TechBytes with Steve Murphy, CIO, 3Cinteractive

Steve Murphy
CIO, 3Cinteractive

Modern marketers have shown an appetite for leveraging mobile marketing platforms to drive interactions with customers. These interactions are based on the analysis of consumers’ preferences on how they would like to communicate with brands. Chatbots and intelligent assistants have created a flourishing opportunity for marketers to influence consumer loyalty and improve experience across mobile marketing campaigns. To understand how brands can leverage mobile marketing to better customer acquisition and brand advocacy through mobile and social channels, we spoke to Steve Murphy, CIO of 3Cinteractive.

MTS:  Tell us about your role at 3Cinteractive and how you got here?
Steve Murphy: I lead 3C’s global technology organization, overseeing the existing platform and systems as well as championing the development of new, innovative products that support mobile marketing programs for the company’s clients. I am an experienced technology and business executive with more than 20 years’ experience profitably growing businesses by developing products for online, mobile and telecom companies—in both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business sectors. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to work on some innovative teams building great products which have resulted in 19 patents.

MTS:  How do 3C and its clients use customer data to benefit the consumer in their journey with the brand?
Steve: The more we engage with customers digitally, the more data we can gather from those interactions and, with the right analytics tools, we can gather useful insights to further our relationship with those customers. Whether targeting with the right offer to delight or using context to provide exceptional service, we operate in the age of data and can harness it to our advantage.

The key to data capture is not only the content but the context. When we engage our customers via mobile, we can bring added context to the conversation. The fact that they’re choosing to communicate with us on a mobile device is itself a contextual element.

Take location as an example: A change in location can be very powerful. If they’re moving at 60 miles per hour, it may not be the best time to suggest a sale on shoes at the store that’s now a half a mile behind them. If they’re on vacation visiting their hometown, they are probably in a different frame of mind than if they are in a strange city on business. It’s all context that can make a single interaction a moment of truth that defines your customer’s relationship with your brand.

MTS: How are mobile messaging platforms evolving with the changing dynamic of online engagement with customers?
Steve: Recently, Forrester Research indicated that roughly six billion text messages are delivered every day in the US, resulting in about 8.6 trillion text messages in a single year. However, the native text messaging experience is currently limited to plain text and clunky interactivity at best. The changing dynamic of online engagement has created consumers that now expect a rich, dynamic brand experience with every single interaction, and the native text messaging experience has been running on technology that is due for an upgrade.

Although mobile carriers have upgraded their networks to keep up with demand for data and smartphones, the SMS technology infrastructure also needs to evolve to enable new, rich functionality in the messaging experience. As a result, mobile players have begun to adopt a new technology called Rich Communication Services (RCS), which leverages data connectivity to deliver next-generation messaging features like location sharing, high resolution image and video sharing, read receipts, and rich cards — all within the native messaging application on the device. RCS is essentially the evolution of SMS and MMS to a more dynamic messaging experience. In many cases, RCS capabilities extend beyond messaging. The technology could integrate with the device’s address book, to see who else in a person’s network is utilizing RCS, and enable users to share media and location even during a telephone conversation.

MTS: How does the Switchblade platform enable marketers to leverage and maximize the ROI from their CRM?
Steve: The key to our platform is its flexibility and scale. We’ve found that many brands have customer data in many different places and in many different formats—making it difficult to create true 1:1 to engagements. Our platform is able to ingest these disparate data streams and leverage them to develop customer touch points that are real-time and relevant to the end user. Additionally, we do this at scale processing over 1 billion mobile events daily for some the world’s largest brands.

MTS: How can brands leverage mobile marketing to drive customer acquisition and brand advocacy through their social channels?
Steve: According to Nielsen, 83% of consumers say they trust friend and family recommendations more than any other form of advertising. When it comes to promoting products and services, there’s no source quite like social media and word-of-mouth marketing to get the word out.

At 3C, we see several brands who are looking to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty by integrating their mobile marketing efforts with their existing social media strategy. By delivering a seamless mobile marketing experience, and then enabling satisfied customers to easily share their positive brand experiences with friends and family on their social channels, brands are seeing supplementary program results like increased app downloads, loyalty program sign-ups, and increases in social followers, among others.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Steve.
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