantheon of tools that often get applied on the client side because a lot of those rely on know that browser to execute things in order. And inevitably some of the, some of the time that gets in the way of what that actual user wants, which is to simply click the button by the thing.
- [14:48]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The marketers want to see every little step in the process, but the customer just wants what they, what they want. Right. It's. And both are, both are valuable. But, but you know, to your point, one, one shouldn't get in the way of the other. And that kind of brings me to the, I want to get back to the, the business case here and the business value of speed and a faster site doesn't just feel better. Certainly we as consumers know sites that load fast or others that we will do anything to avoid. Probably. But faster sites drive conversion, satisfaction, loyalty. How are your customers translating performance gains into measurable business outcomes?
- [15:32]
Jackson Repp
I think in many ways we look at that as a two tier process. The first is what do SEO bots see? Because for a lot of them it is where they are ranked, which is their number one concern when they come to us. It's my page is slow, but it's negatively affecting how consumers find me. Not even to the point of how they experience you. So what can we do to improve core web vitals like lcp? Time to first byte those things that will get you ranked higher. And those are very easy for us to do as just kind of that front layer. Next are the things that truly impact conversion like personalization, A, B testing. And that is a, it's a heavier lift. But our platform is designed to allow you to accommodate all of that personalization and testing for groups very efficiently by providing everything you need in one box and deploying that, even though it is, you know, a little bit of porting your application potentially or moving your APIs onto a distributed infrastructure. We try to make that as easy as possible because the real solution for scale is horizontal and the real solution for personalization and the real outcomes of feeling like that site is truly targeting me and giving me everything I need is some sort of infrastructure that can do that on a cost effective manner at scale for users that might be distributed across the entire world.
- [17:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so maybe to ask the inverse of that question, but you touched a little bit on some of this already. But as is probably always the case, teams are being asked to do more with less. And so they're being asked to prioritize And a lot of times the things that get prioritized are like the new fancy features and the new, not necessarily making a site more performant and all those kinds of things. What's the cost of inaction here? Of simply saying, oh well, yeah, we'll get to that because we really want to launch this other thing or whatever the case may be. What are brands risking if they don't make performance a priority?
- [17:46]
Jackson Repp
I think the first is that you are judged relative to your competitors and everybody is trying to make things faster. They are also trying to launch new features and new personalizations and including AI generated content and all of the other things that they're trying to do. And historically what we've seen is the old school sites that are really, really plain. If you look at Amazon when you are searching, you know, for any given thing, their results are very good because those pages are very simple. They, they are very easy for a bot to index and they are very performant and easy for me to use. When you are attempting to compete against an unlimited infrastructure kind of competitor, you are tasked with a lot of things. You have to cache, you have to distribute, you have to ensure that you have multiple layers of performance enhancing attributes as part of your solution. And everybody is doing that at the same time. So I would say as you are trying to add all of these new features, inevitably what occurs is it feels really good for a while and then maybe you get a little traction, maybe you become slightly more popular. Maybe there's a new feature that everybody loves and they all go, if that feature doesn't scale, if that feature slows you down, you're behind actually where you were when you started. And that is usually when people end up coming to us. They say this was the most amazing idea ever. Ultimately the execution fell down because of the stack we used or the paradigm we kind of conceived of, or we were operating, you know, with infrastructure choices that we made five years ago and they're not built to support that. Can you help us? And that's ultimately where we play, is helping deliver a more composable, intelligent performance stack to again allow you to scale those cool features to address that wider audience and to ultimately deliver that return.
- [19:56]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, Love it. Well, Jackson, thanks so much for all your ideas and insights here. One last question for you before we wrap up. I'd 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?
- [20:10]
Jackson Repp
I think being kind of the customer facing sales engineer, it is always an interesting challenge. All the challenges are different. They certainly play in the performance realm, they often play in the digital commerce and conversion realm. But every problem comes with its own unique challenges. So you are by definition agile in this role. And I think as an organization we are constantly looking at the variety of challenges issued to us by our customers and trying to stay one level abstracted above that and say across all of these customers, how does our platform in its uniquely composable paradigm, how can it address many birds with one stone? What are the common threads that we see? What are the common features that we would develop that would allow us not just to solve the problem for this one customer, but but perhaps for two or three or ten or every single one of them in a way that makes sense for our product, makes sense for the customers ultimate outcome, but really and probably crucially for the developers that are going to be doing this implementation. Because we were all developers who built this platform to solve the problems that we were seeing. And ultimately it is a tool that developers will use to create those solutions for their customers or for their companies if they're internal. And that is what we're really focused on. The best developer experience and the most performant outcome for any application at any scale.
- [21:49]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Jackson Repp, Field CTO at Harper for joining the show. You can learn more about Jackson and Harper by following the links in the show notes. 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.greggkilstrom.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. The Agile Brand Ever heard of Farm to Table? How about Farm to Home? That's how Costa Farm's plant business works. With over 1500 plant varieties grown over 5200 acres. They're not just a company, they're your plant partners who've been perfecting their craft for 60 years. They deliver beautiful high quality, easy to care for plants. They even offer virtual plant consultations and an insider club for rare plant access. Check out www.costafarms.com today and enter code worth knowing COSTAFARMS15 for a 15% discount on your first purchase. You can also purchase this unique plant brand at Lowe's, Walmart, Amazon and Home depot. Go to www.costacostafarms.com before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy, and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. TechSystems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on changes. Learn more@techsystems.com that's T E K systems.com now let's get back to the show.