“Journey orchestration became a key fundamental in terms of connecting experiences in the context of the journey and then making personalization and individualization decisions based on where the customer is on that journey and where they are on multiple journeys.”

This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos; we will be speaking with Ray Gerber, Chief Technology Officer and SVP of WW Engineering at Thunderhead. Thunderhead brings brands closer to their customers by assisting them in better understanding and satisfying the demands and needs of each client, regardless of where or when they connect. 

[00:56] Ray's Story – Ray recounts his journey up to this point and describes the significant landmarks he has encountered.

[05:20] Journey Orchestration – Ray outlines journey orchestration and what he noticed in the industry that inspired him to say, "Hey, we need to build this because it fills a massive need." Also, taking into account the present level of technology, he further explains how far he believes the company has developed since he first conceived of it and began constructing it.

[13:46] Conversation in the C suite - Ray describes why journey orchestration is discussed less frequently in the executive suite.

[18:15] Use Cases - Ray presents some of the more intriguing Journey Orchestration use cases he has observed.

[22:25] No Personas - If you can begin to personalize the experience, you may no longer require personas for design. Theoretically, it would help if you had guideposts but not necessarily personas. Ray delivers some of his thoughts in response to this.

Resources:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ray-gerber-b4232b/

Website: www.thunderhead.com

Be Customer Led - How Journey Orchestration is changing

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to be customer led. I'm your host bill. Staco folks, every once in a while you get a guest on this show who like I've just followed and admire a ton. Today we have Ray Gerber, who is the chief product officer of Thunderhead Medallia recently purchased Thunderhead. And, Thunderhead is the leader in journey orchestration and real time.

R T IM real time interaction management. So I really like Ray, thank you so much for coming the show. I'm so excited for this episode. You're welcome. I'm just jazzed about the technology and the capability and where it's going over the next couple years. And we're gonna get into that before we do Ray.

Just, you've got a really interesting background, cuz you've been in the CX tech space for a while. Tell us about your journey into, into this.

you can hear about the accent. I'm south African it's been Americanized a little bit, and it has a little bit of twist of, of British in there. Since I lived in London for seven years. but historically I come from an interesting, a manufacturing background. I was an engineer, in South Africa software engineer at the biggest dairy in the Southern hemisphere called CLO dairies.

So in 1995, they moved me to the USA, which I was very fortunate and I love the country and the opportunities I've had. And, and through that, I went from E R P then into actually into CRM. And, worked on kind of the side of the user of technologies, not vendors per se. And then in, late two thousands, we acquired a CRM technology called accordion software.

And again, we successfully deployed that in subsequently. They asked me to become their CTO. So I joined Corion. And as part of that, we really got into this concept of conversation management because Corion had an amazing NBE action platform acquired by acquisition of K I Q, which is really the leader at that time.

and then we were acquired, according was acquired by Pega systems and I was fortunately to work for them for a year as the, the VP of, customer experience. But primarily working with them, to work with the, the accordion customer base, to feel comfortable with the acquisition, but also instrumental working with the Pega leadership team and the technology team of how to integrate the, the accordion assets, into Pega systems in, in, and I think that if ever, they was an example of a leader that decided that the company they acquire needs to be embedded and thoroughly embedded in, in acquired query.

The first part of my journey was actually to help him take his current CCM solution, customer communication management, and translate that into a SA solution, which translated him in 2016, being able to, sell that company to Exel Jr. When subsequent use that funding to accelerate the development of the thunder red customer orchestration or gene orchestration platform.

So I've been fortunate to work on both sides of the aisle. I, I love what I do. I, I, I love way Thunderhead has emerged in, in any essence, how Thunderhead has I believe been, set the standard for what gender orchestration vendors are measured to. So I, I look forward to sharing some of that with you today.

Cuz it solves a really big problem.

As part of that process, obviously my background, as, as understanding NextSpace action, fundamentally very fortunate to work with some of the, the, the thought leaders in this space, at Pega slash co beforehand, and the innovators of this space, I said we needed to bring, NextSpace action into the engagement space, because that is provide you with the ability to continually deliver experience to the customer.

That's relevant, appropriate in the context of the channel, capabilities that they're, they, that they're in. what I realized was that, engagement was about experiences over time. Next is action itself was really about a moment in time, what is the right conversation to have with that individual at that time?

So then the concept of customer journeys came in in terms of, but if engagement is over time,consumers and customers engage with the brand over time. And those over time experience interactions are captured in essence, as a journeys that are present to the journey. So the idea of journey orchestration came in terms of how do we add, context to next best actions?

Based on where the customer starts and the eventual outcome that they want to achieve. And so junior orchestration became in as, as a key fundamental in terms of connecting experiences together in the context of the journey and then making personalization, individualization decisions based on the, where the customer is in that journey.

But also where they are in multiple journeys. So if a customer is on a sales journey to, to, to upgrade something, but he suddenly has a service issue. How does this recommendation engine and engine understand the impact negative impact of the service experience on the positive experience possibly of the, of the upsell or, or the renewal and how do you then pause the, the upsell journey?

Continue the service journey, then maybe start a nurturing journey to the point where you have enough insights about the customer, that he can actually now progress on his upsell journey or his re subscription journey. So, so it's kind of really taking individual expert actions with, with himself are very, very, very, very good, but providing a layer on top.

That says, how do we connect all of these experiences and actions together to be able to realistically understand how customers prefer to behave over time in the context of a journey?

And even thinking about some of your prior roles, right? Just how has the technology evolved in the last couple of years? The one thing that I think about Ray is, and I just post about this this morning is in the last five years, technology has significantly changed that five years is gonna turn into two years, from now like, so when you think about sort of Thunderhead in, in 2016, when you were ideating and you were starting to build this, how far have you, do you think that the company has come today, given the technology where it is.

So that's, that's the one thing in, in correlating to, to that going from real time to instantaneous is this concept. I would call it personalization to individualization. Okay. So, traditionally marketing systems was very much focused on segmentation. Okay. In, in segmentation is focused on demographics and psychographics.

There's very little elements of, of behavior analysis. That's part of that. And when you think of it's easy to categorize group of people in segments, when they are the same age and they live in the same area and the same level of education and they all own own own homes. I think where you get into individualization is when you, where you have the fundamental ability to in real time.

Understand the impact of each interaction on a customer journey and therefore bringing behavior and the understand of friction and emotion as part of that behavior over time into the aspect of making that decision. That's the second element. The third one is the ation of, of AI and ML. it's a word that gets thrown around a lot.

Okay. But it's really the ability to take mass amount of data. And in real time process their data to understand. How behavioral change is occurring and therefore, how do I respond as a brand to that behavioral change? So I, I kind of take that, I did the presentation last week around the concept of autonomous orchestration is how do I compare where our industry is going?

Mm-hmm to driverless vehicles and the technologies embedded in drivers vehicles and the ability and the need to react instantaneously to changing. Internal and external conditions of that driverless vehicle is, is I call that autonomous gene orchestration. It is how can, a brand deliver journeys to customers, but allow those to autonomously improve themselves, but also understand where and when the need is for a human being to interject themselves in the process, because.

Things are happening that is not supposed to be happening. So, so for me, I, I take all of that in, in, in terms of the concept of autonomous journey orchestration, which is interesting is my question to some of the other journey orchestration vendors that really are campaign vendors is how do you plan to transition from a pre-planned campaign to something that is autonomous, agile, and continuously learning and evolving.

And I think there's a GI, a big gap between the two.

Why do you think maybe? And when you go to the Thunderhead website, you've got plenty of research on there. Significant reduction in churn through the platform, significant, solid increases in cross sell solid increase in, sort of new customer acquisition, et cetera. Why do you think that or journey orchestration or even autonomous journey orchestration?

Why isn't that more of a C-suite conversation? Like why isn't the CEO? Why haven't their ears perked up on this yet? Maybe

So, so a lot of companies are doing lip service to customer centric. But when you look at the authority of an, a chief customer officer within the, in a company, most of them are single individual sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so then we, we had a couple of conversations with CEOs and CEOs. Yes. They there's, they're supposedly be supposed to look at, at the investors, firstly, and, and then the customer base.

But I think this land is more on the invasive side, which, which is fine. Mm-hmm so then we look at, in saying, as we develop our gene orchestration platform, What is the biggest problem we solve for the consumer or the customer. Okay. And we, and we realized it was that, proactive predefined campaigns that are enticing us and giving us bad experiences by delivering emails and irrelevant SMS is continuously trying to push things down our throat.

And so we realized that the, the solution that we were building. Was in essence solving that problem is how can we help the CMO to maybe get more value out of their campaign systems. But by us being embedded into that platform, we can still, even in the context of a journey, being able to say, okay, you need step three, go to a and saying, is this still the right thing to.

And that's just interesting. When we had the OEM partnership for Salesforce, we were very, very successful in terms of bringing kind of the old, exact target journeys. And thundering solutions together, but what happened was provide optimized experiences to customers because the journeys became contextually aware of the behavior, the wants and needs of the customers, but obviously we knew over time that, people will see that these preplan campaigns continually.

Out of date and the, the effort to continuously maintain it because of behavioral change and the change in, in understanding our customer needs and wants is just gonna be such an administrative overhead that they get, they need to get rid of that. So I think that's why we, we ended up primarily, focusing on the CMO, however, We always were interested in bringing the CMO and saying, let's bring customer service into play.

Let's bring eCommerce into play. Let's so because for us, an engagement is about marketing sales, service and commerce, and you need to be able to understand how the customer behaves and all those channels. And you need to be able to realistically understand how do I engage with that customer across all those silos to make sure that every experience has still has value to the customer, but it's also enough value to the brand to deepen the relationship they have with a customer,

But I'm hearing that a lot more and more as. Whether that's the growth of the role, whatever it is. I think that like a lot of things that the role has become bastardized a little bit mm-hmm um, and has become different things to a lot of different companies. When you think about sort of the, those use cases that you, whether it's in, in, I wanna get to your point or in, in this question around the horizontal impact of, of a platform like Thunderhead mm-hmm and bringing different, sales, marketing, customer center operations, et cetera together.

What are some of the more fun use cases you've seen with this technology? I mean, there's probably some real obvious ones, of course, but like, and have you had any, maybe that surprised you when you were engaging, some of your customers were like, man, we never thought about that, but that's a pretty cool idea.

I'm just curious to your thought,

And, and what we realized is people behave. Differently. Mm-hmm. I mean, when we look at, we thought we were gonna see these beautiful flows of, of most common paths or most journeys where people use five different channels and then they go from a to B and C and then where you can, we can understand what we realize very quickly is wow.

People behave differently and it's truly that every person as an individual. Behave in their own way, in their own context and based on their own needs. And, and, and so for us, the interesting thing was in a version two of the gene genetics is firstly, we added, tried to add more context, think of Delta airlines, just saying I'm trying to analyze my most common routes and people are flying, but is it globally?

Or do you say what's my most common route from the east coast to the west coast. Mm-hmm , or from north America to south America and in, and so we added what we call a query layer to that we allow the business user to provide context to them. And then we started saying, okay, now let's build these AA algorithms.

And the first one was called most common path analysis, which was very strict in terms of people had to go from a, to B, to C, to D on the same channel. And then we realized that. People behave differently. So we create what we call a relaxed version of that, where we, we allow kind of like a, a nearest neighbor type of concept.

So you can actually see similar behaviors, but not exact behaviors. And that's kind of where it became very, very interesting for brands to understand, kind of the groups on cohort people that are actually. Behaving, in, in a similar manner and therefore most probably have the same needs and wants.

so, so I think that that was for me, the thing, the next thing was, was to use using that as a basis is to use machine learning as a diagnostic tool, instead of just a predictive, a prescription tool is, is how do I, now that I have app all these behaviors, how do I translate behaviors into machine learning features?

We started with something called Dyna, static actions where the, the business user have to create the 50 individualized conversations that we want to have with the brand. And we realize suddenly, but the number of conversations. It's explosive. I mean, it's hundreds of and thousands of them. So we then internally transitioned the, the platform to be able to support what we call dynamic conversations or dynamic actions, where you can much quicker at a large scale at 10, 20, 30,000 conversations that can be had with customers.

So those is the interesting transition, in terms of which allows you as a brand to become really individualized in. I have a conversation that's applicable to bill. I have a conversation applicable to, to arraign, but obviously bill looks like a group of other people based on, demographic, psychographics and behaviors.

Andra looks like something. So therefore I can assume those people are gonna be behaving the same way. So,

Because if you can start to individualize the experience, you don't necessarily need personas for design anymore. Right? In theory, I, you need guideposts, but you don't necessarily need personas.

So it's a very much like, we saying that a consumer wants a personalized individualist experience in the context of who they are. When we, as a brand position products and solutions to business users, we also have to understand their background, what drives them and where they come from. Mm-hmm because you, you can pull the rug from a marketeer and saying, you've done this stuff for 15 years.

I'm gonna give you something new can make you more powerful. Suddenly he's knowledge based that made him a, a very important employee is pulled away from him. So we've come up with something called audiences. Which believe is kind of a middle path between a persona and a segment mm-hmm , but it's more what we call dynamic audiences.

So we have the ability to understand the, the, and use machine learning to, to create cohorts of, of consumers and customers that we put together as audiences. But the nice thing is that as that customer's behavior changes in the next five minutes in the next 10 minutes, they'll be moved out of one audience into another.

Okay. And so it's kind of is the concept of dynamically, having group. So it gives you the business users, still the ability to say, what is my cohorts of customers that are behaving the same? How do they behave? What are are these, is there similarity in demographics and psychographic, but that's kind of where we come up in terms of trying to find that model path.

it's kind of the, same thing with, with campaigns on the one side and actions on the one side is what is that mapping experience you pro provide in the middle. And we work very hard at finding a way. Is there something called an experience map or a conversation map that is not a redefined set of statements on the left hand side?

[00:23:42] Bill Staikos: Got it. one of the things that I really wish for the technology, and I wanna ask you where you think the tech is going the next three years is the ability to turn, turn the tech on, more outside in.

And what I mean by that, Ray, from the perspective. Even though I'm I might be in a journey with Delta as an example. Mm-hmm I actually might also be going through two, three, or maybe even four concurrent journeys. So when you think about context and individualization, how do you think about, and I want to get, get to the point for maybe the future of sort of the technology, but I'd love for I'd love for a way for something no matter what that is, maybe it's your phone or something else at some point.

To be able to understand that I'm going through those three or four different, or concurrent journeys and then how to bring them together. To create value is sort of in, for my life, right? So there might be like an overall, like an archetype of a travel journey, Delta meet being one of those journeys, but then you've got Uber, then you've got shopping, then you've got whatever that is.

And how do you bring all those together to create even a different layer of value? Very

It's pretty interesting. I think the interesting thing there is the challenge that concept competes with the Googles of the world. Sure. Okay. On one side, I think the second aspect is, is the aspect where suddenly, if you're saying I want the consumer to be in control of their data, As they interacted on third party sites.

And then first party sites is, is I think what we found the resistance of first party providers in terms of, but I don't wanna share my data if, if Raymond is looking for a car. Okay. I don't want him to use the search. Okay. He did on my site to help him buy another. Assuming that this middle layer will say, okay, Raymond has looked on on Honda.

He's looked on VW is looked on Mercedes Benz. Yeah. correct. Therefore I have this centralized kind of decisioning system that says, well, therefore I think based on Raymond's research on all these sites and all the data that he's had, I think Raymond should buy Mercedes-Benz SL three 20 a and G which, and so I think, yes, we would all love to go there.

I think the technology can go there. I think there's just a lot of other hurdles that are more psychological, that I think is, is preventing it from being there, to be honest. So

Where do you see the technology over the next, like evolving over the next three years?

Okay. I think brands spend a tremendous amount of time in investment CMOs, everybody in terms. What is that perfect set of customer experiences during the buying cycle that has allow my customer to purchase a product in a frictionless manner, et cetera, et cetera. I think one of the problems that we have is our inability to be able to understand if the product the per customer purchased is actually fulfilling his wants and needs that he stated always discovered as he was in the buying cycle.

And I think that, obviously feedback programs that Medallia has is very important to get that information. I would just like a more automated way where you can have more technologies embedded in products. That can understand is the use like a cellphone is a perfect thing. I mean, you, when you have a Verizon contract, they know how many times you talk on the phone, how many text message you've seen without knowing the content?

So they know Raymond is using this phone. He's got a plan that is overwhelming based on voice, but it only he's he's, but he only, his, his user voice is 5% of his overall use. So therefore maybe when renews, we should recommend a different. So, so how can we take that analogy of, of, of that? And then when you bring in the concept of if therefore a consumer has multiple products with multiple IOT devices, how can those IOT devices communicate with each other to provide a better experience for a customer?

Let's take simple example. Most probably, but, but I have a refrigerator. That's an IOT device. I purchased my tomatoes in a bag from Publix that has a tag on it on when the, then tomatoes expire. Wouldn't be nice that if my tomato bag and talk to my refrigerator to alert Raymond, that your, your tomatoes will expire in two days and then automatically put it ordering to Kroger or to Publix.

To reorder, tomatoes in three minutes. I think that's kind of where I see. I mean, we still a long way from that. Yeah. But that's where I see kind of the, how does the tomato provider ever know if people are getting value from the tomatoes because they dunno how many tomatoes being thrown away or not.

Yeah. But, but how can that I IOT device communicate back and saying 80% of your tomatoes that are being sold, are being thrown away just as an example.

Yeah. I love that because it, it kind of helps us think a little bit about how journey orchestration is gonna change our lives and the way we interact with brands every day. And that says something I, I put a lot personally of just time and thought into. It's just a topic that I'm always curious about.

Ray, I'm mindful of the time. I know you're packing for a trip as well. I wanna be respectful of that. What leaders do you look up to whether in this space specifically, or, or just even just business leaders generally, or do you have like folks that do you look

To come up with an idea that they believe in and fundamentally stand behind it and going through having left your job and taking all your cash and putting into idea, not knowing at all, if it'll be successful. Yeah. And, and that's the people that, and, and I think that's what bank Americas are. Is all these small companies that have started from somewhere, every big company at some point was a small company.

every big company was a small company that competed with a big company, a around ideas and innovation. I think when I look, I I'd rather look at companies that have changed the lives of people. When we look at, at, at, at how Netflix have changed our life compared to blockbuster. And knowing that Netflix tried to get them sold to blockbuster for 18 million.

Creating a new idea, creating a disruptive idea that we can see change the life of consumers,

I I'm a terrible reader. My wife always laughs at me because she loves reading. I read the first three pages of a book, then I skip and I read the last three pages, then I feel like I fully erase myself.

Okay. So I know how consumers or business users experience software that they get that does not function is as expected and was oversold. I know a difficult, it is, especially in the SA space to not only develop software, but to manage the software on behalf of those customers. But also because I read so much from that perspective.

And when I say I read a five page blog post, maybe I read seven paragraphs that are key for me is that is kind of what inspires me and what helps me think about, oh, this is a nice new idea. How can I translate that? And, and I think if there's something very specific that really has triggered. A lot of my thought is the use of the product called ways the GPS application.

Sure. Yeah, because that's so much in our space in terms of how, how does ways work? It's a lot of drivers being attached, driving slow. Therefore we can SP assume that there's something going on. When a, a gas station has a special, it will recommend how you reroute to fill up gas because you own on one third of your gas.

So, so I think that to me is like, when you look at Netflix, when you look at ways, those are the things I think that I get inspiration from and saying, how can I make sure that to acknowledge we build at slash Medallia now, continues to first and foremost at the end, create, improve in customer experiences and then subsequently.

The the business user is our customer too. How can we make sure that those business users also have great customer experiences?

And that, anybody who's never heard of Ray, please look this guy up, read his stuff, check out Thunderhead, certainly, and just really impressive what you and the team have built. I'm excited for the opportunity to partner with you on a more regular basis. And yeah, I'm excited for this space and what it's gonna be able to do, for consumers.

[00:34:43] Bill Staikos: I totally agree. All right, everybody. Another great episode for you all. We'll see you next week.

We're out. Talk to you