← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#719: Composable Customer Data Platforms with Tejas Manohar, Hightouch
00:24:07
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:01]
Strayer University Announcer
At Strayer University, we help students like you go from Is it possible? To Anything is possible by offering access to up to 10 no cost gen Ed courses so you can reach your goals affordably and fast. Visit Strayer Edu to learn more. No Cost Gen Ed is provided by Strayer University affiliate sofia. Eligibility rules apply. Connect with us for details. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by CHEV and has many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
- [00:31]
Carvana User
Hey sweetie, your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana give it a whirl. Love ya.
- [00:54]
Tejas Manohar
So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it.
- [00:56]
Strayer University Announcer
Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees.
- [01:00]
Tejas Manohar
May apply.
- [01:01]
Carvana User
Foreign.
- [01:13]
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. Now onto the show. Are you building your customer data strategy around your goals, or are your goals constrained by your data platform? Agility in today's marketing technology landscape isn't just about speed, it's about flexibility. Brands need data architectures that adapt to their needs, not the other way around. And with the right approach, that agility can fuel personalization, better customer outcomes and real business value. Today we're going to talk about composable
- [02:35]
customer data platforms and how AI is
- [02:37]
enhancing decision making to increase customer lifetime value. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Tejas Manahar, co CEO and co founder of hitouch Tejas, welcome to the show.
- [02:49]
Tejas Manohar
Greg. Thanks for having me.
- [02:51]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you.
- [02:53]
Definitely timely topic here. Before we dive in though, why don't we start with you giving a little
- [02:59]
background on yourself and your role at High Touch.
- [03:02]
Tejas Manohar
Happy to. So hitouch is a fast growing company. We started the company about six years ago, but we're already, you know, 250 plus employees and we operate across U.S. europe, Asia and Australia, New Zealand. And really what Hitouch does is it helps brands, particularly consumer brands. But all types of companies really figure out the best way to engage their customers. So our belief is that every brand is fighting for attention. You know, look at your, your Gmail app or your text messages. There's a bunch of messages or a bunch of brands open up Instagram or Facebook, a bunch of things that could, you know, distract you out there from ads to social posts. It's, etc and you as a brand need to figure out how to punch through that and really grab the attention of your customer. It's the most scarce resource there is and we believe that there's a secret there which is figuring out how to tap into your data as a company. What have people shopped with you in the past? How often do they come to your store? What do you know about them? What do they like and don't like to figure out how you should market to your customers. So that's what we help companies do. We work with companies like, you know, petsmart, the nva, Warner Music, Grammarly, a lot of very large companies.
- [04:21]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I love it. Well, yeah, let's, let's, let's dive in
- [04:24]
here and we're going to talk about
- [04:26]
a few things today. But I want to start with just, you know, certainly those listening out there
- [04:32]
probably familiar with what, what a customer
- [04:35]
data platform is, probably using one or have used several throughout, throughout their career. But composable customer Data platforms, composable CDBs. Can you talk a little bit about what makes that different from a more traditional cdp?
- [04:52]
Tejas Manohar
For sure. For anyone who's new to hitouch, as you mentioned, Greg, Composable CDP is our core product here at hitouch. We brought it to market five, six years ago and it's what most of our customers use us for today. In addition, we have another product called AI Decisioning which makes, maybe we'll get to touch on later but that's an, you know, a product we released last year and is growing super quickly. We'll dive into the CDP first. So Composable CDP actually before Founding Hitouch, I was an early engineer at a company called Segment. So Segment's owned by Twilio. Now, in 2020, they were bought for over $3 billion, and they were one of the original CDPs in the market. And what a CDP did originally was help marketers get all their data into one place, resolve that data into customer profiles. So we all know that problem of having multiple customer profiles in different system, in a cdp, you're really bringing that all into one profile with identity resolution, and then most importantly, allow marketers to activate that data. And when I say activate, what I really mean is build audiences, build journeys, and then execute those to orchestrate campaigns across all your platforms, whether that's a customer engagement platform, an esp, ad channels, your website, your app, you name it. Hitouch is a composable CDP has the same goal. So it's starting at the same goal. The difference is that we can sit directly on top of all of the data that your company already has. So what we found is that everyone wanted the cdp. Everyone wanted their ability for the marketing team to use customer data fluidly to, you know, personalize every engagement with every customer. But getting all the data into a CDP in the first place was always the challenge, right? I need to go get my IT team to collect data from my app, my backend, all my historical data, my point of sale system as a retailer, and load that into a CDP just to get started with IT as a marketing team. That is very hard to do and can take 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, and sometimes never finish at a large enterprise. But a lot of this Data exists in CRMs, in data warehouses like Snowflake or Databricks or Google Cloud, aws, Azure. And as marketers, we don't care about those technologies. We want to be able to use data for marketing. But a composable CDP means that we can just tap directly into all those technologies, get the data from all those places, and help you as a marketer, start using it way faster and with way more data than you'd have in the traditional CDP route, where you're operating on the small subset that, you know, your IT team's able to send to the cdp.
- [07:35]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And to that, to that point, I mean, I've, I've seen many of those project, those data migration projects. And, you know, six months is, is very optimistic, I would say, on how long.
- [07:47]
Tejas Manohar
Yeah, short end success.
- [07:50]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And to your point, some don't, some truly don't end, some, you know, take way longer and, and so, you know, to, based on what you're describing here, there's, it sounds like there's a lot more both control as well as flexibility, as well as not having to wait for, you know, some, you know, amount of months or, or things like that, you know, what does that afford the, the marketers then to do? And you know, instead of waiting there, what, what are they able to do more quickly?
- [08:22]
Tejas Manohar
Yeah, great question. So first off, yeah, some of those projects never finish. As you mentioned, Greg, we do about 40% of our business just replacing other CDPs where companies have signed a big contract with a Salesforce or an Adobe or a Treasury data or a Segment or whatever it is, no offense to any of the solutions in particular. The products work great. And a pilot where you put some subset of your data in there very hard to get all your data into these systems. And so the composable CDP model is just successful is a large, vast majority of the time because we're able to tap into that existing data how it is. You don't have to translate your data into the segment format or the Salesforce format or the Adobe analytics format. You can just use it how it is. So what else does it do for the marketers? One, they have, they have a cdp which they wanted, right? So that's one, they can actually go in. They could start building audiences, building journeys, execute personalized campaigns across all those channels we talked about. Two, I would say is the richness of the data that you can use as a marketer in a composable CDP model goes beyond a traditional cdp. What we see is a traditional CDP like Adobe's RTCDP or Segment or any of them. They often want all your data to be in the form of users like who are your customers, what's their name, what's their age, et cetera and events those users are doing, what pages they go to on your website, what they click in your mobile app. We all know that as enterprise brands, we have way more data than that Bin store data, point of sales data, CRM data, third party data. And that looks different from company to company. It's not all users and events. For a company like petsmart, which we work with and we're really proud to partner with, they have data about pets. The actual pets that their customers own can get registered into a loyalty system and their pet's age and birthday and grooming preferences and all that kind of fun stuff or households, right? And who's your partner? All that kind of information exists in a lot of companies and with a Composable cdp, we have a fully flexible schema. You can tell us about any data. When a marketer logs in at PetSmart, they can query customers by different pet breeds and different households how long they've been a customer. Whereas in a traditional cdp it's basically, you know, the events that user has taken. So we really get access to a much more vast amount of data, which is important in many different industries and most large complicated companies.
- [10:58]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I mean that makes a ton of sense because I mean traditionally like
- [11:02]
when I, when I hear the term
- [11:04]
composable, I have a, in my mind as far as like how it connects with external systems. But it all, it almost sounds like there's, you know, you know, there's a bit of, or there's a lot of flexibility within the product itself of how you know what you, what you capture and everything like that. And so like the pet examples and things as well. How does that flexibility and even, you know, the agility that you know, getting up to speed with these things, how does that benefit then the end customers? Like, what does the customer experience benefit from?
- [11:37]
Tejas Manohar
Great, great, great question. The customer experience benefit is ultimately getting really personalized campaigns that break through the noise and provide value to you as a customer. So when you, when you take a look at a company like petsmart, they're able to, using high touch, run campaigns like, you know, your pet's birthday is coming up and we know that your pet loves the grooming salon, right, petsmart, or loves certain toys that you bought in the past for this pet at petsmart or sometimes you might want to splurge on that premium food or whatever it is. Right? So by giving access to all that data, you're just able to give a level of relevant marketing and personalized marketing that makes it feel like there's a more direct relationship between you and your customer. Petsmart is just one example. I think the NBA is another great example. We help them run a, you know, in app campaign where you could open your mobile app and see all your stats about, about what you've been watching this season. Almost like a Spotify wrapped powered by all that data that you are, that you have access to as a brand when you have really loyal, happy customers. So I think overall what we're really unlocking is for marketers to create that Spotify wrapped type of moment with their customers where, you know, you're sending out campaigns that people love, they enjoy, they tell their friends about, and thus they're effective. They also click on them and they also convert from them and you know, I really think that most big brands have the ability to do this today, but from a data perspective and from a relationship perspective with their customers, but from a technology and workflow perspective, it's just very difficult for them to execute on it due to the way data flows throughout a marketing organization today. So our vision at High Touch is all about solving that.
- [13:35]
Greg Kilstrom
I want to switch gears a little bit as well. You, you mentioned another product that Hitouch has is AI Decisioning. And so I did, I did want to talk about that as well. So I'd love to hear, you know, maybe, maybe just describe what the, what the product does and you know, how are, how are marketers using it?
- [13:53]
Tejas Manohar
Yes. So AI decisioning so composable CDP helps you set that data foundation in your customer 360 and getting the data from all the different systems and helping you use it as a marketer to build audiences and journeys. But sometimes there's still a question of what is the right audience to build to drive a certain business outcome. Or I have an audience of high value customers or of people who live near a store and seem like they'd be interested in an event I'm running at the store, but I don't know what to send them. There's five different pitches I have for the event. It's five different events happening in the next month. I have 20 different product SKUs I could sell these customers. And there's this question of how do you match the right customer with the right content? And so how do we see brands approaching this day? Well, the first step is that they start using their data, right? They bring in a CDP, potentially high dish, potentially another solution. Our AI decisioning product can actually work with any CDP. So we have customers of Salesforce, Adobe, etc. Who are coming to us and saying, I don't want to change my CDP right now, but I want to start using AI to decide the best thing to send every customer. Can you help me with that? High Touch? And so we said yes, we can. But the first step that we see brands do is they usually get a CDP and they start using data. So you start making hypotheses that, hey, not all your customers are interested in the grooming salon. It's the ones near store, the ones with certain pets. But then the system. The next step we see that customers do today to match the right content or the right customer is do experiments. They run a B test. They say, do customers who have a golden retriever like this more than people who have a lab like this more than people who have a chihuahua. Or does this content perform better than that content or does it perform better on Mondays or Tuesdays? You try to run experiments to get more signal on that if you have the bandwidth as a marketing team. But all of this is a lot of work and there's so many different experiments you can run, so many different audiences you can create. So what we're excited about with AI decisioning is that we've created a platform forum that you can actually use to answer that question of what is the best content to send each and every customer on a one to one basis. And the way it works is that you put in your goals that you want to optimize towards. You can say, I want to drive customers to download my mobile app. I want them to activate a loyalty offer. I want them to go from purchasing in one product category to a second product category. Then you can put in all your content. You can say, I have these 20 emails in Salesforce, 10 different subject lines, another 10 push notifications in braze some ads and then you can say hi Touch, go figure out, go run a bunch of experiments and use ML and AI to figure out what are the patterns and what are those rules that are too many that I could code, couldn't code myself to decide what are the best content to send to each customer. So we're basically using AI and automated experimentation to answer that question for dozens and dozens of companies now.
- [16:52]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, because I mean that's really the, I mean none of this stuff is easy, but I think one of the big challenges is in the orchestration of this. Right. So you know, it's one thing, you know, creating content certainly takes time and effort, but you know, generative AI and some other things are able to accelerate some of that process. But then you still have to, to what you're talking about, which is figure out, okay, well this thing goes, you know, in what sequence to which audience and all that. So having a tool that is able to take that burden off while also not just, you know, because marketing automation, you know, where all a lot of
- [17:30]
this stuff kind of originated from, wasn't very smart.
- [17:33]
You know, it would, it would do this, if this, then that.
- [17:35]
Tejas Manohar
And so everybody gets intelligence, the AI and the intelligence to marketing automation.
- [17:41]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, so, so I mean, given that, I guess where are some of the initial kind of like unlocks, I guess for, for this, like where, where would a brand start? You know, let's say they're, they are used to more traditional marketing automation and so they've Got that down. But that's going to very broad segments. Like where, where would a brand start with something like this to start unlocking value?
- [18:04]
Tejas Manohar
Yeah. So one thing's for sure which is that this is not a one size fits all problem. Right. If I could wave a wand and say that AI can replace all marketing automation tomorrow, I get a lot of claps in the audience. But product also wouldn't work and so that would be a problem. And so we're really clear with our customers on what AI decisioning can do and what it can't do. Today we have a vision of being able to do more and more. But where the product really excels today is optimizing long term business priorities and evergreen kind of goals and motions that you have as a company. You're always going to have your manual audience building for a brand push for a new category that's launching for a holiday, for a promotion that you're running nationwide or in certain Geos. You're going to go into high touch or any cdp, develop some audiences for that and go execute it across channels. But when you have these ongoing initiatives of like I want to drive customers to activate loyalty offers or I want to get customers to download the mobile app or I want to get customers to come to my grooming salon or trade in their first video game at like a GameStop and if they haven't done this, I want to get them to do it. I don't know when it is, but it's sometime over the next couple of years, as fast as possible. AI decisioning what it can do is instead of you just putting these, trying an audience send here, trying an audience send there, putting, putting different campaigns on your calendar at different times and saying oh, salons are important this quarter, let's put 50% of the campaigns on that or 20% of campaigns on that. You can actually give AI decision this goal and say your goal is to increase this business metric and this is going to be your goal this month, next month and for a while here's a group of customers that you want to increase it amongst, go figure out which ones are interested, what to send them and it will actually do like automatic experimentation to figure that out. And then when it finds that secret sauce of which customers are interested in which things, it'll scale it up across your whole customer base. We've seen it work really well for driving long term goals. Like I mentioned getting customer from first to second category, getting customers to download the mobile app, et cetera and just be able to drive significant lifts in PadSmart's case. We've spoken about this online. We've driven 10%, 20% type range lifts for key business metrics like incremental bookings to grooming salons through this methodology.
- [20:38]
Greg Kilstrom
That's huge. Yeah, yeah. And so in this, and you know, I know there's a lot of talk about, I mean, first of all, I consider myself an optimist when it comes to AI and technology and the human relationship with it. But you know, there is a lot of talk and I would say some anxiety around, you know, what is the role of the marketer in something like this? I mean, I have my own answer to this, but you know, how do you look at that role of the marketer in this? I mean, it sounds like they definitely play a strategy role. Like how does it, how do the humans fit into this AI decisioning?
- [21:15]
Tejas Manohar
It's a great point. I should have talked about it from the beginning. One of the most loved features of our AI platform and actually sometimes a core reason that customers are coming to us is to get insights. Today, a lot of marketing teams are blind as per what content's working well for which customers, what's the best time to send different things. They aren't able to run enough experiments to figure all of this out. And so when you use AI decisioning, you get really rich insights like the ones I just mentioned and more automatically out of the box. And then you as a marketing team are spending much more time in that part of the platform looking through the data, looking through the insights of what's working, thinking of new experiments and content to create for your customers, and then deploying those in the wild. Instead of spending your time thinking about what you should put on the calendar this month or audio know how should you change the audience criteria next time, or what a B test should you run that's done for you automatically. So I think it's a really exciting time to be a marketer. Personally, I encourage our marketing team at hightouch to adopt as many AI tools as possible. I think every marketing team is stretched thin on resources and has big ambitions, especially when it comes to personalization data that they can't execute on. Right now I haven't seen a single one that doesn't meet that criteria so far. Even the most tech advanced companies there are are all saying that. So I think it's a really exciting time and it changes the workflow to be less about the technical tactics oftentimes and more about what brought us the industry in the first place, which is marketing strategy and really understanding our customers and we have tools that allow us to do that better than ever today.
- [22:49]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I like that approach. I mean it definitely. And from my perspective, I mean that elevates the role of those marketers that are doing the work from, you know, from tacticians to having the ability to think about the strategy. And ideally, I mean, I think strategy is the thing that the marketers always want to get time to do, but they get stuck in the weeds on those other details. Right. So I think in that way, I think this has the opportunity to benefit them.
- [23:19]
Tejas Manohar
Exactly how we see it as well.
- [23:21]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Tejas Manohar
Well, thank you so much for having me on the show.
- [23:27]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, no thanks. Thanks for joining. One last question for you. I like to ask everybody before we wrap here, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [23:38]
Tejas Manohar
I try to reflect, reflect every day. What's gone well today? What went too slowly? I think agility is all about speed. What went too slowly? Is that because of something short term we did today or is it because of something long term? And just try to bring that feedback back to the team or myself at a really high cadence. So that's my strategy.
- [24:00]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Tejas Manohar, co CEO and co founder of hitouch for joining the show. You can learn more about Tejas and
- [24:08]
hitouch 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 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.
- [25:06]
Strayer University Announcer
The agile brand. At Strayer University we help students like you go from is it possible? To anything is possible by offering access to up to 10 no cost gen ed courses so you can reach your goals affordably and fast. Visit Strayer Edu to learn more. No cost gen EDS provided by Strayer University affiliate sofia. Eligibility rules apply. Connect with a third for details. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by CHEV and has many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.