← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#745: Digital experience analytics and VOC with Dave Anderson, Contentsquare
00:25:34
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- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [00:12]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [00:15]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [00:22]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [00:24]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [00:27]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty 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 sophia. Eligibility rules apply. Connect with us for details. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and has many campuses, including at 212150 17th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
- [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 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.
- [02:11]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Is your brand agile enough for the changing expectations of your customers? Agility requires more than just fast reactions. It demands proactive adaptation, continuous learning and a willingness to embrace the right technologies for the right purpose. It also requires understanding how these technologies can transform customer experience and drive business value. Today we're in New York City at Content Square's CX Circle and we're going to talk about the convergence of digital experience, analytics and the power of voice of the customer insights. Particularly in light of the increasing impact of AI, we'll also dive into how these insights can drive a more agile and customer centric approach to brand building. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Dave Anderson, VP of Product Marketing at Content Square. Dave, welcome to the show.
- [02:55]
Dave Anderson
Hey, thanks for having me.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, looking forward to today. We're just at the start of the event, but also looking forward to talking with you about this. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on your role at Content Square?
- [03:07]
Dave Anderson
So I look after product marketing. So that's everything from a big event like today. We've got a number of announcements that we're making. So really positioning those in announcements to the market, thinking through the roadmap of like, what were we going to announce? As part of that, we got some big announcements around AI, which is our AI sense capabilities, our agent capabilities, but essentially as a product marketer, as product marketers might understand, I sit at the intersection of sales, product marketing, the go to market teams, and we're kind of the glue that helps kind of position this product to market and everything from competitive analysis through to product positioning, through broadcasting and marketing. So it's a. We have a very hybrid jack of all trades, product focus.
- [03:51]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, lots. Lots to keep track of, right? Yeah, exactly. Nice, nice. So part of product marketing is educating the market on what exactly the product is about, the problems it solves, all of those kinds of things. What do you focus on when you're trying to educate the market to understand what Content Square does?
- [04:10]
Dave Anderson
I think Scott DeBrinca used to do this like state of Martech Stack and that's been ingrained in me for the last two decades, I think, or maybe it's a decade, I can't remember. Things have been going really fast, it's a decade, but anyway, there are like hundreds of thousands of logos and so what I like to do is to make sure that it's utterly simple. So really dumb it down. And I often try and explain it as best to either my dad or my kids. If I can explain what we do to my kids, then they get it, then a consumer will get it. Because you only have a couple of seconds to really imprint someone's brain. So the way I explain to people to start off with is with that utter simplicity of like, why do we even exist? We exist because people are increasingly on their mobile devices and they're using apps and they want to get a better experience. And often people are frustrated because they have checkout errors or API errors, it's slow, or they're just bugs or it crashes. And what contentsquare does is it really analyzes people's user journeys and helps teams deliver the improve the experiences so people get to what they want to do faster. So I just keep it as simple as possible as that. And we exist because these apps now are so complicated and there are many different teams contributing to the overall end experience. And what we do is provide that simplicity over the top to go. What should we focus on today to improve our conversion rate? What should we focus on today to increase our add to cart value? How is our new promotion performing? How are users experiencing our app? What features should we bring next? So it's that utter simplicity that I try and bring back constantly because in a world that is so complicated, it's really hard to be simple. And I just try and keep it simple.
- [05:52]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Well, and that complexity, I mean there's a lot of aspects to that too, right? So there's not only channels and I would say an increasing amount of channels itself. There's also just changing consumer behavior and then there's AI. You know, we got to talk about it, right? So let's, let's go there now. You know, how has AI changed the way that people interact with brands?
- [06:15]
Dave Anderson
It's incredible when you think about. I'm a huge AI advocate. I've been playing with it for a long time and like in my previous role was like back in 2017 we had AI within the platform. So we were talking about AI powered platforms before really AI was kind of mainstream and had to educate people on the fact that you could trust AI. It's actually, it's a good thing. I had a stint as an AI evangelist for a, for a cross platform. So I've had a lot of, I've had a lot of experience in it. But I also last week came to this a bit of an aha. And, and that is every single company now is saying they have AI because ChatGPT and Claude and everyone has made it accessible and it's made it easy for everyone to have it. So then it still comes back to then and so what, so like, so what, what is the AI going to do that is going to make your product differentiated? And again I come back to that simplicity of well, ultimately what it enables people that we deliver our software to, it's easier for them to be able to deliver the insights because now the AI is surfacing those insights from a consumer perspective. What does it mean? It means the way in which we interact with brands has changed dramatically. Even today as we record this podcast, ChatGPT announced instant commerce. That's as of yesterday. So now you can query and check out immediately within that query experience. I actually think it's not dissimilar from when Amazon came out with a marketplace. Now, was that bad for retailers? No, not necessarily. It literally gave us another channel in which we can purchase goods.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
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Dave Anderson
And judging by my family and the number of boxes that arrive, my Google home tells me every morning that another Amazon package has arrived.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
It's good and bad news right now.
- [07:59]
Dave Anderson
It just means we can consume with ease. We can get deeper into what we want. So I do an analysis of. I am looking for a particular audio compressor. I do music in my spare time and I really wanted to dive into a particular audio compressor and what the AI enabled me to do is go really deep into the product differentiation, which one I want so that when I knew to purchase, I was just bang in and out purchased and felt confident in my decision making. So it's, it's giving us a new opportunity to visualize a brand through imagery and video on websites. It's giving us a better ability to go deep into websites and find what we need. And ultimately I think what it's doing is giving us just a better opportunity to find what we like, make the experience more enjoyable as part of the process and potentially purchase more.
- [08:46]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. What about it though may be making things tougher for brands or maybe brands that haven't been staying up, you know, maybe lagging a little behind.
- [08:56]
Dave Anderson
I think it's the thing is a little bit of the unknown. So these things are happening so fast. I was at a Commerce next conference only six months ago and there were leading CMOs from E Commerce brands on a panel and they were almost talking as though they knew the answers. And I'm sitting there with a skeptical mind going, how could you possibly know the answer? Because Perplexity, who is also sitting on this panel, has not even decided how they are going to go to market for ranking brands, being able to enable a checkout experience. So it's, I think the scariest thing for anyone in this industry is change brings an unknown and you don't have answers. And it's hard as a CMO or an E Commerce leader when the board turns around to you and goes, well, how do you rank on what are you doing for ChatGPT instant checkout? And you're like, I don't know, it literally came out like 10 hours ago. Can you give me a week to figure it out? So I think that's the biggest fear. There's also fears that maybe we won't purchase through websites and apps anymore. Maybe we'll just purchase through these LLMs. And I don't think that's true because I don't think you. We never really did it through Google Search. We don't exclusively purchase through Amazon. People will form their own opinions. They'll decide. I still want to shop. I don't know about you, but I actually like browsing through when I'm purchasing something that I'm passionate about. I actually like watching the videos and understanding how that product works. And so I still think there's a role for that to be played. I don't think everything's just going to disappear.
- [10:28]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's kind of just. There's more options, there's more to your point, I mean, people have been saying that print was going to go away for however long and all sorts of things. It's more. Just more. Right. And so how do you. I mean, the pressure on CMOs and marketers is always going to be to show quantifiable impact. But there's, you know, there's. Let's call it traditional. I mean, even at this point, web could be almost considered a traditional channel. But with AI, with some of the things that you just mentioned, with the unknown, that's probably going to come out tomorrow, you know, how do you recommend that marketers, you know, continue that focus on quantifiable impact?
- [11:11]
Dave Anderson
I'm going to leave off the dreaded attribution word for now. I think that that's all right. That's on that. We'll open a can of worms. I do think what you can do and the reason why Content Square exists is because you can quantify the difference that you're making when you're trying to improve experience. And so I think it still does come to measurable results. Like, as humans, we always need some form of benchmark and measure as to whether things are improving or not, or what do we need to do in order to make this change. And I think what is happening is the complexity of all of the data that exists is becoming. It's becoming harder, which is why the attribution now becomes like, even more, like, difficult to measure. What we've done at Content Square is we've kind of figured out like the last mile. So within a website and an app, we're really focused on, like, actually what changes and experiments do you make to that website and app? And how does that impact conversion? How does that minimize abandonment? And it's really asking the why question. So there have been tools for the last decade that do. The conversions are up, conversions are down, pay bounces, are up, bounces are down, traffic's up, traffic's down. You're running a campaign and. And your conversion is lower than it should be. Why is that happening? What do we need to do to analyze? Are we seeing this page load time is too slow for people. Are there errors that are impacting that conversion? Are people confused as part of the journey? Is the ad not connected to the landing page? These just sort of deeper questions that we're still only touching the surface of what's available. AI will really help us do this analysis for us because there are so many variants, no human can do it.
- [12:46]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
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Dave Anderson
So it's exciting for. I think it's exciting because it's like it's almost a resurgence and it's a redawn of a new industry again. Yeah, I think with all these AIs and all these things that are happening, it's just like, it's almost like SEO all over again. And another industry is really forming a measurable impact of the efforts that you make to continuously improve digital experience. And I think it's super exciting.
- [13:15]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Another thing that Content Square recently announced was the intention to acquire Loris AI, a company that does conversation based analytics. So obviously this has a lot of impact when it comes to customer service and chatbots. What future is Content Square envisioning for this acquisition?
- [13:33]
Dave Anderson
So, I mean, even based on the conversations that we've just had, it's an increasingly conversational experience that's happening these days. So you. I think Gartner had a prediction by 2017 that 70% of interactions with customer support will begin and start with an agent. So it's conversational in the way in which we search, it's conversational. Then with our expectations of how we experience a website and an app, like I get onto a particular app of an E commerce brand and I want to do a deeper search within that search engine in order to find the page that I want. Because I'm trained on. That's what happens when I'm using the LLMs every day. It's just behavior. Monkey see, monkey do. And so with the increasing conversations that are occurring, whether it's a support conversation, whether it's a conversation with a sales rep and you're trying to upsell or whatever through to just how I navigate through a site and the number of agents that are then part of that experience, you have to understand all of that because it's not just anymore. It's not just I'm using an app and I can tag that app. It's within the app, there are experiences that are occurring, there is content that needs to be placed, and there's conversations that are being had. Being able to understand conversations is a nuance that is different to how most companies tag and understand a site. So understanding those conversations is really tapping into the existing chat tools that are there, but also an emerging capability which is understanding agents and how agents. When you're chatting and you're saying, I don't know, you're wanting to purchase a new phone through Verizon and you're not chatting with a human, you're chatting with an agent. Was that experience with the agent good or bad? And increasingly, as we've all come to learn, chatting with a chatbot has not always been a great experience. And these brands are cutting costs to put more agents into the field. And you have to understand then whether the experience is working or not. Is it increasing conversion? Is it increasing frustration? Because if it increases your frustration because they're using an agent, because they cut costs, you'll just go purchase the phone from someone else. So the barrier of change is really easy. So all in all, if I bring it all back, the opportunity with Loris is a strong understanding to really understand agent experiences. Are they good? Are they bad? What should we do about it? As well as support conversations and conversations that occur throughout a web experience, you combine that with our traditional digital experience intelligence, you start to get the holy grail of a single source of truth. We market that as product marketers, as a single source of truth. If I explain that to analysts, they roll their eyes and go, there's no such thing. You'll never have a single source of truth which is true. But as my dad said, sometimes don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. It's as close as you'll get. It gives internal teams a bigger lens to look at the signals that are coming into their digital ecosystem. And then the understanding of what should we do about it? Do we double down on the agents? Do we need to correct the agents because they're delivering a bad experience? Do we need more humans as part of the process? Should we put humans into the second stage step? Should we. It keeps going, the questions keep going. So every time you have a question, you can then use insights to form your opinion, and then you test and experiment and then you keep going. And ultimately to deliver a better customer experience.
- [16:52]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, because I mean, at the rate that the. I mean, these are all one to one experience. I mean, first of all, these are all fast moving transactions, you know, when you think about the traditional way of measuring, you know, cx, like the lagging indicator, you know, the survey just doesn't cut it at this point. I mean, maybe, maybe it's useful to some degree or it is useful to some degree, let's say, but it's never going to cut. So you need, you need these leading indicators, you need these, this real time information to, to do that. And to your point, you know, whether it's the perfect single source of truth or not, it's going to evolve, right? I mean, this is, this is only, this is only getting better, right?
- [17:31]
Dave Anderson
Exactly. And it's the need for personalization. Like customers are going to expect that they get a personalized experience.
- [17:38]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Experience.
- [17:39]
Dave Anderson
If you have a million variations of content, it's beyond human to figure it out, which is why we need agents. And it's the thirst for the consumer to get an experience that's personalized to them. If I go to Nike and I'm on their site, I really want to see running shoes. If I'm in their app and they know that I'm a runner and I'm using their running, I want to see their running shoes. I don't want to see some of their other products, they're not relevant to me. And so I think you're going to need an AI to both help with the personalization. You're going to need an AI to understand the analytics. It's wild. It's going to be fun.
- [18:14]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so one thread that's kind of come up a couple times is just this idea of telling the right story. Because I think to your point, intellectually marketers get it. They need to measure, they need to get results, all of that stuff. And yet telling the story from the content square perspective is critical so that they understand where to plug things in. I know you've touched a little bit on this already, but how do you think about storytelling in the context of selling a technical product? What have you found most useful in doing it?
- [18:49]
Dave Anderson
I don't know if my wife agrees, but I like to think I'm a pretty empathetic person. And I learned this actually from working in my dad's hardware store as a kid. And someone would come in and they had a particular need, had a problem that they were trying to solve, which is they need to hang a picture on the wall. And I had to help them find a solution to their problem, which is I had to find whether it was a drywall, a brick wall, and then I'd have to provide the tools to help them achieve it. And I've related that throughout my tech career, which is to really understand the use cases of the people that are in the job and really get to know them and understand what they struggle with and what they are trying to achieve. And then matching the story of the product to what that need is, whilst also being mindful of what is strategically making us differentiated from everyone else. Why would someone buy us versus that other person? And then just keep that thread continually and keep it consistent. And it also means product teams need to make sure that they are building for that use case. And I just think ultimately, if you break it down in everything that we do, every business, the single biggest differentiator is customer experience. And I remember someone telling me at one point, it's like the difference between the airlines, they are all flying potentially a Boeing 737. They leave from the same terminal. The terminals aren't owned by them. Most of the time you're fundamentally the only thing that differentiates them. Yeah, it's price, but it's the experience that someone gets. And if they don't have a good experience, they all prefer to swap to another airline. And I think if we can, if you really understand that user, if you really understand what they want, then you can deliver the story that they need and be true to that story. And I think that's the essential part of my. And that's why AI for AI's sake is not the answer. Because everyone has got AI and eventually everyone goes, yuck, I get it. But what is it beyond the AI that you're going to help me do?
- [20:53]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, love it. Well, CX Circle is about to kick off here in a little bit. A few minutes here. What are you most looking forward to?
- [21:02]
Dave Anderson
There's the same story that I just. I nearly caught myself. What I was going to say next is I'm really excited about the announcements that we're going to make. I am, because I've worked really hard on these announcements and we're really excited about what we're bringing for AI. And if I bring it back to what it means for the customers, I presented one of our capabilities, which is the ability to map a website and an app with an agent. It basically can go through and classify everything. If I take like Nike as an example, again, it would be going through their site and working out men's shoes, women's shoes, apparel, T shirts, basketball, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you can categorize any category you want, which means product managers now can look across their website and they can really understand how. How categories are performing. They can really customize it to any view. So this auto map, the reason why I say the auto mapping is so incredible is I presented it to a customer ahead of this event, and this is another way in which I try to understand how these features are going to resonate. And this customer from a large financial institution literally wheeled his chair right up to the screen and I'm on a zoom call, put his face basically on the camera and was like, wow. And so I went. That, to me, was a pretty good sign that what we were announcing today is going to be pretty important to the customers because it's going to save them weeks of time. So I say from a product standpoint, I'm really excited about that. But I love hearing customer stories. There's going to be a brand this morning talking about how they're using AI to generate new photos and videos across their site and what the new engagement means. So they've taken a static image and they've turned it into a Instagramable person walking in a new outfit. That's not a real model, it's an AI model. And then what the increase in conversion and engagement is as a result of animating that image, that, to me is like, again, goes back to the need to quantify what it was that you did the initiative on and did it improve conversion. And so that's what I'm really excited about. I'm really excited about the customer stories and I'm a people person, so I just love the opportunity to talk to people like you, to network, to get excited, excited about analytics. So I'm just looking forward to networking with people. And we've got a couple of good friends of mine. Baratunde Thurston is one of the presenters today who will be absolutely incredible if people don't know who he is. I highly encourage you to look him up. And the king of customer experience, Brian Solis, who's head of innovation at ServiceNow, he's also gonna be presenting. And nice. There's lots of really good content. I'm like, I'm excited. I'm also like, I'm the MC for the day, so I'm also like, I'm doing this in about half an hour and so I've got to contain myself to not tell everyone about my summit throughout the whole day. So I'm pumped.
- [23:41]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Nice. Nice. Love it. Well, one last question before we wrap up. 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.
- [23:50]
Dave Anderson
Oh, I. I've curated my YouTube channel for a Saturday morning. Very tech focused, very focused on me. I don't let my kids touch it, otherwise they'll ruin my algorithm. Very careful with what I search. And I am a big believer in you don't think about things, do things like just do it. Like get chat chat PT and try the new instant commerce and play with Claude. And I've built apps with Lovable. And I'm just, this is such an awesome opportunity these days to play with tools and there are freemiums you can do. And so I. My wife did freak out that I had Lovable on my bank statement. She did ask me after the fact, like, what is lovable? And why are there like five charges in the space of a week? And I did have to explain to her that is an app.
- [24:37]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
It's fun.
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Dave Anderson
It is really fun. And so I just think, yeah, this is a great time. And the way I stay agile is I'm just continually learning. I am searching, I'm playing, I'm talking to customers all the time. And so I'm, yeah, I'm at events like this. So, yeah, the way I do it is I think about it and then also I keep it pretty. Like, I really enjoy LinkedIn and I post provocative things and look for feedback and just enjoy connecting and creating content and questioning where we're going and why we're doing this. So, yeah, and I host a podcast as well. So I, as part of my podcast, I invite people, AI thought leaders, onto the podcast. And that keeps me inquisitive as well, whether it's healthcare or tech or education or the future of autonomous vehicles. All of these things.
- [25:23]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
- [25:23]
Dave Anderson
Love it.
- [25:24]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Love it.
- [25:24]
Dave Anderson
It's a fire hose. The hardest thing is the downtime.
- [25:27]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah. Well, again, I'd like to thank Dave Anderson, VP of Product Marketing at Content Square, for joining the show. You can learn more about Dave and Content Square by following the links in the show notes.
- [25:39]
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@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.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.
- [26:33]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
The agile brand.
- [26:42]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [26:51]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [26:55]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [27:02]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [27:03]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [27:07]
Dave Anderson
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty.
- [27:11]
Liberty Mutual Co-Spokesperson / Strayer University Announcer
The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to Made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack Welchmba to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.