MarTech Interview with Andrew Joiner, CEO at InMoment

Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What inspired you to start at InMoment?

I don’t have a traditional software background by any stretch. I was a pre-med student who worked on Wall Street then started a software company one afternoon. (That should be comforting for anyone struggling to determine their major.) But I was fortunate enough to see a fundamental trend – technology (at that time email) was disrupting the cozy way of Wall Street business. Emails were finding their way to the cover of the Wall Street Journal and the leaders of those firms wanted to it stop. My brother and I founded Singlecast Technologies, to solve this problem and we became a pioneer in unstructured data classification. As the world went bigger digitally with instant messaging, rich media and document management, we were fortunate enough to not only see that startup acquired but stick around to steer the ship through several more acquisitions in this space. I eventually led a high-growth business unit within HP Autonomy, a $1.1 billion market leader in providing unstructured Data Applications and solutions focused on Customer Experience and Marketing Technology.

What drew me to InMoment specifically was its combination of unique technology that was related to my past and a culture that is people and customer-centric. It also didn’t hurt that it is headquartered in the Silicon Slopes (Utah’s tech center), which is an ideal place to economically scale a business. There’s always a certain amount of rolling-the-dice when stepping in as CEO of any organization, but I’m happy to say InMoment leverages the best of what I’ve learned and was exactly the right choice in a very exciting industry.

What is InMoment and how does it fit into a modern Marketing Technology Stack?

InMoment is a Customer Experience software company that helps leading brands fundamentally improve their businesses by listening to their customers. We uniquely distill signals of what’s happening in business despite the vast noise that exists in customer data. Ultimately, we’re helping them focus on the actions that will deliver a positive impact to the bottom line, while also improving the relationships with customers and employees alike.

For years, traditional sources of marketing data have been limited to static data that tells businesses the “how,” “what,” and “where” customers were buying. By bringing together these other powerful sources of data into InMoment, brands can understand the “why,” ensuring they can create and nurture more profitable relationships with the key human stakeholders. Our platform brings together intelligence about brands, customers, employees, and the market to help businesses understand and identify the critical intersection of what creates meaningful experiences that will drive revenue and increase business performance.

How did you prepare the company for the latest strategic growth investment from Madison Dearborn Partners?

InMoment is an ambitious company and our strategy and performance to date attracted a wide range of interested parties. We’re not here to be another player in the industry—we deliberately shared that we aim to be a true disruptor. What has driven InMoment to this point, and what will continue to drive it, is our vision of the future of feedback. The CX market has been underserved by both metric-heavy and market-research-led approaches, but it’s time to think beyond traditional surveys and metrics as a way of understanding human beings.

MDP invested in InMoment because of our forward-thinking vision—in addition to our strong management team and accelerating financial performance—aligns with their ability to add value. I couldn’t be more excited about this new partnership and have no doubt the investment and support will help us achieve our disruptive ambition.

How do you plan to extend the benefits of this investment to your employees, customers and technology partners?

The origins of InMoment are unique in that it’s been both profitable and a high-growth company for years. We haven’t lost the discipline that’s brought us to this point, but now we have the flexibility to make choice investments that will differentiate us even more among other platforms and expand our offering. We’re on the bleeding edge of technology, which offers incredibly exciting professional experiences for the entire team at InMoment.

For our clients, the investment allows us to accelerate our plan to double down on our strategic services. The customers of do-it-yourself and tech-only vendors are struggling. Customer Experience isn’t just a tactical job to be done. It requires significant subject matter expertise and strategic best practices in order to really succeed. We never want to be in a position where we are selling clients technology without ensuring it’s adding real value to the business.

Tell us more about your Data-Driven solutions? How can CMOs optimize their Digital Marketing and Advertising budget using your products, services, and solutions?

Experience data contains a wealth of information CMOs can use to drive marketing efforts, including brand perception, product insights, competitor intel, segmentation detail, and nonbuyers. Our solution enables marketers to search data for answers in a matter of seconds, create and execute market studies to segmented consumer groups to understand specific issues, or perform benchmarking in near real-time to see how they compare with competitors in the marketplace. We also enable targeted micro surveys to help marketers get feedback on customers’ journeys throughout the website. All of these solutions combine to provide value for CMOs by enabling them to optimize their marketing spend through deeper contextual intelligence.

How can businesses maximize their ROI from investing in your Customer Experience platform?

It would be easy to talk about improving response rates or boosting satisfaction or NPS scores, but that’s the kind of mindset we’re trying to break in the industry. When businesses invest in InMoment they’re investing in a technology partner that sits down and maps out a blueprint for using customer experience to improve the larger objectives of the business, whether that’s increasing retention, identifying operational improvements, or creating truly personalized experiences for their customers. And then there’s the employee side of the equation. By understanding and even anticipating human expectations, brands can optimize their businesses, making them both more efficient, and creating unique and meaningful value for both customers and employees. The ROI on that kind of investment comes from multiple places across the business both in the form of cost savings and in increased revenues – think lower people attrition, more loyalty (and all the financial benefits), and more efficiencies. The customer intelligence we provide our clients is like a secret shortcut to much smarter business decisions.

Tell us how you integrate the Customer Experience (CX) Cloud, Employee Experience (EX) Cloud, and Market Experience (MX) Cloud in a single Experience Intelligence platform.

The InMoment platform provides data from an insight into the three most critical lines of intelligence about the customer: intelligence from customers themselves, from employees, and from the market. We’re able to do this because we built our platform specifically to ingest any customer or contextual data, no matter the format or origin. Instead of forcing our customers to fit their needs into our technology solution, we offer flexible technology that provides customer, employee, and market intelligence and actionability for all areas of the business.

Which other Technology platforms like Website Analytics, Video, Contacts, Contracts, Email and Customer Service sync with your platform?

We enable clients to view existing partnerships all within our Experience Intelligence (XI) platform and then choose to connect to plug-and-play integrations like Adobe Launch, Slack, and Clicktale. While many customers still respond to traditional surveys, response rates are at historic lows. There’s a treasure trove of feedback that can be found in other sources, and we make it possible for companies to do that seamlessly.

To ensure our clients are hearing from as many customers as possible, our solution integrates with social and review sites, telephony systems, contact center chat and call records, and much more. We have also integrated with a number of solutions to help disseminate intelligence and integrate into the business’s native workflow. Experience data and its associated insights can be accessed in ways that are most natural to users. Our integrations empower everyone to get involved, share ideas, and ultimately take action.

What are your predictions on the most impactful disruptions in AI and Machine Learning technology for 2019-2020?

The first generation of AI was all about going from brick-and-mortar to digital, or “bricks-to-clicks.” Now we’re seeing the customer journey evolving into a machine-led, human-assisted hybrid. Many of the advances we see in improving experiences are focused on improving human-to-human connections, whether that’s in the contact center, online chat, social media, or a mobile app.

One reason AI hasn’t historically worked well in CX is that everyone dumbed it down to a metric. Now that we understand the complex nature of customer relationships, we can better use customer data to make personalization and empowering humans much more effective.

What startups in the technology industry are you watching keenly right now?

Certainly, as customer feedback has gotten richer, the ability to discern contextual clues from rich media like videos, audio, etc. is becoming more important. Startups with the infrastructure in their technology to combine diverse data sets in a more cohesive and comprehensive way to improve the customer experience will be ones to watch. I think Banjo is doing some interesting things with how they are using AI, location and event-based data to curate content to make it more relevant, and disrupting the journalistic community in the process.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Business Leader?

AI is not going to replace humans—it will make our lives much, much easier. And faster. As a Business Leader, I would find ways and places where AI works really well and helps people work smarter. Look for areas of big impact with little disruption to the business. For example, with Salesforce, AI can save a lot of manual effort trying to decode a successful sales process and give you the blueprints to make Sales Leaders better.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

The brand associated with InMoment’s internal culture is something we call Leave Your Mark. InMoment has always hired positive, dedicated people—industry analysts and many of our customers have recognized that defining the character of our culture specifically. Leave Your Mark permeates every good thing throughout the organization, from employee rewards and recognition to community service efforts to the way we treat our clients.

I love the concept that there are many who can light up a room, but far fewer who, after they leave the room, leave the light behind. We live and work around amazing, creative people.

One word that best describes how you work.

Vision-first or design-led – like our platform.

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

Apple TV: It’s proven to be very useful for collaboration among our team.

Zoom Communications: InMoment is a globally diversified company and video conferencing helps us keep the human touch of startup culture we thrive from.

Parental monitoring apps: I’ve used dozens for our kids. Too bad none of them work.

Slack: It has changed the way we communicate and collaborate as a team for the better. Slack is a classic example of forward-thinking technology, which is one reason we chose to integrate it with our platform.

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

I don’t take notes in meetings, which helps me focus on the big picture versus the little details. It’s hard to get everything right, so what sticks is usually the most important.

What are you currently reading?

I’m a huge reading junkie, but I also consume a lot of podcasts. Podcasts are a perfect medium for Business Leaders and present a solid way of getting deep into a piece of content. One podcast in particular that I’m always streaming is, “How I Built This” with Guy Raz.

On my reading list, I’d highly recommend, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup — it’s a useful book for any software entrepreneur looking to be successful in a very cut throat industry. It’s really a cautionary tale of the ‘‘fake it till you make it” approach taken too far.

What’s the best advice you ever received?

There are three pieces of advice that have stuck with me throughout my life:

• Integrity is a virtue that you lose only once.
• Think of life as a juggling act and the five balls you’re constantly juggling are: work, health, family, faith, friends. Work is most rubber of all the balls — we go through high and low points, but the ball largely retains its shape. Think of the other balls as glass; once dropped, it’s almost impossible to return them to their original state. Knowing this, prioritize which balls you’ll take the greatest care of when making some of life’s toughest decisions.
• And, for my fellow tech professionals, the most useful quote I can think of is, “Always bring a gun to a knife fight.” You never, ever, want to compete on your competitors’ terms.

Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

For starters, I’m certainly willing to take risks, but only after carefully calculating those risks. For me, this involves both gut instinct and Bayesian thinking, which allows me to approach complex problems like customer experience, with multiple lenses at the same time. This helps me break away from conventional thinking.

 Tag the one person (or more) in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read.

John Lewis or Gary King.

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