Interview with Aaron Glazer, Co-Founder and CEO, Taplytics

Tell us about your role and how you got here.  What inspired you to launch a Mobile Customer Experience Cloud?

I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Taplytics. We started off building mobile applications and saw an interesting trend developing; the future front door of a business was not going to be a physical store, but a mobile app in the palm of their customers’ hands.

From there, we strived to help businesses build the best mobile experience for their customers. We now see customer experience as an omnichannel journey that Taplytics can help stitch together. Our initial core experimentation technology and culture inspired the formation of the Taplytics Experience Cloud, which helps marketers and brands build the best end-to-end customer experience possible.

How do you see customer data acquisition models evolving with the availability of Cross-Device Measurement Technologies?

We’re already seeing a shift in cross-channel acquisition strategies; they’re moving from single channel to omnichannel. Customer touch points are continuously evolving with technology, and brands will need to think about how each experience is connected to the ones in other digital channels.

Amazon is doing a really good job with this by connecting their app to their web experience, and even leveraging social media like Instagram to make it easier for their customers to purchase what they need. One of their secrets is attributing any viewed, added to cart, or even wishlisted items to your user ID no matter what platform you’re on. This allows them to continuously customize what their customer sees upon first open of any platform in sections called “inspired by your shopping trends” and “related to the items you’ve viewed”. They further connect this data to the content in their social ads, emails, and push notifications with those specific items.

Leveraging data across all channels can help modern marketers stay at the top of mind and make personal connections with all of their customers. Combining cross-channel data will uncover important pieces of the purchasing journey, like buying intent to hyper-personalized product suggestions. In these cases, customers will be targeted as individuals rather than segments, and experiences will become even more contextual as the cross-channel data signals are combined.

How has the maturity of data science and analytics influenced the creation of real-time customized experiences for mobile?

As mentioned above, there are more data points than ever before. There are endless combinations of actions a customer can take before making a purchase or engaging with a brand. The problem is that many companies have trouble connecting all of these cross-channel data points and thinking about the customer experience from a holistic approach. Comprehensive and well-managed data is key to understanding increasingly complex customer journeys, which must be personalized to the consumer involved and the type of product they are buying. The need to draw meaningful insights from this surplus of data drives the desire for AI.

The evolution of AI will help create personalized recommendation models and custom one-to-one experiences for customers no matter what platform they live on. These custom experiences will be served up live based on real-time actions adding value with each and every interaction the customer has with the brand.

What are the core tenets of Taplytics Experience Cloud?

The customer experience is getting more complex with every new technological advancement. Brands have to be reactive to the new digital touch points that are emerging in order to be in constant contact with their customers. However, we see far too often that the user experience is fragmented as customer move across channels.

The Taplytics Experience Cloud aims to help marketers tackle this disconnect in the market through the different components of the cloud:

• The Taplytics Experimentation Engine helps brands discover what experience delights each customer the most, through iteration and experimentation at all touchpoints and in all channels.
• The Taplytics Engagement Platform helps marketers create contextual pathways of engagement for their customers no matter where they are.
• Taplytics Launch Control helps brands mitigate risk of failure by allowing them to launch and roll-out new features or products incrementally to their customers. Real-time feedback can be monitored during the launch and if anything goes wrong these features or products can be immediately rolled back.
• Taplytics Analytics helps teams own the data they need. Teams are able to build custom dashboard and reports without relying on share data teams and resources.
• Taplytics Data Warehouse helps put data at the center of customer experience decisions. Brands can house and analyze their data from any source all in one place to gain further insight on their customer.
• Taplytics AI – Dexter helps teams identify areas of opportunity to improve customer experiences at every touch point. Through machine learning, Dexter can not only help automate processes, but surface areas of the customer journey to make the highest positive impact

What are the benefits of leveraging proprietary AI-powered experience performance platforms for the B2B ecosystem?

AI is no doubt going to play a large role in reshaping the way we work. The amount of data available is continuously growing with quickly changing marketing needs. We see that this data growth is too much for teams to handle, and the valuable insights being generated are enormous — if understood. Teams are spending more time taming and analyzing the data than building creative solutions and products to better serve their customers.

‘Dexter’, Taplytics’ AI-powered technology, can improve both customer experience as well as internal efficiencies. In the case described above, our AI-powered experience platform can help create efficiencies within the business by surfacing when and where to make changes in the customer journey that will make the biggest impact.

Which startups in martech/ad tech are you watching/keen on right now?

Drift – Drift has carved out a unique spot in the sales and marketing space for companies looking to build a better online experience. As more companies, specifically brick and mortar, see their customers spread across channels multiple digital channels, it is important for them to receive the same experience across all of them.

Now, online chat isn’t incredibly revolutionary, but Drift is doing this differently by arming marketers with a way to interact with their customers in a scalable manner through chatbots, automated emailing, and in-app messaging. Anyone can install a piece of software, but how marketers set it up is what makes a difference. Drift’s combination of features and products allows the modern marketer to easily reach their customer when it matters most.

What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

• Drift – Online chat
• Zapier – Automation
• Autopilot – Email Automation
• Salesloft – Email Automation
• Salesforce – CRM
• Airtable – Collaboration
• Gmail – Email Vimeo – Video Vidyard – Video

Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? 

Taplytics is at the center of most digital customer experiences. We have our ears and eyes open for specific experiences that most customers would not notice themselves.

Taplytics is at the center of digital customer experiences, which makes brands, look to us for insight on the latest digital product trends. We have our ears and eyes on the ground at all times on the lookout for things that most customers and brands wouldn’t notice themselves.

As an attempt to boost our website traffic, we started publishing a series of blog posts that observed the strategies that tech leaders like  Spotify and  Google were implementing to test and rollout new features. These strategies and insights were hypothesized to be highly valuable to those in the industry looking for direction, which should boost website traffic.

After publishing this series, we saw a 3x increase in unique website sessions. This number was further sustained as we continued to publish these insights and share them within our online community. This signals to us that brands look to innovative companies for direction, which is what we hope to bring to our customers as we continue to spread the word about designing customer-centric experiences.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?

Staying at the center of our customers’ needs.

In any situation, it is important to keep a pulse on our customers and their needs. As their needs grow faster, it’s important to be prepared to serve them as quickly as they develop. AI a powerful differentiator in the industry, and should be leveraged to help solve our customer problems. Whether this is an internal efficiency or a way to better serve their customers, AI will be a large part of our solution.

One word that best describes how you work.

Iterative – The key to quick success is a quick failure and in order to achieve both, one must execute fast in order to learn and consistently iterate to improve.

Taplytics’ culture and product are built on this foundation and is the reason why we are where we are today. We understand that customers’ demands are constantly changing and the way we build and make decisions needs to be just as flexible. We embody this style of work every day and help the brands we work with adopt it as well.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Zapier – We have many internal tools hooked up to Zapier that data and alerts into the proper channels. This allows us to quickly react to any sales, marketing, or even engineering situation.

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Taking notes of the action items rather than the conversation items. This version of note taking I find to be more actionable and contextual. Rather than sitting on a pile of information and wondering what to do next with it, I make efficient use of my time executing on high impact items.

What are you currently reading? 

Goodnight Moon (It’s my son’s favorite) 🙂

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Strong opinions loosely held – Believe strongly in the things you say, but be willing to keep an open mind.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Yuri Sagalov

Thank you Aaron! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.