MarTech Interview With Regina Soller-Gould, VP of Revenue Marketing at Ada

Regina Soller-Gould, VP of Revenue Marketing at Ada shares a few impactful tips to help marketers drive value in a digital-first era:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, tell us about your marketing journey so far and what it’s like as Director of Product Marketing at Ada?

I am VP of Revenue Marketing at Ada and it has truly been a great growth opportunity for me! With nearly 20 years of marketing experience, I’ve found myself at a number of startups where I’ve had the privilege to lead the growth of their marketing teams.

My journey has consisted of developing ABM strategies and building a deeper understanding of how sales and marketing work hand-in-hand to pilot businesses to new heights. I truly enjoy mapping out the process and devising an informed strategy as I help coach my amazing team through the execution.

We’d love to hear a little about your core marketing strategies/marketing processes at Ada and also, a bit about the martech that helps drive this?

Our martech stack includes 6sense, Hubspot, Outreach, SFDC, Zoominfo, and Boardroom Insiders to name a few. We are a data driven company that focuses on not only meeting our customers where they are, but arriving with proactive solutions that solve their problems head on. The goal is to target the root of a customer concern and get things right the first time around. This grows customer loyalty and encourages our customers to trust our process.

We use ABM and personalization that leverages our martech stack and intent data as well as our own platform to create quality interactions and conversations with our customers and prospects.

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When it comes to customer journeys and customer service today, expectations are rapidly changing, in what ways do you feel B2B marketing teams need to stay updated and what best practices should they follow through 2022 to drive true ROI?

Personalization is key! Marketers and customer service (CS) personnel need to focus on account based strategies and omnichannel proactive or anticipated interactions. It’s one thing to meet customers where they are, but it’s another to arrive on time and devise a comprehensive strategy to fix the issue at hand and personalize that strategy to prevent future problems.

How do you feel customer service as a whole will evolve in the future? How in today’s market are you seeing brands use other channels like bots/social media to drive faster customer service workflows and success?

The customer and employee experiences have both gone digital. At work and in their personal lives, people expect their interactions with brands to be instant, consistent, and relevant. When these expectations are not met, customers quickly take their business elsewhere, resulting in employees becoming frustrated and sometimes less productive.

Delivering valuable interactions at scale has traditionally required budget and staff. Basic automation through “chatbots” and related technology have helped, but these solutions lack the breadth and intelligence to move beyond reactive support to cross-functional interactions that anticipate individual needs and intentions.

With a digital-first approach to customer service, you can resolve up to 90% of all volume with automation that meets brand standards while providing personalized support that anticipates needs. Support organizations are able to focus on the customer topics that matter while manual tasks are automated. Customers are able to get the answers they need faster.You need a Strategic combination of synchronous and asynchronous channels:

• Asynchronous will continue to rise in popularity – 69% of US online adults are already using third party messaging platforms asynchronously to communicate with family and friends
• Chats between customers and brands are rapidly increasing on mobile devices (as opposed to desktop) – brands will need to adopt asynchronous messaging in popular channels (i.e. Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Apple Business Chat) as well as in their native mobile apps
• Agents are 15-30% more productive with asynchronous messaging compared to live chat (Source: Sparkcentral & Forrester) because agents can handle many chats simultaneously without compromising quality, reducing cost per contact and overall operational costs
• Synchronous messaging (i.e. live chat) will still be used, but reserved for time-sensitive, complicated issue where both parties are willing to be live, active participants in the conversation.

Can you throw light on some of the best brands you’ve come across who boast of above-par customer experiences? What takeaways can industry marketers grab from these observations?

Some takeaways that I have:

• Be customer centric & personalized
• Using data intelligently to elevate the experience and reduce customer effort
• Meet your customers where they are

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To me, brands with great CX include ones like: 

AirAsia (APAC’s largest low-cost airline carrier), here’s why:

• Innovation: world’s first airline to use SMS booking, meeting customers where they are (source) and leveraging automation (with Ada) across channels to scale high-quality customer experience to millions of passengers each year
• With Ada, they were able to close their call centers (which previously had a 1 hr wait) and pivot to digital channels including live chat, where the average wait time was reduced to <1 minute (source, this was before the pandemic)
• Winner of the World’s Leading Low Cost Airline at the World Travel Awards for the past 9 years (source)
  • Over the pandemic, launched the Super App – now airasia is an all-in-one digital company with nearly 20 travel and lifestyle products and services

Mailchimp, here’s why:

• Winner of 5 2021 Stevie Awards for including ecommerce customer support (Gold), contact center, frontline customer service team, department of the year, and innovation in customer service for leveling up with data and automation (source)
• Using automation (Ada) across the customer journey with both new and existing customers to help them sign up initially, onboard to the product, self-serve their support inquiries, and learn about new offerings – 24/7 at their convenience

Five thoughts on the future of data in B2B marketing and martech?

AI and analytics will continue to play a crucial role in allowing brands to provide a truly VIP experience to customers and prospects.

According to Forrester, 58% of support data is used in marketing platforms. This validates that this is some of the most important data that can be used by marketing and ABM both now and in future.

The ability to use data intelligently to reduce customer effort/friction will be a marker of success. Companies that do this will both win and maintain business.

Data insights will drive even more orchestration and tactic determination in how marketers use personalization to interact with customers and  predictive engagements. They will also help a brands ability to experiment, iterate and optimize their interactions with agility to achieve business goals faster.  This is also powerful for ABM and lifecycle marketing.

The future is a single automation layer connecting all brand experiences that pulls insights across CRMs and other platforms.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, before we wrap up!

AI, Analytics, ML and being customer centric in your interactions are the future for martech and B2B marketing.

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