Interaction Studio: Part 2

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a Marketing Cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer- experience obsessed and podcast hosts Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- on- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how- tos and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. This is Bobby Tichy along with Cole Fisher and Nick Burggraf. We've got part two of Interaction Studio today, diving into implementing Interaction Studio and the strategies around it, so excited to jump into that. As always, you guys can contact us at, intheclouds @ levdigital. com and still sitting and nine reviews as of this taping. So hopefully someone's given us that 10th review or 11th.

Cole: Let's not talk crazy now, Bobby.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, so excited to jump into this today, as far as what it takes to implement Interaction Studio and really the concepts to do it. So Cole, would love for you to start off just kind of going over what that looks like and what you've been learning over the last couple of months as you've gotten up to speed on Interaction Studio, what it takes to implement it.

Cole: Yeah. So I think to start with, it's just a very different beast. It's nature is entirely different than other products. So when we implement mobile studio or email or things like that, these generally come with prerequisite understanding, experience, best practices that people generally know. Marketing managers who have been in this place before and know what to expect from email, know what their standard practices are. They have pretty typical expectations of what they should get out of this. It's a single channel and it's just very straight forward. So the implementation tends to be more technical than strategic. With Interaction Studio, however, this really begs a larger scale discussion and so you need to really understand end- to- end what that customer experience may look like, you have to be open to what you don't know about the customer experience, all the different variations of the life cycles and things like that they may go through.

Bobby Tichy: Is it safe to say that, I think a lot of times, when you think about those single channels, you think about a campaign, you're just thinking of an email campaign. Is it safe to say that Interaction Studio's a different way of looking at a broader campaign? So you're thinking more about more channels, more touch points, not just a, I want to send an email campaign today. You're going to launch a campaign that takes more time and that sort of thing?

Cole: Yeah, it can be. So it's entirely use case based. So really knowing and understanding those lifecycle stages and what you expect to get out of those, that's imperative to start. Identifying opportunities, where you're going to have objective measurable KPIs and then really drilling into what specific goals are, whether they're a customer or product related, however that may look. So it's important to say," Okay, what are the 2020 goals," or," What are we looking for throughout this fiscal? What are the big pushes that we're trying to do as a company?" From there we extract, like what are the big products that are going to need to be pushed? What are the big opportunities that are missing right now with current analytics that you may have? What can we learn? What can we garner from what we have on the table and build in, this is really specific use cases around, this is a specific product that I need to build more awareness around. This is one of the things that is kind of like a pitfall, like we talked about with Journey Builder, where we see those nightmare journeys where somebody wanted to be like," Okay, well this is the welcome and they'd get like five messages and then they're going to be in this lifecycle and they're going to be in this sort of mode." [crosstalk 00:04:30]-

Nick Burggraf: And they over- engineer.

Cole: Yeah, and so they just end- to- end do everything. Generally, the rule of thumb with Interaction Studio is if you're going beyond a lifecycle stage or two, you're probably doing it wrong. So that should probably be broken up into separate use cases. So, if I want to drive awareness to a specific product, then I should just be focusing on just the awareness, not the awareness and then educating them about the product once they're on the site and then converting them to the product, getting them to purchase. I don't want to do that because that's me falling into my old way of this is how I'm going to orchestrate the end-to- end journey. That's the end-to-end process that we wanted to avoid in Journey Builder, and we want to avoid it in just general orchestration.

Bobby Tichy: So the end- to-end, as we think about the end- to- end customer journey and not meaning Marketing Cloud journey, but just in general, what we want to think about is how do each of these different Interaction Studio use cases map to that across the whole element. But that doesn't mean one Interaction Studio use case is the whole customer journey.

Cole: Exactly, yeah. So you have to be prepared to say," Okay, yeah, I do want this new product awareness. I want the awareness. I do need to educate around it. Yes, we definitely want to bring awareness to this because we're trying to get higher conversion rates to it," but those are different use cases. So we need to separate those. So there's certain frameworks that we can use when we're onsite or when we're discussing customers around how to identify these. We're talking about what is the customer looking for? What's the need that they're feeling? So it's very customer- centric in how we discover this. But I think one of the big, big pitfalls, aside from just trying to tie everything in and traverse multiple lifecycle stages, is the implementation process itself, where we don't have the right decision makers in the room. We need a lean team of decision makers who are 100% bought in, we don't want... A lot of the times where we'll run into a snag is if it's cross- channel, it's omnichannel and... which it should be to start with, but where we've got the email marketing team and they're ready and we've got the web team and we've got them all tied into this use case and ready to go. Then when it comes time to use CRM data, or to push this into CRM for next best action, all of a sudden we've got to get a hold of the CRM team and they have dev that's just not ready for it. Or they have a different executive sponsorship that hasn't been caught up to speed and all of a sudden we start hitting hurdles and [crosstalk 00:07:08]-

Bobby Tichy: Because I imagine where it's a lot different, especially than your standard channels is you're taking a concept. So a lot of times when we're working on an email implementation, for example, we're working with the email marketing manager, who's responsible for the content just deploying these messages, but Interaction Studio is turning that on its head where it's saying, what as a business are we trying to accomplish? So to your point, let's take a greeting card company, for example, we want there to be more awareness around our birthday cards. So that's our use case number one, and then maybe use case number two is once those people are aware, we want to educate them on why our greeting cards are the best. Then third, we want them to convert on buying one of those. So it's really, how do I get the... is it marketing, that's primarily driving these use cases?

Cole: A lot of the times, the main decision maker is your chief marketing officer, or now they're coming up with all these cool... like chief innovation officer and things like that, you know?

Bobby Tichy: Oh sure, yeah, chief experience officer.

Cole: Yeah, exactly. So it's a lot of times, yes an experience officer or something like that, but yeah, a CMO, a chief experience officer, somebody like that is tied into not necessarily the everyday process, but 100% bought in and making decisions.

Bobby Tichy: Which is really cool because as you think about it all of these different channels should be decisions made from that top level. It should be a brand strategy rather than just the email marketing manager saying like," Well, this email worked pretty well last year. Let's send this again." So there, that CMO is having these exact level conversations of what do we want to do as a company. Then they're able to say," This is what we need to work on," and IS able to easily fit into what that should be.

Cole: Exactly. I mean, we've talked for decades about silos within companies and it's easier said than done breaking those down, but Interaction Studio is really that cohesive layer across all these channels and its number one purpose is really business value. So when we change our lens to look through this as business value, that is touching, and it has to touch all areas and having that roll up into one executive sponsorship or one ultimate decision maker, or a COE, or a narrowly focused group that is making this happen is vital.

Bobby Tichy: Nick, do you think that the way that Interaction Studio supports all these different elements, do you think it will make the way that people strategize around these campaigns or use cases will change, or do you just think that Interaction Studio makes it more efficient for them?

Nick Burggraf: Yeah, great question. I think that overall, we've covered it. Organizations have been transforming over the course of the last five to 10 years into that more customer- centric model of," Hey, it's no longer a CMO and somebody from a CRM team that's overarching." So there's this disparation of these different silos in a company. So really, the point being, it's really complementary to what's already happened from an organizational change and that groundwork has complimented companies taking on Interaction Studio because they've already had those gears turning of," Hey, the way we're looking at this doesn't work anymore because this customer life cycle is getting way too cross- channel, omni- channel and we can't operate this way anymore."

Cole: Yeah, this is becoming a very healthy and welcomed change for the companies that are doing this and doing it correctly. They're seeing this like the normal way we've been approaching our problems has not been effective enough, where this cohesion across all channels, that's becoming really successful.

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. And I do think it's still classically marketing- led, just because they've always been more in tune with the customer lifecycle or what should be happening because they've been on the forefront of trying to take work away from sales and service teams and take work away from people. Not in the bad sense of," Hey, we don't need as many reps," but we can automate this use in so many different systems over the course of time in the last five, 10 years.

Cole: And there's a natural inclination that the marketing teams are so able to readily accepting to this, is because it's very similar to markets. So it intuitively falls in line with what marketing teams already know, which marketing has never done. You're always optimizing, you're always evolving. You're learning more as you go and that's what Interaction Studio is like. So the omni- channel, complete customer experience is never really done. Even when you implement these use cases, you're finding out more new things about them and more new opportunities or ways that we can pull a couple levers and optimize things. So I feel like marketers are already in that seat that they've known this for a while. As any martech, or even single channels are concerned, they know that just watching the analytics and studying and learning as they go is just protocol for them. So this becomes very naturally accepted.

Bobby Tichy: I'm sure it's more of a... for companies who are implementing Interaction Studio, and may not follow this process today, it probably makes them mature faster, or just in general mature because they haven't been doing this before, thinking about that. So I think as we transition to more of the process and timeline for what implementation looks like, just as a recap. So as we're starting to implement Interaction Studio, a couple things, one is strategy is key, understanding what those use cases are and making sure that those use cases are focused around what we're trying to accomplish, making sure the right decision makers are involved from a leadership and those who are actually able to make those decisions is vital. Then also, it's a similar concept to what we teach in marketing, which is it's never really done. There will always be something that can be done better. How do we make sure that we, as Cole likes to say fail, but fail fast, and then also evolve as we learn more about them. So Cole, what as we think about the actual implementation process and timeline, let's say, we've got our three use cases finalized, or we think we do and we're getting ready to implement it. What happens from there?

Cole: Yeah. So I did find those use cases. There's a lot of pre- work to that and a lot of that is done during the sales and understanding and discussion around Interaction Studio. So there's homework to be done on both the partner and Salesforce and customer side, but once that's and we feel like we're getting to the point of finalizing those use cases, that's that discovery and design phase. Typically we're looking at two to three weeks and that's where we're leveraging everything in current state. What we know about the customers, if the customer already has predefined lifecycle stages, any analytics that we can get our minds around, that can help with that. Understanding the overarching company goals and how each of those are going to tie into customer- centric or product- specific use cases and what we expect out of those and where our baseline goals and KPIs should be, because none of these use cases are successful without objective KPIs to measure against. That's where that ROI really comes in handy, because Interaction Studio, it's like any martech, it's not going to be a cheap price tag. The whole point of it is to make sure that you're getting more than you're spending. It's all a game of arbitrage. We're trying to get more out of what we're putting out. Then yeah, finalizing those use cases and really having a focused COE, executive sponsorship, a focused committee that is going to be responsible for decision making throughout this process. Having that identified during the discovery and design phases is imperative. After that comes build and configuration. So that typically, just depending on the use case, falls somewhere in about a four week range. That's provisioning data, that's identifying and setting out the touch points across all the channels that you've identified, tagging all your assets, building out the journeys and adding any delivery, or optimizing those journeys. Then after that is heavy QA and UAT time, and you want to spend at least a week doing that. Then after that it's deployment, go live where we're actually... I say that as, go live is not really a point where you're done. It's a one week go live where you publish this and it's just good to go. It's like, let's just keep an eye on this. There's probably going to be more testing now that it's in the live phase and there's going to be more optimization. So that use case now is not necessarily complete, but it's live. So there's a big difference and that's where it kicks in. But all in all, we usually look at for the typical use case, something like a 10 to 14 week timeline. After that, as you identify more use cases, now you don't have to do the lifecycle identification and things like that. So there's certain parts that are a little bit lighter in the list.

Bobby Tichy: So Nick, as we go through this implementation, what are some tips or tricks people can keep in mind, or things where maybe some other folks have fallen down, to help ensure that they have a successful implementation experience?

Nick Burggraf: Yeah. I'm going to pull this one right from The Office. If there's any Office fans out there, it's the Michael Scott sales tip of KISS, keep it simple, stupid. Hurts my feelings every time but it works. I might have misquoted that a little bit, but really it is about that. There's so much that you can do to over- engineer something of this scale. So when we talk about... and Cole, you mentioned prerequisites, there's not really prerequisites yet because a lot of companies aren't doing doing something like this, or they're not using technology, that's comparable in any sense. So to over- engineer it is putting six month timeline in front of a project they can take up to 12 weeks or so to actually implement and get the gears going on this. So when we talk about use cases and we talk about building a center of excellence and having leadership sponsorship for this, it's really about, hey, let's just find that ROI on a system that's going to grow with us and that we have capacity utilize over time.

Cole: Yeah, I think that's a good point. Kind of that streamlined nature of keeping it simple, it's true with the strategy side. It's true with the organization, but it's also true with the technical implementation too, because at the same time, when we want to think about data in Interaction Studio, there are certain tips and tricks that we want to think about. Let's not collect data in Interaction Studio that's already being collected elsewhere. Using native connectors is fantastic, if we can do that. Any data that's already in data extensions is ideal. Not tagging assets and parts of the sites that we don't need to on these original use cases. We can spend days tagging every site and every page and every asset that we have, and really that's not going to be directly affecting our use case. On top of that, if we do spend the time doing that, it'll not only slow us down, but now we're going to be probably charged depending on what data we're collecting. We're now going to be charged for the data that's going to be collected. So if you're trying to be lean and mean and intelligent about how you're getting up and running within Interaction Studio, you want to be mindful of your usage. So all of a sudden, pulling in data and things like that you just don't need, that's going to be expensive and timely.

Bobby Tichy: To that point around data, there are two elements to Interaction Studio data, there's a data store and data adapter. So data store you can think of as the data model within Interaction Studio, so we might be feeding that data into Interaction Studio itself on a regular cadence. The other is data adapters, and these are temporary elements of data that we can call out and get as needed. So, for example, let's say at the time that we want to send out a particular communication, we want to check the service to make sure that's still available. So, let's say we're talking about greeting cards again, and we just want to check to make sure that this greeting card hasn't sold out, that we're going to pitch to someone to make sure that it's still available as we send them a message about it. So two main elements there, and as you get into the implementation, you'll want to understand what makes sense for us to keep in the data store and actually store within Interaction Studio, versus where is this data somewhere else that I can just pull from at the time that I need it?

Nick Burggraf: Yeah, a couple of other quick ones that I don't think we covered, but one of them is surrounding those use cases that I think in episode one or part one of this, we talked about web personalization and the common misconception. Definitely want to fully understand the platform and the capabilities, cross- channel omni- channel and not just focused on web personalization.

Cole: Yeah, web personalization's a big thing for a lot of people but if you're just trying to do web personalization, there's cheaper and easier tricks to do it. The real value in Interaction Studio, you're right, is touching across multiple channels. Yeah, I feel like you're right, that's a really common misstep that a lot of people have, is they just go right to the web personalization aspect, which is fantastic, but is limited.

Nick Burggraf: Yep. Finally, I'd say you got to know your KPIs before you begin, whether you're getting hit up by a Salesforce rep, or you're getting leadership pressure on analyzing Interaction Studio, or just frankly," Hey, we need to go and license this," from the CEO, that's happened before. In my experience on the customer side, we bought Marketing Cloud five, six years ago because our CIO was like," Hey, we're buying this," and threw it on our martech plate of," Okay, now go and implement this." That kind of mentality of, okay, make sure you do the prep work to understand what KPIs you're going after, because this isn't a small investment. It's a game- changing initiative, for sure.

Bobby Tichy: So just as a recap of everything that we chatted through. So as we think about Interaction Studio and implementing Interaction Studio, a couple of things. One, we want to make sure that we're focused on strategy. What are those big ticket items that the company is trying to drive? And how can we turn those into use cases that are specific to those different ideals? We want to make sure that we've got the right decision makers involved. Typically someone from the marketing team that's leading the marketing team and then as we go through the actual implementation timeline, it's usually about a 10 to 14 week process as we go through it. Again, you want to start with a couple of use cases. You don't want to throw out three dozen use cases to start. You just want to keep iterating. Marketing has never done that sort of element. then lastly, just a couple of tips and tricks. Keep it simple on your initial use case as you start to learn the tool. Don't just start using it as about personalization, it's a much more powerful tool than that and start thinking outside of that. Be mindful of data and know what your KPIs are beforehand. So thanks again for listening to part two of Interaction studio and jumping into completely unrelated, the best fad you guys can think of, or your favorite fad, I should say.

Cole: You know, I had a weird thing. I always had an aversion to following feds. I think it was younger brother syndrome. Whatever my brothers do, I had to do something different, or cooler. So they were already in... a fad was a thing. I was like," Oh, I'm not inventing this thing. I don't want to just follow." But one of the coolest things, especially when I was really young and impressionable, snap bracelets, do you remember those?

Bobby Tichy: Oh, yeah.

Cole: I remember collecting those. They were all the way up my arm.

Bobby Tichy: The girls wore them, yeah.

Cole: I mean, they were all up my forearms, the more you had, the more street cred you had. I mean, it was a thing.

Bobby Tichy: Just imagining when I'm walking down the street and I see a gang and they've all got their snap bracelets. That's not someone you want to mess with.

Cole: You know to stay away from those, they're wild.

Bobby Tichy: The things that I love are just all basically around food. I think The best are my favorite fad, I consider it a fact because it's not around all the time, are the... Oh, I'm totally losing the name of it. The mint milkshakes at McDonald's during St. Paddy's Day.

Nick Burggraf: Shamrock Shakes.

Bobby Tichy: Shamrock Shakes.

Cole: I've never tried one of those.

Nick Burggraf: They're delicious.

Cole: Really?

Bobby Tichy: They are really good, yeah. They're green, minty. Oh, it's delicious.

Cole: I love me some St. Paddy's themery.

Bobby Tichy: Nick. I'm going to guess yours is a mullet since that's what you currently have.

Nick Burggraf: I do have a mullet and-

Cole: And you're playing POGs right now.

Nick Burggraf: I think there's a classy way to wear a mullet. I think it's a look that's going to come back. It's not my favorite fad. I think my favorite fad, or the best fad, and maybe this is just nostalgia talking, but through the'90s, there were some great boy bands. I mean, the choreographed dancing on the scene.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, I like what you're putting down here.

Nick Burggraf: I think that that is one of the best fads to come out of... There's no shame in being a coordinated dancing.

Cole: I don't know if I would call that a fad as much as I would just call it raw talent.

Bobby Tichy: So, here's the million dollar question. Backstreet Boys or NSYNC?

Nick Burggraf: Oh NYSNC all the way.

Bobby Tichy: Cole?

Cole: Well, every group has to have one guy who's wrong. It's Backstreet.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, exactly.

Cole: So Nick is clearly [crosstalk 00:25:19].

Bobby Tichy: It's clearly Backstreet, yeah.

Cole: Just way off.

Bobby Tichy: Just because Justin Timberlake ended up having a better solo career, does not mean that NSYNC was better than Backstreet Boys.

Nick Burggraf: I couldn't name a Backstreet Boy.

Cole: Yeah, because there's no I in team.

Bobby Tichy: Exactly, beautiful.

Nick Burggraf: Beautiful.

Bobby Tichy: Thanks for listening guys. We'll talk to you soon. As always, you can reach out to us at intheclouds @ levdigital. com. Talk to you soon.