Dale Renner, founder and CEO of RedPoint Global, doesn’t care much for titles in the world of loyalty marketing, such as Chief Digital Officer or Chief Marketing Officer.
“It’s challenging in a large enterprise where we create these titles like Chief Digital Officer,” Renner told Loyalty360. “What does a Chief Digital Officer do compared to a Chief Marketing Officer? Or the person in charge of email might be in direct conflict with what I’m doing with my CRM in my call centers. Part of the challenge is organizational.”
But, what it IS about for Renner and RedPoint Global is customer engagement.
“Something major is going on and a fundamental shift is happening,” Renner explained. “It’s not about social. It’s about the customer and how you engage. People want to engage where it can be friendly.”
RedPoint Global, a provider of data management and customer engagement technology, this month introduced the RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub, which orchestrates customer interactions based on a dynamic, unified customer profile and real-time decisioning.
The Customer Engagement Hub combines RedPoint’s customer data platform with its real-time customer interaction platform that optimizes customer engagement across all touch points and enterprise business functions.
Customer journeys are no longer linear in nature, as customers now desire dynamic, continuous, and real-time engagement, Renner noted. Brands with unified customer profiles and effective cross-touchpoint engagement will outperform competitors, which is where the RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub will become the new standard in the modern enterprise.
“The big shift, in my opinion, that’s happened here is digital transformation,” Renner said. “It has nothing to with becoming digital. It has everything to do with delivering that brand promise ubiquitously.”
RedPoint’s Customer Engagement Hub’s key capabilities include the following:
Connected Data: The CEH’s customer data platform processes and integrates any customer data, including first-, second-, and third-party; batch and streaming; plus structured and unstructured data, to build a unified customer profile that it then leverages in real time for decisioning and analytics.
In-line Analytics: The CEH’s in-line analytics operationalizes machine learning, other advanced analytics, and real-time decisioning to drive next-best actions, including offers, alerts, notifications, or other contextual messages.
Orchestration: The CEH orchestrates interactions with customers across all digital and traditional channels, touchpoints, devices, and engagement technologies.
The solution can be deployed in the cloud on Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, in an on-premises private cloud or infrastructure, or as a hybrid option.
“Begin with the end in mind,” Renner said. “If the end in mind for a brand is to grow profitable revenue, where does the whole CX play into that?”
Renner referenced the statistic that 86 percent of all people say they would pay for a better brand experience, while only 1 percent say they have a good experience with their brand.
“We’ve put in place a whole bunch of point solutions (CRM, Customer Service, Email, Social Media, Mobile) for all engagement systems. Each has a set of business rules and a set of processes around optimizing that end point,” he said. “We’ve got all these brains out there and they compete. If I had a brain in each arm and leg, what would be the possibility of walking in a straight line across the floor amid competing forces?”
And with so many customer journeys today, brands struggle to provide customers with personalized and relevant experiences.
“It all depends on how I’ve artificially defined your entry into my brand,” Renner explained. “The always-on consumer is always on and you have no idea where I’m going to enter the brand. What we’ve done is allow organizations to engage the customer across the enterprise. That’s what the Customer Engagement Hub is all about. In the world of the Customer Engagement Hub, we need to connect all the data. We need to be able to decision around that data and orchestrate around that data. Orchestration is about having one place where you’re managing decisions about a customer and then being able to push that out across all those engagement systems.”
The Hub, Renner noted, will allow brands to email 80 people instead of 100, but those 80 will be more valuable.
Renner pointed to a specific client example: Xanterra Parks & Resorts, which is a travel services company that services 20 million visitors per year, and has 32 unique properties, and manages some state parks.
Xanterra wanted to create enterprise and customer journeys, and cross-sell at the enterprise level. RedPoint brought together 100 sources of data and enabled them to execute at the enterprise level across those journeys and personas. As a result, many marketing campaigns improved as much as 839 percent and decreased the number of communications by as much as 13 percent.
“We were an effectiveness play and an efficiency play,” Renner said. “Now, Xanterra engages visitors before their trips with all the information they need about things to do and places to go. After the trip, Xanterra engages further, wanting to know all about the experience. What that does now is it allows Xanterra to drive huge cross-sell opportunities and now I’m engaged with that person at my enterprise. It’s the first time Xanterra was able to pull all that data together and is a great example of how the Customer Engagement Hub helped a client with demonstrable effectiveness and efficiencies. The beauty of what we do here is we can help drive value very quickly and immediately start to impact the engagement process.”