AI and Marketing Insights

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Do pro relevant.com. Today I'm interviewing Frank Artrell and uh, let me tell you a little bit about him. He is a. CX strategists and he has, uh, over 25 years experience, uh, spanning Wells Fargo and Amazon. He bridges emerging tech with real world impact, simplifying AI for marketers, and he teaches CX strategy at Santa Clara University.

erson and looking forward to [: 00:01:00

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into AI and marketing and then of course, cx? So it's, uh, a few things. I think CX, um, came up, uh, for me about two years ago when I was in Dubai, finishing a work for a holding company. And I implemented a system to do, uh. What we call, uh, personalization at scale.

ay's world is, is around the [: 00:02:00

You do sales, you do finance, you do hr, you do customer support, you do marketing. Whatever you do in a company, you have to serve the customers. And that's the reasons I think company like Netflix have, uh, 90% retentions is because the customer is at the center. So two years ago I say, okay, now I'm going to bring my 30 years of experience.

ed to be a coded today to be [: 00:03:00

To show my customer or to help my student understand how they can perform better, how they can be on the cutting edge of their functions in the market. So, um, that's the reasons I balance CX with ai. And, um, what is interesting, uh, I did a course of four hours lately and I was shocked by the result of the student, um, because.

nd I'm going to give you two [: 00:04:00

What does it means? So it means that, uh, customer me are mobile and interact with the brand many times during the journey, during the week, during the months. And you have to touch them at the same time with the right information at the right time on the right channel. Whatever device they use and AI is a good way for you to achieve this goal.

very hyper personalized way, [: 00:05:00

How have you run into some of the legal challenges where the legal wants to approve everything before it actually goes out to every customer? So there's kind of, you know, a balance or a. Uh, you know, I don't know an obstacle there maybe, uh, in terms of the, the ability to do as much personalization as you'd like, as opposed to what the legal will allow you to do?

Uh, to be honest, it's very simple. You need to have the technology that allow you to, to capture and collect the data. To have the user consent to archive the data. As soon as you have the user consent, legally you are on the right track, which means, uh, you are on G-D-P-R-C-C-P-A based on where you are in the world.

data platform. Leverage this [: 00:06:00

And I think what I like in this approach is, um, I like the fact that on the market we are strong with user data. And as soon as you collect the data, you have a better way to serve the customers. So when you say personalizations, it means it serve the company and the users because personalization means you serve the consumers with the right content at the right time on the right channel.

And for a company, it means you scale your advertising and you increase your profitability. So it's a combination of, uh, increasing customer satisfactions and increasing, uh, uh, company or organization profitability. But once again. The core is data accuracy. And data accuracy comes with the technology and the way that you collect your data.

So when you work with [: 00:07:00

And, uh, there's kind of two sides to it. Certainly the consent is critical, but, uh, and, and in regulated industries, and, you know, you've worked in Wells Fargo, but in regulated industries, uh, uh, the industries that I'm unfortunately working in right now, legal wants to approve every message that gets sent.

h, missing the boat there or?[: 00:08:00

No, I think, I think you're right. Uh, I work for 24 Fitness, I work for Wells Fargo. Um, you have to go through legal for message, uh, approval, but, um, it's just a process. When I was talking about user consent is, is the most important aspect for me. Messaging and getting, uh, legal involved. Yeah. We got that every day.

If I work for a startup, it will be more flexible. It's just big corporations, uh, like Wells Fargo, Intuit, uh, 24 Fitness, Amazon. They are cautious about what we say could be, could be turned into a, a lawsuit, and we don't want that. So, but in any big operations, you always go through legal, but I, I take that as a step in a process, but not the problems.

ve the approval of the users [: 00:09:00

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, it is unfortunately and, uh, critically important, you know, because your, the risk is, uh, can be pretty high, but, um, uh, yeah. Well, let's, let's talk about a couple of other things. So, um, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you've seen startups make in the, uh, in cx, and what do you think they can do to avoid them?

Yeah. I think the best, the, the most important mistake is, uh, what I call a product market fit. You need to have a product market fit. In order to serve the customer, right? Uh, if you don't have it, this is going to create a lot of headache as soon as you have the product market, uh, product market fit. The second mistake that, uh, you need to cover or you need to get rid of is make sure you understand, uh, the customer journey mapping.

engagement the customer come [: 00:10:00

Uh, but quite often the, I think, uh, the, the company come to me and say. I, I want you to be the marketer for this product. And lately I was launching, um, I was involved in a startup, uh, very interesting technology, but the product is suck. But you try to tell, uh, the, the founder and the, the CEO that. You have an amazing vision, but your product is not the fit.

ed an influencer million of, [: 00:11:00

So you get rid of, or you, you say, no, something is not right with the product. We have to improve, we have to do something in order to get this product market fit right. And, uh, that's, I think this is the, the biggest issue I saw with, uh, SaaS company, uh, or any company. And I understand when you are a founder or the creator of a product, you always think that your product is the best.

will be my, uh, my answer to [: 00:12:00

Product market fit. Yeah. Whatever you are. If you are genius in marketing and you don't have it, yeah, believe me, you will, you'll get fair. Well, nothing can, uh, kill a good product, uh, faster than, well, nothing can kill a bad product faster than good marketing, so, yep.

Yeah, yeah. No, and absolutely, and, and, and you're so right. You know, unfortunately, you know, the startups, uh, have egos. We all have egos and, you know, and our baby is, you know, is beautiful regardless of whether it it is or it isn't. And it's sometimes hard to face reality that there are some tweaks or some other things that need to be done to the product to make it really a good product, product market fit.

d customer support. If I can [: 00:13:00

Tell us, uh, a little bit about that, and maybe you have some examples you can share. Yeah, I think, um, uh, a company in Dubai reached me to do the training of customer support. Because they have, uh, they, they had increasing ticket, volume ticket and they wanted to train their, uh, 12 employees to be, uh, better at managing ticket.

And, uh, I told them, I say, the problem is not customer support. The problem is not training your people. And I tried to make them realize that if you have customer support, it's because you are not doing business right. Because to be honest with you, uh, if a company do well, they don't need customer support.

you could do is, once again, [: 00:14:00

You have a a net promoter score in place, et cetera, so you can qualify the journey of your customers and quantify the engagement. And when you benchmark yourself against the industry. As an example, if you have a drop of the use of the product via 25%, you are going to engage with customer support. How do you get rid of the 25% frustrations or frictions of the product?

e less call because you will [: 00:15:00

Your customer lifetime value, be reducing your, and, uh, you will be just es escalating the most important ticket that needs to be treated. And the best example I have for that is Salesforce. Salesforce today use AI for customer. And, uh, with, uh, this AI chat bot tools, they have been able to increase the customer satisfactions because with AI you have a way to really be super efficient answering your customers.

nd AI is increasing customer [: 00:16:00

Someday we are good, someday we are bad, someday we didn't sleep. AI never have this type of things. They always answer. Right? And I think Salesforce understood that. And the AI has a capability to analyze all the data in the world for them to make sure they have the, get the the best answer. And in this point, they just keep 25% of the most important ticket that, uh, escalated and human touch.

t. Yeah, that makes a lot of [: 00:17:00

I don't know if I've ever seen a product that actually works that way, but, um, uh, you know, there's always, there always does seem to be some kind of customer support. Now, the other, the other challenge though is, let's say that you got rid of customer support. Does that then reduce the opportunity for. Uh, the upsells that often take place with, uh, when people do interact with customer service, uh, whether it's in a positive or a negative way, uh, you know, quite often many companies say, well, you know, one thing you could do, by the way, we've got a new, uh, x, y, Z variant that might be of interest to you.

h should happen based on the [: 00:18:00

And that's the way that you use the machine learning. You create algorithm, you use ai. In order to understand when you have to connect with customers in order to cross sell or upsell, and that goes back with, uh, with cx, with customer satisfactions. If you keep the customer satisfaction on the top, you are going to have an organic grow.

And upselling grow and across selling grow, it is just, uh, customers that trust their brand, like their brand. They do it naturally, but with the layer of having ai, you have a way to analyze the customer behavior in a better way. So it's a combination of increasing, uh, or improving CX and leveraging ai. To make sure that before they go to the customer support or customer service, you are able to propose upsetting cross selling.

And if you [: 00:19:00

And I think if you understand your customer journey and you can, uh, leverage the tools to nurture this journey, you should not be worried about customer support doing an upsetting and cross-selling. It should be natural. And, uh, I think the best example is, uh, think about Amazon. Amazon has been doing that for 20 years now.

ou will buy, you will be buy [: 00:20:00

When I worked for Amazon, what they did when I was there as an experimentation is they were shipping a product to consumers without them asking for it. To understand the acceptability of the offer and the result was amazing. And how they did it just by understanding the consumer behavior, the past, uh, purchase.

And they were delivering the product that the customer wanted to, even if it was not thinking about it. And I was, uh, I was part of the target and one day I receive a product and I still use this product because, uh, that's the kind of things you can do today. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. Uh, although I will admit, I would say, if you don't mind, I'm gonna be a little contradictory.

ual. It's almost impossible. [: 00:21:00

But if you are, if you're somebody that's maybe not tech savvy or not, and you know, you're just need to talk to somebody, then you know, Amazon, uh, in its ability to actually talk to you is, is, uh, definitely a, a challenge. Yes. And, uh, I talk about the, the pro of, uh, Amazon, but there is a lot of cones and uh, I agree with that.

a little bit different from [: 00:22:00

So do they have this retention rate because there is no other streamer on the market? I don't think so. I think they have been building, uh. An ecosystem for users, uh, around entertainment, uh, by creating movies, by understanding consumers, by understanding, do you use a tablet, a device, uh, screen tv, et cetera, et cetera.

So yeah, there is, uh, always, uh, the good and the bad. But that's based on the profitability of a business. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I, I think they, it's incredible. If you're a, uh, uh, I think for most, you know, like you said, 90%, 99% of the users, uh, Amazon is just absolutely incredible and it is to me. You know, it is the gold standard of, uh, user interface.

're in, uh, healthcare or in [: 00:23:00

And every industry is affected by the fact that, you know, the customer experience there is, is as strong as it is. Yeah, we, I, I call it the domino effect. And, uh, if you think about my kids, my kids were born with Amazon. Yeah. So today we expect the same type of service. It's, uh. No sell for written products, the best price and shipping within 24 hours.

or bad way. And after that, [: 00:24:00

Um. It. Have you, I mean, obviously I think, uh, Amazon is one and I think, you know, it took Walmart a long time to, to catch up or target to catch up, but what other kind of examples do you have where a customer experience is a good competitive advantage? If you think about ROI, so you, you, you put customer experience in four bucket.

apply CX in TS four bucket, [: 00:25:00

They are going to have, uh, an increasing. Incremental revenue coming from retentions, incremental revenue coming from acquisitions because they are going to be able to factor everything in the right way. Understanding where do I need to put CX in place in order to increase the sales conversions. Where CX needs to be improved in order to optimize retentions and increase cross sales.

ow is going to increase your [: 00:26:00

In fact, when you have a reputation as a brand, when you build trust with your consumers, immediately you get an audience that come to you and, uh, everyone wants to go to a brand. That is going to serve them the right way. And so by doing so, by doing CX right, you are going to scale advertising and you are going to decrease your Spain because you are going not to be in a need to acquire more and more customer by advertising because they are going to come naturally to you.

ey're going to. Stay because [: 00:27:00

Uh, that will come with a company like Nike. And so it's a, it's a kind of a cascade of, uh, how do you apply CX at every level of your department, company in your industry? You benchmark, but you will see that company that get the trust, have the better, uh. NPS are the one that are much more profitable on the market, so it may not be tangible.

But today you have the tools to calculate your cx, ROI, and I've been doing it for a, a, a big corporation in England where I'm showing them how much money the left on the table by not, by not applying cx. And we talk about million of dollars. Mm-hmm. And do you need to improve CX at every level? No, you can.

tart. And, uh, if you are in [: 00:28:00

It's just a simple effect like that where it's a dual or dual achievement. Mm-hmm. It's, uh, profitability because you spend less and you have an organic grow and it's, uh, customer satisfactions because everything you do support the consumer. So for me, uh, it's a huge differentiator. Huge. Yeah. But you have, the company has to have this metric in place to understand the impact.

metrics, you cannot realize. [: 00:29:00

However. They're not losing money enough to understand they are not profitable, but the profitability could be two times higher if they were fixing something because everybody needs a bank. Everybody needs to put the paycheck in a bank. So do you go to Wells Fargo, bank of America, chase? Do we have a difference today?

few times during your life. [: 00:30:00

No. You, you have the bread owner of the company. Mm-hmm. And, uh, they don't know about your kids. They don't know about your wife. They should because easily they could have the dad, mom, and kids in their bank if they were doing the, the, the job. Right. Do they lose the job right today? No, they don't. Do they lose money?

No. Do they waste? Yes. Hmm. So, and, and CX is in the middle. I think CX should be amazing if well apply in a bank. Healthcare system is the same. I think the, the, the best industry where you can, um, you can perform are really the healthcare system and the financial industry. That's where I think there is, uh, a huge opportunity for cx.

and you're right. You know, [: 00:31:00

Is there any one last, uh, word that you'd like to get across before we break? Uh, no. I think. I just will, uh, I, I, I will just say what you said at the beginning is, um, if you are doing business today, I truly recommend to focus on CX in leveraging technology. And when I say leveraging technology, it's not only talking about the digital transformation that happened in 1999, but it's also to integrate our AI can improve what you do with the technology today.

I think you're so right, uh, [: 00:32:00

There's so many interesting questions with CX and AI and marketing and, uh, customer retention and, and, and winning of customers. That's a fascinating topic. Um. Uh, and then, um, so is it, where can, uh, folks reach out to you and, uh, learn more about you and, and what you're doing? Um, linking is the best platform to reach me.

f the backstory on marketing [: 00:33:00

And if you'd like to please visit marketing machine.pro relevant.com and find out more about my upcoming book. Frank, thank you so much for being here. It was wonderful to, uh, learn from you. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Absolutely. Thank you.