TechBytes with Audelia Boker, Global VP Marketing at Glassbox Digital

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Glassbox Digital.

As Global VP Marketing, I’m in charge of all the strategic, marketing and communications initiatives at Glassbox Digital. My team works very closely with key internal departments such as research and development, product, sales and customer success, as well as with external stakeholders such as media, analysts, partners and customers.

Glassbox Digital offers customer experience analytics solutions that don’t just tell you what a customer is doing online; they tell you why. Using deep customer behavior analytics, we extend traditional customer experience analytics capabilities to give you powerful and instant automatic insights and all the data you need to optimize your digital customers’ experience across web and mobile apps.

How much has the Digital Customer Management landscape evolved in the last two years?

Global enterprises across different industries are ultimately abandoning a siloed approach, be it between web and mobile customer experience or between different departments in the organization. They’ve started leveraging the benefits of a single view of their customers by combining data, analytics and insights into an overarching, unitary view, which represents a more sophisticated form of digital customer management. This has allowed them to amplify yet simplify customer experience across all digital platforms, including mobile.

How do you see the pace of evolution in Behavioral Analytics further accelerating with adoption of AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision?

Traditional analytical models are no longer viable. The vast and ever-growing amount of data captured obscures the valuable and timely insights contained within, causing business leaders to miss out on solutions to issues and opportunities for growth. Thankfully, this is where AI and machine learning step in. Over time, patterns in user behaviour emerge. Retailers need to be there, ready to capture them and leverage technological advancements that allow for quicker time-to-insights.

What is the state of Mobile Customer Experience management technology in Marketing, Sales and Advertising?

Mobile customer experience is impacted by a multitude of variables such as the device being used, the network connection, the app version, UI and UX, crashes, etc., and companies too often find themselves either unprepared or overwhelmed by the amount of SDKs they need to install on their app and the many elements they must factor in.

In a way, achieving optimal levels of experience and satisfaction on mobile platforms is far more complex than on web, and only in the last 12 months have we started seeing compelling solutions being deployed to help marketing, sales and advertising departments catch up. The real question now is how long it will take global enterprises to embrace such technologies on mobile devices. The outlook is positive.

How does Glassbox help to digitize Customer journeys? How are consumer behaviors evolving across online and offline touchpoints?

Using digital customer journeys to examine the process is the best way to understand the purchasing decision and adapt the user interface to meet customer needs and accessibility. Since a business can see the entire purchase or non-purchase process, they are able to analyse which pages the customer stayed on, what information was contained therein, and what may have helped to sway them into purchasing a product. They are also able to see if there any anomalies in the web interface and what type of struggles visitors are facing that may be hindering the process, such as dead links or poor manoeuvrability between devices and apps.

Glassbox automatically generates real-time maps of customers’ most common journeys, analyses their actions and struggles, and brings enterprises automatic insights in an easy-to-consume way. Glassbox empowers brands to create funnels in a matter of minutes, either by dragging and dropping a specific customer journey from a session replay, or by using free-text. Funnels can be based on any type of criteria and help you understand why people are abandoning a session, at every step of the journey.

Which businesses have been the fastest to adopt your technologies?

Glassbox finds its stronghold in highly regulated industries such as financial services, travel and telecom, as we are the only digital customer management solution to offer web and mobile real-time insights both on premise and on single-tenant clouds, thus giving global enterprises access to one digital truth. With this premise, it comes as no surprise that the four largest banks in the US (amongst many others globally) along with large carriers and airliners adopt Glassbox faster than tier 2-3 enterprises across other industries.

How does Big Data and Customer Data unlock opportunities in the Mobile-driven Retail markets?

The days when retailers could rely solely upon proprietary panels, lab experiments, field studies or even loyalty programs to track customer journeys and needs are long gone. The only growing channels are the online channels. The bar has been raised, and any retailer that does not understand or embrace the considerable insights available from digital channels will struggle to survive in the highly competitive e-tail world.

With the advent of big data analytics and richer customer data collection, retailers can finally address another side of the revenue picture that tends to get overlooked in the rush to bring in new customers: retaining them, including those multichannel shoppers that online retailers could once only dream of visualizing in a single platform for web and mobile apps.

Compared to the Americas, how do you see the markets in EMEA and APAC dealing with the disruptions in Digital Retail landscape?

North America is by far the trendsetter region among the three when it comes to disruptions and innovations within the digital retail landscape, as it is in many other fields. American e-tailers fully understand the need for a complete digital customer management solution across web and mobile that allows them to consolidate their proposition not simply from a marketing perspective but also from an IT, legal and customer support one. EMEA is slowly embracing these innovations but the approach between web and mobile is still very much siloed, with retailers struggling to see the bigger pictures. Finally, we have APAC, which holds the greatest potential to catch up with North America and potentially surpass it in the next couple of decades.

What are your predictions on the role of AI, Machine Learning and Robotic Process Automation for retail?

They are all here to stay, and this is no breaking news. Subjectivity will be reduced to the bone, and choices will be driven by a virtually infinite number of analysed variables — something absolutely unachievable without the use of the most sophisticated technologies. We are approaching very exciting times, in which e-tailers will be able to provide highly personalised services, outstanding levels of customer experience and full consumer protection to their multichannel shoppers.

Which new technologies in data-driven Marketing and Sales are you most interested in? How would they impact customer journeys in the near future?

The conversational UX trend will continue, and voice command will play a larger role in how customers engage with retailers. We will also see a wider adoption of machine learning applied to analytics in real time. This will all be part of an industry trend towards more holistic digital customer management.

The prerequisite to introducing chatbots is for brands to properly map their digital customer journeys. Without a clear understanding of the customer experience, they risk doing real damage by using chatbots, so rather than looking at the impact that this technology will have on journeys, we have to focus on distinctively mapping the customer journey with the most sophisticated digital customer management platforms available.

An additional emerging and innovative domain will lead the way in defining the end game in terms of practices for marketing analytics:  Customer Data Platform (CDP) is like CRM for sales but built purely for marketers. It is a very tight “IT + Marketing” environment that focuses on one single view of the customer and real-time, continuous updates. It also relies heavily on AI and predictive analytics.

One advice to all MarTech and AIOps professionals looking to build a career in Retail and related industries –

Free yourself from any anachronistic approach to retail, no matter if your company is long established or just founded. Fully embrace technology and the latest powerful tools; that’s what you are there to do and the only way you will be able to deliver against your customers’ expectations.

Forget once and for all about siloed approaches to customer experience. You must work together with other departments across all digital platforms towards the same objective — customer satisfaction. Do it now, because tomorrow is almost certainly too late.