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Join WillowTree’s Billie Loewen for a deep dive into growth marketing. In each episode, Billie discusses the latest news and topics in lifecycle marketing, chatting with a wide array of guests, including WillowTree colleagues, client-partners, and industry thought leaders. Let's grow!
Hey, everybody, welcome back to another
episode of Room For Growth.
We are just days away from
Adobe Summit.
I am super excited.
My bags are packed. I'm headed to Las Vegas
to join all of the other 100,000+ attendees
at this massive conference that celebrates
everything from Creative Suite of tools
into, of course, my Love Language, which
is the marketing set of tools that Adobe has
in their suite, to AEM capabilities
for web development.
This conference is so much fun.
We show up in a big way.
It's an awesome chance for us to be in a
ring just talking about some of the winning
stories of our clients.
In particular, Adobe is great
at a few things. They are really good
at helping brands
with massive scale when we're talking about
millions or maybe even billions of data
points a month or a year, we're talking
about the amount of data points that you
could have on a single customer being
so vast that it's hard to really
track in your brain that kind of human scale
of what's possible.
Adobe is excellent at that.
They're excellent at helping
massive, massive brands tackle
their most important business challenges.
So this is everything from like major hotel
brands who book their entire booking flow
on Adobe technologies.
So meaning at any given time, if you're
looking up a hotel somewhere in the world,
it doesn't matter what language you speak
or which country you're looking from, you
need to know what's available in the city
that you're going to.
And so the amount of demand on Adobe
to have rich solutions
that work is really incredible.
And I love that.
Today we're going to talk about some win
stories in particular for one
part of the Adobe suite, which is Customer
Journey Analytics.
Customer Journey Analytics is a relatively
new tool.
It's a product analytics tool that helps
combine offline and online data in
ways that allow businesses to
track the entire customer journey, both
across devices and products.
Again, offline/online, which is particularly
relevant with the guest that we're going to
talk to today.
It's a really powerful tool.
Adobe Analytics for a long time has been a
leader in the insights and intelligence
space, but particularly as we're
getting ready for a Summit conference
that's really happening in the shadow of a
year that has been exclusively about
AI, good data health and hygiene,
and how to create scalable
business intelligence is just so top
of mind for so many people going to this
conference.
So we wanted to talk to a guest to can
help bring down the barrier for what it
means to adopt a new platform at scale.
We know that that's a really intimidating
challenge for businesses when they've got
gaps in measurement and how they understand
the customer experience.
But the idea of bringing millions,
billions of data points together to stitch
profiles together across all these different
platforms can be really
intimidating, and it can be really intense,
and it can be hard to know exactly where
to start. So that's why I love this guest.
Our guest today is a Director
of Data, AI & Analytics at TELUS.
TELUS is a major telecom.
They are particularly relevant in Canada.
For our U.S. listeners, you might think of
them like a Verizon or a T-Mobile,
but they're one of the largest mobility
and home internet providers in
the country.
They're also in an extreme competitive
state. So they are working to make sure that
their customer experience is best in
class and absolute best in the business,
not just by Canadian customer standards, but
really anywhere in the world.
For folks who don't know, WillowTree was
acquired by TELUS International last
year, so we are really being held this
year to put our money where your mouth is
with these Adobe technologies, we are
leveraging them to drive business results
within our own parent company.
And so I have been particularly steeped
in telecom lately, and all of the challenges
that that space brings.
Again, it is huge.
It's large. The customer pain points are
many. You can think about how frustrating it
is if your TV quality isn't perfect,
or if your home internet goes down for even
ten minutes, or if your phone plan,
has something unexpected on the bill.
There's just so many pain points that
a tool like Customer Journey Analytics can
really help with and transform a business.
To make sure that you can both identify
what are those customer pain points and then
create the intervention for them.
But also make sure that you can track what
your customers are doing across in-store
experiences, through call centers, through
bots, through chatbots, and any sort of
like, interactions that they might be
having there. And then of course, across
traditional channels, things like email,
push, social media, paid media
channels as well, it's really ripe
for intervention right at this moment, both
because of the advent of the AI, but also
just because the savviness that's
required of understanding customer
experience and how a customer experiences
your brand across these complex landscapes.
It's just at an all time high.
It's table stakes now, but that doesn't make
it any easier.
So super excited to hear from Mike and just
talk about a few of the wins that he's had
as he's worked to adopt this new Adobe
platform.
But also keep in mind, we would love to
see you at Adobe Summit.
We are in Booth 1127.
That's Booth 1127.
It should be pretty easy to find us when you
walk into the main hall, where all
of the different sponsors are.
Just look around for our dark
teal and then our very welcoming space
to come hang out. We'd love to have you
there. But without further ado, I'm going to
introduce our guest to you.
So we are here to talk with Mike Kellner,
who's the Director of AI
Data & Analytics at TELUS.
So we'll both explain a little bit about who
TELUS for our non-Canadian friends,
as well as the projects that he has been
tackling. So hi, Mike, welcome to the show.
All right. Thank you very much, Billy.
It's nice to be here.
So before we dive into
many of the technical challenges
that you're working on today and where
you've had some wins as of recently,
we're excited to tell some of those win
stories. Tell us just a little bit about
yourself.
What is your role at TELUS and how
did you get to that role?
What has been a bit of the journey that got
you here?
Oh excellent question. Yeah, I've, I've been
at TELUS for a long time, 21 years
now, actually, as of the beginning of this
month. So quite some time.
In my current role of supporting
the AI and data and analytics team,
it sort of evolved organically from one of
my prior director roles.
We kind of built it to solve a variety of
problems. We were getting a lot of new
capabilities.
We work closely with Google, Adobe and
others, and a lot of the capabilities
they're introducing we wanted to leverage to
improve our customer experience through
data and analytic solutions, in particular
AI. So we we formed a team
to focus on a few use cases,
focus on improving customer experience
overall. So that's how we kind of got things
started and, why we're venturing into
the Adobe world as well.
Awesome.
So before we get too deep
for our non-Canadian friends, tell
me about TELUS.
What does TELUS do?
Yeah. TELUS is one of the major
telecommunications companies in Canada.
So think like a Verizon or AT&T
in the U.S. Very similar.
We have a suite of products that
focus on mobile, home services as well,
including internet, TV, etc.
I think where TELUS is a little bit unique
and different is that we also have
arms in health.
So we have TELUS Health organization as
well, a TELUS Agriculture and Consumer
Goods organization. So there's more breadth
than a traditional telecommunications
company. So we have a lot more products
and services that we're able to provide and
support our customers with.
And then tell us again, so now that
that listeners have wrapped their head
around, "Okay, we're talking about telecom."
And when I think about telecom, I generally
think enormous customer-side,
customer bases, huge amounts
of potential data points that you can
collect everything from: how are our
customers interacting with us across
internet, across phone — that's leaving
out the big Ag and Health
challenges that you're facing — within
that, there are thousands of data points
on any given day that you might
want to track towards an individual
customer.
And then add in the fact around bundling
and offering services, there's just
so much that you could potentially be
tracking against.
And when your title is Data AI
& Analytics, that can mean many things.
Tell us a little bit more about some of the
biggest challenges that you're tackling
today.
Yeah. For sure.
Where my team focuses, we operate
in the consumer area.
So all of our regular,
consumer products: mobile, like I said,
internet, TV, but not to businesses.
So straight B2C, if you
will. And, to your point,
there are millions of interactions
and touchpoints on a daily basis with
our customers and even more data points that
we're collecting. Right. And it's
not just the number of customers as
well. It's the touchpoints that we have
across all of the channels that we offer.
Right? There's stores, we have dealers, we
have bots, we have our contact centers.
So there's million, there's multiple
channels as well, which adds to the
complexity. Right.
You mentioned the products alone and the
product mix you can have.
And what amplifies that is the
multiple touchpoints you can have on top of
it in different channels. So bringing all
that together and understanding
where there's inefficiencies and
opportunities as it relates to
customer experience.
Right.
We like to have a
frictionless customer experience, if you
will. And that's not always the case.
So finding where those opportunities are to
drive out that friction is really where we
are focusing our efforts.
So, Mike, I know that TELUS
is, of course, a major Adobe customer
client, leveraging most
of the Adobe suite to drive
towards business outcomes, set compelling
campaigns, do all of the functions
that particularly the martech stack from
Adobe offers.
And you are one of the early adopters
of their new Customer Journey Analytics
platform.
Talk to me a little bit about what
capabilities you were hoping to bring in to
TELUS, and what problems you're trying to
solve by adopting that platform.
Yeah. So going back to the customer
experience comment I made a little while
ago, the, the capabilities
were CJA are — there's many
of them, obviously, but the ones that are
very much interesting for us is:
bringing all of our customer data together.
So those multiple channels and touchpoints,
being able to link and follow our customer
across each of them is where CJA really
excels.
And we've, the way we've always sort of had
challenges with understanding customer
journey is everyone has their data,
they understand it, but other groups don't
necessarily understand it or even get a
chance to see it.
With CJA, we're working to bring
it all together and ensure that we can match
the customer data from one area — corporate
stores as an example — to the customer data
from our digital environments to
our contact centers.
And then, what it allows us to do is
follow our customer through a specific
journey. One of the cool ones we've been
working on to remove pain points
for our customer is onboarding.
So when a customer activates or purchases a
new product for us, from us,
we can now track that from any channel that
they've ordered that product right
through to everything they've done, whether
they've gone to our digital environment
after, to another corporate store, or
even contact the contact center.
And what we're trying to do with that
information is obviously streamline it.
So we remove the unnecessary touchpoints
that can drive customers crazy sometimes.
Mike, tell us a bit more about what the
customer pain points are in telecom.
I know many of them are pretty great.
They often involve picking up a telephone.
Tell us more about what you're trying to
solve for and what pain points you're trying
to identify.
We have a lot of products.
You can, you can bundle lots of
different things together in different ways.
You can add them at certain points
too, it doesn't all have to be at the same
time. And that can pose challenges
from a billing perspective and understanding
your bill at certain points in time.
So, making it easy
for customers to subscribe to
new products and services and
not have to call us to ask questions about
their bill is a big part of it.
Right? So making that interaction and that
part of their journey simpler and easier
is a big focus for sure.
The other is, is when your products are not
working, right?
If your TV signal
or, earlier in the conversation
we talked a little bit about Wi-Fi.
If your Wi-Fi is not robust or dropping
a lot, we get a lot of calls associated with
that. So the two biggest pain points really
are billing and can be
billing just given the multiple products
and the product mix that we have available
for our customers. And then if something's
not working, right? So you need to fix my
service or
things are dropping and then what have you.
Right. So, avoiding those and working
on those to support our customers
is really the two big areas of focus for us
right now.
And Mike, talk to us a little bit more where
in Customer Journey Analytics have you
seen those customer pain points
in an addressable state?
What does that look like?
Yeah. So from a billing perspective,
there's two
that we're really focusing on right now.
One of which is a missing credit.
So if you add any product or service or
you do have some sort of challenges
and a credit is provided, in either one of
those instances and it doesn't appear on
your bill. Huge pain point for customers.
And similar from a billing perspective
is if you think something should be
covered in your plan — data
is a good example — and you see a separate
charge for, say, roaming or
a data overage that you weren't expecting.
We see a lot of billing disputes in that
regard. So with CJA we can
see the relationship between the changes
in your bill and the call drivers.
So what we're doing is we're working to get
ahead of those to to solve for them.
And if it's a notification in advance or
just addressing the system issues that we do
have sometimes with missing credits,
we're seeing where the opportunities are and
where we're trying to address them
proactively.
Yeah, talk to me a little bit about how you
decided where to start.
Where would you begin to
bring data into CJA?
Why did you decide, for example, that
that first point of purchase would be a good
one? And then what
did you decide to bring in in terms of data?
This is just such a common problem for
executives who have to prioritize
thousands of priorities, hundreds of
priorities and business needs.
And then there's always the debate around,
let's capture everything.
Let's capture only what we need.
How do we know what we need?
How did you solve that challenge?
That's a that's an excellent question.
Yeah. Where we started was with
contact center data.
As much as we'd like to talk to our
customers, they don't always want to talk to
us, right? They don't want to call in the
contact center, especially when they're
having problems. So we wanted to find
out really, that's our starting point.
So we wanted to limit, or remove
contacts that weren't necessarily right for
the customer in particular.
So that was the starting data that we
brought in. And we focused on onboarding to
start, because what we've known historically
is, if you activate a product with us,
you're calling us more than once over a
couple of month period for a variety of
different reasons: to understand your bill,
or to rightsize because you didn't get
something that you initially thought you
needed. So a variety of different things.
So we started there.
And just we started there with contact
center data. And then we started asking more
questions, because that's the cool thing
about CJA as well, you bring in some data,
you connect it, and then you're asking: why
did the customer do that?
And then you're bringing in an additional
data set. So we started with contact
center data, then added digital.
And we've now added bot, all
of our bot data.
And we're working on bringing more of our
corporate store data in as well, so
we can see what the customer is doing across
each of those individual channels.
It's so interesting when I think about what
the major differences are between Adobe
Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics,
the interfaces are basically
the same. So if you are,
an Adobe Analytics user or a power user, and
there's many of those in the world because
it's such an impressive platform, and then
you're considering what is the transition to
Customer Journey Analytics going to be?
And what do I get in terms of
a capability differential?
Like I said, the interface is basically the
same, but whereas Adobe Analytics could
really only look at digital data.
CJA crosses into being
sort of part analytics, part business
intelligence, where you're able to stitch
together both offline and online data
together and create that sense of
a journey visualized so that you
can then trigger off those touchpoints or
off those events just as you would expect
to do anywhere. But it's a really
interesting capability gain, particularly
when so much of the TELUS customer
experience happens in disparate
places. It's part, I mean, you can just
think from the moment you buy a cell phone
plan or a wireless plan, you're going to
expect that part of your adoption and
onboarding is going to be through an app or
website. But if you run into a problem, do
you go to the store, do you call somebody,
and how do you create continuity in
that customer journey?
And CJA is really helping to solve
for that.
These new capabilities are really
impressive, but it can
be costly to bring on any new analytics
platform. And then it's really important
to do internal education
to help folks inside of TELUS or
any business that you might be bringing on a
new business intelligence platform, to
help them understand what does this platform
do? What kind of data will be available,
how do they engage with it?
How did you think about internal adoption
and making sure that the adoption of
Customer Journey Analytics was successful
from the perspective of just good
communication?
Yeah, to tell you the truth, really, it was
actually relatively easy.
I mean, once you bring the data together and
you can analyze it and show
the journey in a way we've never been able
to before, it really sells itself almost
honestly, from a from a benefit perspective,
being able to see things we've never been
able to see before. A customer — we used to
build customer journeys,
and we would sort of build it in a way that
was what we perceived to be "the happy
path," versus, when we're
doing it with CJA, it's really the customer
who's showing us what their path is,
and then we can find the happy path
that we've defined.
But there's actually more than one, because
a customer could go and do a bunch of
different things to solve their problem.
And we've never been able to see that
before. We've kind of only tracked single
ones that we think is the right way to go.
So it gives us a whole different perspective
and lens, and that's pretty
easy and impressive to sell, right?
That's an intelligence on a customer we've
never had before.
But you lead a huge, a pretty large
team. Sizable.
When I think about just the number of people
who you're managing in your sort of data
operations team, that's a lot
of folks to either get them using a new
platform or have the capabilities.
How did you think about bringing
Customer Journey Analytics into your data
operation itself, with your sort of like day
to day practitioners?
That's a great question.
We actually had a very thoughtful onboarding
plan. It started with just a few
of my senior leaders and
we worked with our WillowTree partners to
really understand the capabilities of the
system and how it worked.
And they helped us build
an onboarding plan that was suitable
for our needs, because we have some very
technical folks.
And this system is a little bit different
than anything we've used before, and it's
brand new, so you don't know what you don't
know. We leveraged the WillowTree team to
help build an onboarding plan
suitable for data folks such as myself to
really understand the capabilities, why
it's beneficial, and
how to use it.
One of the earliest learnings we had
was that, it takes a lot of upfront
data work to make all of this happen.
The connections just don't happen
immediately. You really need to find the
right unique identifiers to match
and group the data together.
And that's the other challenge we had across
each of our business units and different
data sets. So for example, the corporate
stores data or digital data, they
all had somewhat different unique
identifiers. So we had to build reference
tables to pull it all together as well.
So upfront time and investment on making
sure your data is robust and good quality
is hugely important for this,
for this capability to get the most out of
it.
Talk to me a little bit more about lessons
learned. What advice would you give to
somebody else who's trying to onboard,
an organization of your size on
to a new Customer Journey Analytics
platform?
What I would recommend, I'd spend a little
bit more time designing your schemas and
looking at your data.
And I say that because one of the learnings,
one of the other learnings we had on data,
as we've traditionally aggregated
data into single rows.
So there's a lot of information in a single
row of data on a customer.
However, with CJA, each row
of data represents an event, and you want to
track customers at specific event levels.
So did they do this versus did
they do this right?
And by aggregating your data, you're only
going to capture one of those events.
So you want to be mindful of how you're
splitting your data out and how you're
aggregating it so that you're getting
the lowest level of detail that
you want to understand for your customer.
Super interesting.
I'm going to see if I can say this correctly
back to you and understand it right.
Just meaning you have so much data on any
given customer that traditionally you
wouldn't want it plotted out across
individual events or behaviors or actions
because it just simply be too much.
So in a previous world, aggregating that
data and rolling up single, rolling
up multiple attributes into something more
singular so that you can make sense of
that data in a manual world doesn't actually
make as much sense in Customer Journey
Analytics, where you want that complexity
and that granularity to, like, have all of
its beautiful form, because that's when you
can see trends and themes and
journeys in their entirety.
Is that true?
That's exactly it. Yeah.
In fact, I'd say, start
more granular and then aggregate
within CJA. And in fact, we've done that.
We've coined this new way of
looking at our data. I called it creating an
Event Hierarchy.
Right. You have your macro events that you
typically would look at at a higher level,
but going down lower and lower, especially
with digital data, where every page you
click on is technically an event.
So you want to aggregate those up to create
your Event Hierarchy.
And then you can be selective in which
events you choose for your Journey
Analytics. So that's exactly correct,
Billie.
I'm putting you wildly on the spot right
now, but can you talk a little bit about how
you did that in an ecosystem
where there's multiple, there's not just
channel and product type, but
there's also brand level.
How did you think about that hierarchy,
given the amount of complexity that you have
to work through?
It's a great question.
We're actually, that's one of the items that
we're looking at next, Billie, but we've
already given some thought to
the separation.
Because we do have brand interaction,
certainly. And in fact, going from one brand
to the other and the reasons why.
Right. So we are certainly looking at
for example, we have a couple mobility
brands. Our main TELUS one and then we have
a Koodo brand.
And we do have TELUS-to-Koodo
customers and vice versa.
So looking at those journeys and connecting
them is something we're working on doing
right now.
Our first and initial use cases were really
focused just on the TELUS brand, as
it is, which has plenty
of complexity as it is with all of the
products and touchpoints, as you've already
mentioned. So optimizing those journeys
is the initial use case for
our focus.
Yeah. Tell us more about what's next in
TELUS's maturity curve in terms of
leveraging Customer Journey Analytics and
other tools within the Adobe suite?
Yeah, we've we're really just starting this
journey. So we have a
long list of journeys that we do want to
build out in CJA already.
And the appetite for
usage is growing considerably just with
the few use cases we've already developed.
There's other groups within TELUS who have
similar use cases, but with a slightly
different spin on it from a customer lens
perspective. Right. So onboarding is going
to be another important factor.
We've set it up right now where my
team has access and is leveraging all of the
data, but there's other groups that we'll
need to bring in.
And the thing about CJA, it actually makes
it relatively easy because every group just
needs to set up a separate project.
But we just need to set that up so that it
can be seamless, and bring people
on, quickly and easily.
And then finally, one of
the last components of Adobe
that we're really excited about leveraging
more effectively is the CDP.
So all of the things that we've been talking
about, whether it's the events and the
journeys that the customer is on to
the communications they get, bringing
that all together into a customer digital or
a data profile, so that we we know
what the customer is doing, what their
preferences are, so we can personalize
communications and events for them
a little bit more effectively.
One of the best things about Adobe is that
it scales really well.
There's not really another solution in
market that has the same level of
scalability as the Adobe suite of products,
but particularly those for customer
data platform and the Customer Journey
Analytics as well.
How are you thinking about leveraging
the scalability of this platform, both in
terms of how people get it and start using
it — systems, teams — and then just data
points overall.
Yeah. So we've already had a lot of interest
in CJA, not just for the journey analytics
piece, but for other groups and within TELUS
to start utilizing it for similar use
cases. So we've been working with WillowTree
on building a onboarding and governance
model, and we're currently defining the
users and the needs of those users.
And each
one is going to have a slightly different
onboarding journey. So for example,
we talked about Adobe Analytics a little
while ago.
And CJA being more in analytics and
BI capability, bringing a lot
more data together. There's a lot of
interest in that. So we have some users who
are going to look to migrate from Analytics
into CJA, and there's a lot of familiarity
there. So they won't need as robust or as
as much support in the onboarding of
it. So we have a group that
we're focused on working with there.
And then there's groups like myself who are
really interested in seeing what the
customer is doing in certain
times of their lifecycle, and
building out more journey flows and bringing
more information together.
And that requires a lot more
data engineering work and really thoughtful
approaches in how you're defining your
events, like we talked about.
So the onboarding for that is going to be
quite a bit different.
And then finally thinking about usage.
CJA is different than AA
in that it's not based on server
calls or API hits.
It's made based on rows of data and more of
a consumption model.
So we're building a little bit of, or at
least we're thinking about how to provide
a little bit of a chargeback model based on
that same sort of usage approach across the
different teams, because, again, it will be
different depending on how you use it.
So there's a lot going into that for sure.
Mike, you've alluded to the fact that
WillowTree and TELUS are now working
very closely together under the same banner.
TELUS recently acquired WillowTree.
So this has been one of the first projects
where our team has been working closely as
well. Thank you so much for the partnership
in that. I hope it's been as good of an
experience for you as it has been for us.
It certainly has. Yeah.
WillowTree has really helped us accelerate
our learning curve.
I've previously mentioned CJA is relatively
net-new in the industry, and
WillowTree has such a breadth of knowledge
and a lot of experience with Adobe products
in general.
And leveraging and working with them to
not only develop our use cases, but really
set up the environment to allow
us to onboard other groups quickly and
relatively easily has been a huge win.
And yeah, so big thanks to
the WillowTree team for helping us with
everything so far.
Yeah. Shout out to Tony Ferreira and Jon
Yildiz does who I know have been really
important in that mission.
Anyone else who deserves a little name
credit?
Yeah, Jon in particular.
He's got great hair as well and,
really, really great in helping us build
a lot of the journey flows and really
helping us understand the data
structure and how to define events
clearly.
He's been a big help, and he's done a lot of
our onboarding, training as well.
So he's been a huge help.
Well, Tony is with us in the booth at Adobe
Summit. So if you are wandering around
the conference and you are in
the section where all of the different
partners of Adobe have booths set up, look
for the WillowTree booth [1127], come and
talk to us. Come talk to Tony, who helped
on this project, and many others related to
Customer Journey Analytics and the Adobe
suite of tools.
We would love to hear about similar
challenges or similar moments of opportunity
to bring data insights at scale.
So thank you, Mike, so much for sharing the
story about the journey you've been on very
recently and some of the early wins that
you're having. Look forward to hearing more
as you keep expanding this platform and
what it can do.
Yeah, thanks very much, Billie. I really
appreciate it. And, I will be there and
I'll come say hi for sure.
Awesome. See you at Summit.