Jason Rose - Getting to Know You: Building Deep Customer Relationships Gradually through Progressive Identity

So good morning and welcome, and really excited to speak to you all today. As you know, I, I lead the marketing team, so I kind of represent for gig. Yeah. So I kind of represent kind of the other side of the customer equation, which I think in, in many of the discussions, we kind of really focus in on the privacy and security elements of this slide, but really in the consumer world, you actually typically start in an anonymous state or maybe in a completely unknown way altogether. Right?

So how do we move that customer to a point where we can actually worry about protecting their information and hopefully ultimately that's actually success. Those are like the good problems to have. Cause most organizations certainly in the startup world start up with no customers. And how do we build from that unknown world into a known state? So I always like to kind of reenter around something. That's a pretty common concept for partners, which is this concept of the customer journey, right? Where you start from that anonymous state, hopefully you do some analysis.

You're learning about the market. You find out companies, you do research and eventually you move down that chain and become a customer and, and actually really focus in. And I think a lot of the discussion is around this concept of access management identity proof. But really if you think about that actually represents a fairly narrow portion of the overall customer experience.

And I think there's a huge opportunity for identity and particularly customer identity to play a role across this entire journey from the very initial interaction point around awareness, right through to creating brand advocates and hopefully repeat customers that are coming back. Right. So I don't, I don't want to minimize the importance of the access management portion of it. But if you get to that point, you've actually done really well. And that's really exciting and really privacy and security needs to be across this entire journey, this entire process. Right?

So if you think about the stakeholders you need to work with, I, I know a lot of us come from an employee world, right? We're dealing with internal stakeholders and as an employee, if I want access benefits, my email internal systems, I get a paycheck. I have to use those systems right. In the customer world. They don't have to do anything you want them to. Right. I've really enjoyed Christians talk yesterday about utility and kind of that, that whole concept of behavioral economics, right?

Like at the end of the day, the whole idea is to hopefully provide enough utility to that consumer that they say, yes, I want to volunteer my information. So how do we progressively get to know somebody? I know when I met many of you that I didn't immediately start off by providing my social security number and my address a little less formal that in, in a customer journey, typically you don't start with the most sensitive information. You start with a slightly different concept, but again, is this data paradox that we've been hearing about, right?

We did a study of over 4,000 consumers in the United States and United Kingdom. We found more than two thirds, actually don't trust brands with their data, right? And this is a challenge because really at the end of the day, if you think about some marketing concepts, like omnichannel customer experience, so moving across devices and web properties and everything else and how you actually service that customer, if you don't want to give me information, a lot of the time, it becomes very challenging for me to provide that consistent cross channel experience. Right?

And you get all of these crazy influential or predictive technologies that we think with an 80% chance that that iPhone belongs to Jason. So let me serve them off a particular advertisement. And a lot of the ad tech industry in our tech industry is actually device centric rather than consumercentric I think is their question. Yeah. So I see the responses here concerned, neither in concerned to me that seems pretty binary you're concerned or, or not. So I'm just really curious about the source of the data. How did they come up with neither concerned nor unconcerned.

It was a pick list in the, in the response, how concerned are you about companies handling your information concerned? Unconcerned neither. Okay. So neither is more like ambivalent that's Right. Perfect. Yeah. But the interesting thing is, is again, as consumers kind of think about their information, they do believe that they are the best custodians of that information in many cases, right? So we can see, again, almost two thirds felt like as an individual unresponsible for my data, my data privacy versus the brands that they interact with and the government.

And again, the interesting thing is between the us and UK, these numbers didn't change very much. The UK folks weren't relying on their government to really protect these identities. Then the other thing we found is that when consumers are informed about a data breach, they actually do take action. And this was really interesting. So when given the opportunity, and again, if you think about most websites, most things you interact with you really don't, it's not obvious how you do some of these things, but consumers really will. They'll go in, they'll change their password.

I know I use two-factor authentication almost all the sites I use. I love it when that's presented an option for me, cause I feel a little bit safer, more secure. And if you think about that customer journey and that fact that we have this account is a huge success for us, right? We've actually signed with the customer. I actually, as a market accounted very disturbing that you could lose a fifth of your customer base. We'll just close the account. I'm gone. I'm I don't want to participate in your service anymore. I don't wanna receive any information. I'm shutting it down.

So the risk associated with these data break breaches, the reputational risk and the cost of the business is extremely high. So if we think about this and, and kind of bringing back that, that kind of, of concept of the customer journey and really moving from the left on the anonymous side to the fully known and all the data attributes we collect about the customer, how do we coax the customer along this journey? And there's a few interesting things to wondering if that, there we go. So anonymous interactions.

So I love those cookie consents that kind of come up on the web page that you see really are pretty transitory. They come up, it's not really stored anywhere. It really is just, yep. This device ID has clicked that particular button, but really that's the first interaction many of you will have with the customer, right? So beginning to understand what's the device where the person come from or this information, and almost beginning to build that profile and that identity right at that, that point, and then being able to do things like light registration.

So if any of you subscribe to CNN and actually want to get a news alert and you put in your email address and you say, I'm really interested in domestic or international news, or I want to put in a phone number to re receive text updates. That's actually all powered by gig. And we're able to begin again, that kind of concept of what we call light registration. And really it can be as simple as, Hey, subscribe to our new newsletter.

And, you know, we'll give you some information in exchange for that email address. Again, there's no password, there's no additional piece of information here, but again, it's beginning to build that relationship and that trust with the consumer for a value exchange.

And, you know, I can't wait to get my hands on the new iPhone X. So I'm looking forward to that. Then we move into full registration, right? Which is where now the customer says, Hey, you know what? I'm willing to move from my anonymous state and, and move into a state where now we can actually begin to verify that identity. We can provide a number of different social login techniques potentially to remove friction from that process. Beca because again, when presented with one of these screens that consumer can simply exit and not participate in your service.

So the idea being that you want that experience to be as seamless and as part of your brand experience as possible. And you need to make sure that that process is, is as friction free for the customer on the device or the way they want to interact with you is absolutely crucial. So I think, you know, the gentleman from capital one, we talk about becoming an IEP, again, being able to provide, Hey, there's my capital one button. That's what I want to use to log into this site. But I might go to another retailer go, you know what, that's too high level of assurance. I'm just gonna use Facebook.

And I'm gonna go in that way on some of the more fun sites as, as described earlier. So really making, and at that point, this is where we really can start to build up a really great relationship with the customer through something called progressive profiling. So that ability now to present options to consumers, where they can reveal more about themselves, what are your preferences? So in terms of television shows or types of trips, you'd like to take, or again, the relevant experiences for your brand.

So Vogue down in Australia actually uses this progressive profiling technique on their site to really, Hey, you know, take this survey, have a look at what the favorite colors of the fall are going to be and, you know, receive an award from Vogue and then kind of building up that knowledge of the customer. But again, building that entire brand experience where the customer identity is really at the center. And then as we think about enriching, these profiles identity doesn't live in isolation. This customer information needs to be used across an entire digital stack.

I don't know how many of you caught brands presentation last night. He's the CMO of America's from Microsoft. And he had his customer journey laid out with his technology stack.

Again, this customer information is the currency for great customer experiences across an entire digital ecosystem. So really the onus is on us to make sure that we use the data responsibility responsibly, that we are transparent with the customer, but we still have a job to do. We still have to provide great customer experience across our digital staff.

Now, interestingly with GDPR and many of the privacy regulations, this concept of enterprise preference management or enterprise consent management is becoming more and more top of mind, where do we gather all the consent information gather into one place we're actually working with bear right now? We I'm sure most of you are very familiar with, they've identified over 1800 systems internally that store customer data right now.

So if you think about under GDPR, the right to erasure, I want bear to forget Jason Rose, I, that I ever existed, how 1800 systems need to be checked to see if my information are contained within there. So how do we begin to centralize some of this data?

So if, if we think about, you know, kind of this overall preference and consent kind of framework, really capturing that at the end user level, being able to provide the inter interfaces terms of service, cookie policies, all the legalese that, that are out there, being able to present that in a very nice way through that customer journey lens, but then those things are updated. I mentioned as O S in one of my panels yesterday in the past two years, they had updated their terms of service, like twice, like some minor updates.

When GDPR came on the scene, they've updated seven times in the last seven months. Right? So think about having to trigger a resend were the changes big enough that we need to resend our user community and which ones have consented to the new versus the old versus the version three becomes quite a challenge and a nightmare. So being able to trigger that is part of, think about this. This is all part of the user experience. This is not something that's buried in the system, and you can send an email to your employees and go, you're locked in with email until you sign this agreement.

These are customers. If they don't like what you're doing, they're just gonna bail and go somewhere else. And then being able to synchronize that consent to the downstream applications.

Again, this data does not live in that. If I unsubscribed from your email, you better not share my information downstream to Marketo and send me emails. And then finally, really presenting that information back to the customer in a very self-service friendly way. Right?

So again, the user experience really matters here. The information you got about person, the terms of service, when the privacy policy was agreed, you know, the newsletters and communications have agreed to the frequency and timing of those things. There is a lot required of a consumer to view this, but you need to be able to present it back and hopefully in a mobile friendly way that 90% of your, or I'm making a number up a huge percentage of your customers would prefer to be on mobile. So it becomes especially important in that context. And there we go.

And really, of course, underpinning all this is that repeat customer experience would be authentication and authorization at the appropriate time. So with that, that's really what I wanted to share with you, really kind of bringing that perspective, the customer journey, the customer experience and where identity can play across that entire term. So with that, I'll open it up to questions. Thank you very much. Awesome. Very interesting. And now I know that your product has, and I shouldn't have that four years ago. My life would, so questions Stu silence.

No, because I find you really taking care of these. That's what I said beginning of our meeting that you, you can't go back every week to them. That's right. And my problem was, if you have a website it's a different than, than Salesforce was something like Facebook. If you have a site where there's lots of industries in that site, you know, from cars, but also there's for instance, VO is in there. Yeah. So as soon as you get a new application in, you might need to get the content again, just so, and this is what you need to think about the designing.

And then you have a stack of content, certainly in the beginning, obviously you didn't have that many consumers, but it, it, it really grows. We had no idea how to do it. We had to develop it ourselves. And so I just didn't think it should be the identity and access management realm. I don't know where the content should be.

You know, who is the, in the company who take care of, and It is across, across organization challenge, right? Certainly you've got your legal stakeholders who Want, I wanted to put, they didn't want And triggering.

However, again, you're impacting customer experience, CMO, anything you put in front of the customer, I want to be aware of. And I have a role to play to make sure it makes sense that it's readable, it's legible. So my CMO, same thing, he would gorse. Why is there another one now going out? And it's really an issue. Yeah.

And it, you know, but this is, this is, and I think it's very important now with all the changes going on, that you think about these things, because the, the users need, I think us is a problem, I think, cause so easily. And in Europe you can't do that. Is there a question over there? I saw his hand up there for a while, or you wanted to go Microphone. So the quick question you showed this progression and was a very definite left to right. One directional progression.

And I'm just wondering to what extent users, if you have any data about this users would be okay with taking one step back as opposed to taking like a GDPR, erase everything about me. Like maybe I don't want you to know everything about my preferences, but you can keep the email at some point, send a newsletter next year or something.

Yeah, no, it's a good question. And the customer journey often isn't linear to your point, but I think for simplification, it kind of gets the point across to your question about, you know, can I wholesale, like I don't wanna wholesale remove myself, but maybe I wanna update or remove some of the information you have absolutely the right to edit, update, change, or delete. The entire profile should be a capability inherent in profile management.

Now, especially as we go into the world with GDPR, do you have any data on how many people, if they have capability choose to do that, rather research, I actually do not. And it's interesting because while profiles have been around for a long time, this concept of being edit view update is relatively new. So if anybody in the audience actually has some experience with that, I'd be curious to hear what you're seeing. I think over time that data will become more available as more companies kind of embrace this approach.

And I think the other interesting point about this is oftentimes we think about this in a single brand context. Well, Nestle is one of our biggest customers and they have over 2000 brands on five continents. They deal with agencies who are often setting up microsites and mobile applications on their behalf. And just imagine trying to manage the identity layer and customer journey across not just one brand, but from water to espresso to on and down the line. Right. And really the team there is set up a core toolkit that they can roll out and provide to each of the regions.

And then the agency can do their thing and do the creative, amazing work that they do around that kind of core identity for the Market. Yeah. And that's exactly what I was talking about. I know him quite well. And we were really saying, we can't do this. We don't know how to do this.

And it's, I would like to have one question, but then we have to continue. Although you understand, I like to stop again. It's no problem. It's the same theme that I I had yesterday, which was really how are we bridging the offline activity and those users with their online persona. So in our market, right, we've got sales, tech, salespeople going out into the field. We've got technicians, we've got customer service reps taking calls over the phone. How do we bridge that activity?

Get it into their profile when we can't necessarily always proxy the user or ghost to them, or do things on their behalf without giving them consent. Right. They're not actually clicking the box. They're just toing somebody over the phone. Oh yeah. I give consent. Are there companies doing this effectively version, the offline activity with the online?

That, that, that's a great question. And obviously in the retail space in particular, it's a challenge, but also you mentioned just in many industries going on down the service line with the service technician is out in the field. We see this being embedded in actually the call center applications themselves, where oftentimes now in sophisticated call center software, they're recording every conversation. You always get that kind of default answer.

And the agent can actually check the box and associate the verbal portion of that consent back to the profile via the, the call center software that they're in day in and day out anyway. So that's through an API that we're seeing that take place. And then same thing for the, if you go right down to the retail associate kind of store level in retail, oftentimes it's at the point of sale on the cash register. They don't have a handheld device with them.

They, they, they aren't in the mobile world, but again, at the point of sale, some of these things can be captured and embedded into the, the point of sale technology as well. Again, API driven is, is what we've seen. So it's kind of becoming a part of the service or retail experience for the retailer or the service organization or the call center where those users live versus a whole separate and distinct.