Loyalty360 talks to brands regularly about the crucial aspect of internal alignment as it relates to
any customer loyalty/customer experience/customer engagement initiative.
Maria Winans is Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for IBM Watson Customer Engagement. She is responsible for managing all aspects of global marketing, strategy, and execution for solutions that enable business leaders in marketing, commerce, and supply chain disciplines to leverage data, analytics, and cloud to build deeper, more valuable engagements with their customers, partners, and suppliers.
Winans agrees that internal alignment is absolutely imperative for loyalty marketers.
“One of the biggest things I see in this digital transformation era of cognitive and AI, and being able to experiment with new technologies, is internal organization alignment and getting the right stakeholders to the table,” Winans explained to Loyalty360. “When there isn’t a full force behind those companies, small or big, projects won’t move as fast as others. It is a cultural change and when the company gets behind it, that accelerates the transformation. The most fluid conversations are when you have the alignment of the stakeholders. It’s a full end-to-end discussion. It’s about working differently. It’s the old versus the new.”
Underneath the umbrella of IBM Watson Customer Engagement are Watson Marketing, Watson Commerce, and Watson Supply Chain.
“We are very focused on speaking to the professionals behind each one of these touch points,” Winans explained. “For example, we have very focused messages to the marketers where we talk about Watson Marketing and our capabilities. We address their questions such as: 'how do I personalize the experience,’ ‘how can I create a frictionless experience,’ ‘how can I continuously improve my ROI for every dollar spent,’ ‘what does it cost per response, per lead and how can I get better insights about my customers?’ Our message is targeted to marketers and IBM’s ability to bring it all together.”
As for the solutions, each of the practitioner offers has embedded cognitive capabilities that, for example, will send marketers a notification that says, ‘Marketer, your customer is struggling…let me tell you what they’re struggling with.’”
Winans also noted that it’s important to understand that Watson doesn’t replicate human intelligence.
“Watson adopts a more ethical approach that enhances and scales human expertise, what we call augmented intelligence which helps people make better decisions that solve today’s most important challenges.”
For example, “The marketer is being alerted that there is a struggle and Watson recommends appropriate actions,” Winans explained. “However, at the end of the day, the marketer is the one that makes the decision based on the recommendations that Watson has given him or her.”
Winans said that having conversations about marketers struggling with content and content tagging, for example, or about showing ROI on performance for every dollar spent is very important and bring to light the capabilities and solutions IBM has right now.
“A lot of this AI may seem futuristic, but we’re embedding it around real business challenges,” Winans said. “What’s really important to businesses is protecting their investment by making it easy to expand. It’s very easy to grow with our solutions because all of our offerings are SaaS and are similar to UI. In addition, all of our clients are growing with us over time in each of these engagements.”
All of the discussions Winans sees begin with: “Here’s my challenge. Help me here.”
“How do we get more effective in personalizing these campaigns?” she said. “We want to work with the customer’s investment. What is the best set of capabilities and offerings for this challenge?”
Winans believes a certain strategic shift has occurred that places the customer at the center of everything.
“We lead with what are customers saying and how we can take the right actions to meet their goals,” she said. “I think we lost that over the years. This past week, I took my team through a completely new end-to-end campaign they just built. I proposed we navigate and go through it from a customer perspective (outside in), what’s that next click look like and what will the customer see. The more we look at it from that perspective, leading with the customer’s challenges, the better we become at achieving their goals as well as ours. When we take a good look at what our clients are trying to achieve, technology becomes secondary.”
Winans also points out that today’s customers want to experience everything for themselves.
“The biggest thing we’re seeing now is businesses saying, ‘show me,’” Winans said. “Let me try it. With everything on the cloud, the conversations are very different. Our customers want a 30-day trial and have access to someone who can walk them through the experience. They want to see how Watson works and hear about other businesses that have used a specific solution and we can deliver this to them. This world of ‘what are others doing?’ and ‘what results are they seeing?’ is here and the fact that most of this is done digitally has changed our model for going to market.”