How AI Reduces Friction in Marketplaces

Llibert Argerich: Thanks to the computational power, to AI, to the technology advancements, we can go down to one on one, using everything we know about them, all the data they volunteer, all the data that we capture through their interactions with our products, and personalizing their experience for them to exactly what they need and where they are in their journey.

Kailey Raymond: Hello, and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond, and today we're discussing data-driven strategies for simplifying home ownership. From employing conversational AI to diagnose household issues and identify solutions, to leveraging data to create frictionless interactions and personalized experiences, home ownership can go from complex and overwhelming to manageable and seamless. On today's episode, I'm joined by Thumbtack's CMO, Llibert Argerich, to discuss the challenges of building a frictionless customer journey, the need for human interventions in AI, and how cross-functional teams can help drive a holistic customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: Today I am joined by Llibert Argerich. Llibert has nearly 20 years of experience at high-growth marketplace businesses with prior experience in leadership roles at Udemy, eBay, Expedia, and he currently serves as Thumbtack's CMO, leading the company's marketing, brand and communication teams. Llibert, welcome to the show.

Llibert Argerich: Thanks for having me, Kailey. I'm excited to be here.

Kailey Raymond: Me too. Let's dive into it. I know that you've been at quite a few incredible technology brands. So just in your own words, tell me how you got to where you are today at Thumbtack.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. Listen, I started my career, as I said, 20 years ago, and my first ever job in marketing right out of college was in market research. That's when I fell in love with data, customer insights, research. It's just like something clicked and said, "Okay, this is what I wanna do. I want to understand what people need, what they want, and find solutions to serve and provide them with these needs." And then I had the opportunity to move to London. I'm from Spain. My first job was in Barcelona, and I had the opportunity to go to London and work at Expedia. And that's when I encountered my first digital marketing role. And then the love for data, customer insights, they multiplied by a thousand.

Llibert Argerich: And since then, for the last 20 years, I've been gravitating and building my career around performance marketing, digital marketing, and using data in all shapes and forms to inform brand strategy, customer experiences, performance, budget management, attribution, all of that. So when I had the opportunity to join a marketplace like Thumbtack, and for those who don't know, Thumbtack is a two-sided marketplace where we connect professionals in the home service space and homeowners who need those professionals to come in and fix, repair, maintain, improve their homes. So when I had the opportunity to join Thumbtack, I was like, "Okay, you know what? I know marketplaces. I've been in both sides. Now I get the chance and the opportunity to really own the end-to-end customer experience and use these 20 years of knowledge to bring it all together." So yeah, I could not say no, and I'm very excited about the opportunity.

Kailey Raymond: A marketer through and through. You've been in it for the majority or all of your career.

Llibert Argerich: All of it.

Kailey Raymond: I took my very first marketing class in Barcelona when I was studying abroad there, this Pompeu Fabra, I think was the...

Llibert Argerich: Yeah, I was at that university for a year. [laughter] Yeah. Small world.

Kailey Raymond: Okay. Look at us.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah. Going to the same place. That's really funny. A small world.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. I didn't know that.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. Okay. So marketer, international too, with experiences across the globe and really having that vast marketplace experience now leading Thumbtack. You've, I'm sure in your time, seen a lot of things, hot trends glare up and then fizzle out or things that have been lasting throughout your career. Can you tell me your take on what some of the big trends are today impacting customer experiences? 

Llibert Argerich: Well, it's hard to have a marketing conversation today or any tech conversation without talking about AI. So AI is the hot topic and I think that's what's really dictating the trends. When I think about AI's application in the marketing field and the customer experience, it's really the ability to now really bring to bear what I think marketers have been talking about for decades, which is, "How do we really bring personalization at scale to become a reality?" I remember 15 years ago talking with a marketing director back at eBay in Europe and we were talking about micro segmentation and wouldn't it be cool to be able to rather than target hundreds of thousands of people that look alike and have micro groups of people who are more like each other and instead of doing a hundred thousand segments, hundred thousand people segments, do maybe a hundred, a few thousand.

Llibert Argerich: So I think today, thanks to the computational power, to AI, to the technology advancements, we can go down to one on one. There are a few companies that do it really well, but it's not something that is at scale or pervasive across all marketing practice and I think this is what really gets me excited; the ability to really start talking to my customers on a one-on-one basis, really using everything we know about them, all the data they volunteer, all the data that we capture through their interactions with our products and personalizing their experience for them to exactly what they need and where they are in their journey.

Kailey Raymond: I hear you. It's one of the things that we do surveys every year. Actually, I think it's coming out in a few weeks. We have this report called The State of Personalization, and time and time again, the consumer demand for having these personalized experiences is there. But then when you ask companies whether or not they're doing that, they think they are, but consumers are saying, "I don't actually think you're really personalizing it." So there's this gap between the consumer perception and the brand perception of what actually is happening. And you're right, I think that gap, for the most part, for a long time has been because of technology, we haven't quite literally been able to do this. But now with some of these new advancements in AI, we're getting a lot, lot closer. Tell me about some of the things that you're doing with AI at Thumbtack? 

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. Listen, to answer that question, one of the things that you have to understand is, what's the customer journey? What are the problems they're trying to solve? And if you're a homeowner, you probably know that there's a lot of things that you need to do around your home and you don't always know what to do. So an example that I give very often is, there might be a stain in your ceiling and you don't know whether you just need a paint job, or something big is going on behind the wall; might be a pipe burst, or some molding and something like that. But most of us are not experts, we're not professionals, and we don't know. So our customers are looking for these answers and they're looking for a diagnose and help around understanding that.

Llibert Argerich: So for us, what's really important is helping homeowners find out what kind of job needs to be done, help them understand what's going on, and connect them with the right pro around their neighborhood who's gonna come in and do a job done well, so they're satisfied. And from a pro perspective, we're looking to connect them with real customers that have jobs that will turn into business for them and grow. So connecting those two dots is important. As you can imagine, understanding the customers and the homeowners problems and needs, understanding the pro capability, bringing it all together in a great experience where the customer can state their problems, we can provide them with the right scope, the right diagnose, the right pro, and just make that as fluent and fluid and frictionless as possible is our new style.

Kailey Raymond: That's really interesting. So as a customer, let me just... I'll walk through the journey and you can say, "This is where it's heading." I come in, I chat in natural language, the way that I speak. "Hey, what's going on? I have this stain that's happening in my ceiling." And then, there's a couple of different paths that I imagine you're probably taking. The first is maybe you're just serving them up some content based off of what you know their problem is, or maybe you're actually sending them to that customer service rep. Are you having that bifurcation in terms of the journeys that you're creating based off of the urgency? Is that something that you're playing around with too? 

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. So you can imagine that this takes multiple shapes, exactly as you said. First of all is just express your need in whichever way you want. So natural language is one of the main things. It's like, "Hey, say anything you want. Write what the problem is, we'll interpret that, and then we'll guide you through, "Hey, this seems like a plumbing problem, or this is an electrical problem, or this is more of a general contract problem." And therefore, we might need to have an on-site consultation, and we'll send an expert to you to figure out what's going on." So those are the different paths.

Llibert Argerich: Together with that, you have, yes, content guides to help people understand a bit better before we show them a list of the pros that are aligned and qualified to do the job for them. And then obviously, providing all of the reference, so the homeowner can make the right choice in selecting the pro who's gonna come in and do the job. So that's exactly the journey and the path. The natural language is the first step, that's where the conversational AIs have gotten us used to. But you can imagine, and this is not too far off the future, and there's a lot of social media videos that show how AI is interacting with the world today. Through the phone, you show your video, and it's like, "Hey, tell me what you're seeing there." "Oh, there's a red car and a woman and a bag and so on." So you can imagine that for us, that application is gonna be very powerful 'cause a homeowner can walk around the home and tell us, "Listen, there's a switch here. It turns on and on, but nothing happens when I turn it on and off. So what's happening?" Or, "There's a stain in that ceiling. This is the stain." And using the image, the video to really understand, diagnose, and then connect the customer with the right outcome.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. That's where my brain was heading as well. I was like, "Yeah. Well, what if I just submitted the photo, because maybe the way that I'm describing it isn't the way that somebody actually needs to hear it? I'm doing it all wrong." [chuckle] So a picture is worth a thousand words in this case. Really interesting. Okay, so I'm wondering, based off of this, we're automating some of these processes that maybe we weren't doing before, we're probably reducing some of the time on some of our service reps or reducing friction in a lot of the customer journey, which is awesome. I'm wondering if there's places where you always have human intervention. What are the places in which we should avoid if there's over automation in place that AI might be able to put us in a direction where we would say, "Actually, we need a human here?"

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. I think for complex jobs, I think that's where human interaction is always gonna be very valuable. So in the example that I was quoting, if there's a complex job, multiple jobs that need to be done at once, so the AI may give an indication and make an instruction or may decide, "Hey, I think you need to talk to an expert. And we'll put you in touch with someone who can do a video consultation or can come to your home, and just do a walk through and tell you all the jobs that need to happen." Or if you're trying to remodel your kitchen, AI might not be able to do that, but will schedule... It will be smart enough to say, "No, you know what? We need to put you in touch with a pro who's gonna come into your home, at this time and get the job done."

Llibert Argerich: So I think depending on the complexity on the job, depending on whether it's a physical walkthrough of the home that needs to happen at some point to get the price estimate and the kind of jobs that need to be done, then I think the human interaction is gonna be useful. I don't think... At this very moment, not all interactions will be served properly by an AI conversation, but I think there's a lot of efficiency and productivity that can be gained by delegating simple tasks to a conversational AI and learning models that will accelerate the diagnose of a problem and the outcome, whether that's, "Hey, you know what? I think you need to talk to a real human being." Or, "This is the outcome, this is the solution, and here's the pro we suggest you book to come to your home and get the job done."

Kailey Raymond: 100%. It's like it's knowing when the urgency or the magnitude of the problem requires human attention or not. But in the meantime, the reduction of friction is such a gain for the customer experience that it's such a worthwhile thing to implement to make sure that you can get folks access to insight and information quicker and make sure that that time to value is really shown. That's one of the most frustrating things sometimes, interacting with companies, is trying to get the answers. So being able to say it in human language and get that answer back as quickly as you can is super important.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. So one of the big insights that I've gotten since joining Thumbtacks almost a year ago is that I already knew that, but as part of my job now, realize that home ownership is hard. [laughter] It's complex. There's no manual that comes with your home. You buy a car, and you know that you need to change the oil every few thousand miles, and there's a clear path for you to take care of your car. But there's no such thing for the home. And it's complex, there's a lot of things that go wrong or could go wrong. And it's the biggest investment you'll make in your life, but nobody helps you. So there's a sense of uncertainty, sometimes frustration, it's overwhelming. And all of these feelings very often lead to procrastination. So you just wait, you know that you should be doing X, Y, and Z, you should be changing the filters of your HVAC, the batteries of your smoke detector, and you just keep letting things go because it's either hard, you don't know how to do it yourself, you don't know who to contact. And it's just complex and therefore leads to procrastination.

Llibert Argerich: What Thumbtack is solving for is removing all of that uncertainty, and turning procrastination into action, and actually helping homeowners accomplish more around the home so they maintain the value of their investment, and hopefully even increase it over time. And it's just solving for that key customer pain point, which is basically home ownership is hard. I think using technology data, making it easier, and less cumbersome or overwhelming to do that.

Kailey Raymond: I think those are the right adjectives. [chuckle] I'm smiling because I am sitting here and I see drywall literally [chuckle] on the floor right behind me because a curtain has fallen out of the wall, [laughter] and I have procrastinated long enough that it's just sitting there waiting for me to ask somebody about what to do with this. [laughter] So I feel that acutely.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. You're not alone.

Kailey Raymond: I'm glad to know that, that there are fellow procrastinators out there. A lot of what we've been talking about, it sounds really simple because it's intended that way, it's meant to seem that it's this frictionless experience, that it's a seamless thing. But it takes a lot of work, obviously, to get there. And so I'm wondering, what is the biggest challenge that you've seen throughout your career in actually building this really frictionless customer experience and journey that you're talking about? 

Llibert Argerich: It's a lot of work. It requires coordination across the entire company's ecosystem. It's like we're not talking just about a specific point in the experience of the journey that a customer goes through when they're coming to Thumbtack and they think about solving a problem, we're talking about the entire journey. It's like from gathering information about what are the characteristics of your home? What's your address? How many rooms? What's the square footage? How many bathrooms? When was the last time any work was done in your roof? And some information you do know, some information you don't know. So there's an element of first party data volunteered by the customer on the onboarding process.

Llibert Argerich: There's first party data that we gather from the customer interacting with Thumbtack and asking questions in a natural language way, interacting and looking for the pros. And there's also third party data that we gather from publicly available information around your home. And all of that goes into building a one source of truth. A source of truth that allows us to create a home profile and a homeowner profile and using that data to combine and start understanding what are the needs that a customer has. And that dictates the type of experiences we build for our customers. We know that there's two typical customer needs. One is a reactive need: "Something is broken and I need a pro right away to come and fix it." That is a very direct need about a very specific need and our job is to make it as fast and frictionless for the homeowner to find the right quote to come and fix the problem.

Llibert Argerich: Then there is a proactive need, which is: "I know that I need to do 10 different jobs around my home because I know that eventually I'll have to change the filters and if I don't do that, then the HVAC might break. I know that I need to maintain the boiler, otherwise, fixing a broken boiler is gonna set me off thousands of dollars, so I might as well do the job," and just building plans that allow people to understand these are the 10, 15 things you need to do every year to maintain your home and avoid these very costly, expensive repairs. So all of these data allow us to build the functionality to allow homeowners to have plans, maintenance plans. And in fact, in April we launch our home care app that really allows our homeowners to build plans with tasks in it and then schedule pros to come in throughout the year at a given time to take care of those maintenance tasks.

Kailey Raymond: Which is a win-win for you too, because you're able to collect tons of information about your customer through building an app in which you're delivering back immense amounts of value to take away that frustration or headache or fear, all those anxiety feelings associated with perhaps the home ownership process, making sure that they feel confident in that. So one of the things that you mentioned that I wanna learn more about is you're talking about data, you're talking about form fill, you're talking about first party-data collection, you're talking about third-party. But one of the things that you mentioned, if I was hearing you correctly is somebody telling you in natural language, typing whatever, a paragraph perhaps about what their problem is, that's unstructured data. Tell me how you're using that unstructured data and then building it into a way that it's structured enough that you can actually use. That's really fascinating, walk me through that.

Llibert Argerich: So full transparency, this is basically we have an MVP we're building to basically get to that point. But so I think the idea is really allow customers to have a free flow input in the search box, rather than saying, "I need a plumber," or forcing in them from the get go into a structured cataloging of our database. In the past, we were forcing people to choose which category do you need? Do you need electrical? Do you need plumbing? Do you need general contracting? And people just don't know. So by opening up the search box to more natural language and then letting the AI make the determinations like, "Well, what I'm understanding from your description, this falls into these categories."

Llibert Argerich: So it's like a bridge between asking and putting the onus on the customer to know what category of job they need. It's like we are taking that burden and we are just asking them, "Tell us what the problem is, and then the AI will infer from what you've described what is the likely category then. And then we will put you... We'll provide you with a list of pros that can solve the problem, then you can contact the pro and then just validate that they can do the job and so on." The quote and so on and so forth. So think about it in the first instance as a bridge to the outcome. And as I was saying, very often as homeowners, it's not clear what we need. If it's an appliance repair, yeah, you know that the fridge is broken, then that you're looking for someone who can come in and repair the fridge. But oftentimes it's more complex or more obscure, and if you don't have the knowledge, you need someone who's gonna help you out and this is about... Building this natural language functionality is gonna help us bridge.

Kailey Raymond: Super-interesting because all of this information which is coming from different places is feeding into your ability to have these really rich customer profiles that are taking some of the contextual where people are clicking, what people are doing, what people are telling you in your app, and then bridging the gap between that using natural language to be able to use their own language and create those attributes and those traits within their profiles to then be able to serve them better. Super interesting. With that in mind, I wanted to ask you, the namesake of the show we're gonna bring it there, if you have a definition of good data? 

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. Good data is all data that can allow you to solve for a customer need. So from that perspective, good data is data that can be structured into a source of truth around the customer that helps you understand the attributes, the needs, the characteristics. In our case, in Thumbtack's case, the home attributes, the customer needs and preferences and so on. And good data is data that informs actions, experience and so on. So when I think about good data, it's the ecosystem of data that goes from understanding customer insights, preferences, behaviors, down to the customer needs, that will allow us to shape our experience from the brand, how we communicate to the customer. When I talked to you about the customer insights, owning a home is hard, and more often than not, it leads to procrastination. This is a core kernel of truth that we're using to deploy our brand platform.

Llibert Argerich: Our branding is about, "Procrastination doesn't live here, you do. So take charge." And Thumbtack allows you to take charge. We help you accomplish more. You don't have to fear uncertainty. So that's based on key data insights. Then when you go more specifically down to behavioral data and the characteristics of your home, then we help you in the onboarding of our experience decide whether you need to look for a pro right now, and help you get there very quickly or actually just start building your proactive maintenance plan. We're asking you questions and you say, "Okay, so those are... What are you interested in? What are the needs you have for the next 12 months?" And then step by step, we guide you to build the plan.

Llibert Argerich: And all of that is really based on that good data, that structure that provides us the source of truth, and eventually does two things; provides certainty for the customer, the things that they need to do, and predictability for us as a business, because now we know that the average customer has between four and 10 projects they need to do every year and we can now help them, remind them when the project needs to... It's coming through and it needs to happen. We'll put them in touch with a pro. We'll have them schedule a slot on a given day when the pro can come in and help that entire process, because now we are with them through the entire journey from the pain point to the solution.

Kailey Raymond: You said a lot of very interesting nuggets that I'm going to pull out here. So essentially, good data, first of all, has a use-case in mind. I think that's really essential because I think that a lot of companies can be stuck in the trap of collecting data for data's sake, and that's a really expensive thing to do. And so making sure that there's a use case in mind for that data, really, really important. One of the other really interesting things that you said was this brand insight. And I love that idea behind your brand of making sure that you're giving people that confidence. It's really great. You're using insights gleaned from your data to be able to develop your brand story, and you're pulling it all the way through into your onboarding tactics, your entire customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: And I may venture to say that folks have probably thought of brand marketers as perhaps not so data-driven in the past, if I may. And then the other side of performance being more scientific, like the right and the left brain. But I think today, modern marketers have to be able to do both. And it seems like that's one of the insights that you're driving to is this is being used across the entire journey. Data is being leveraged in the entire experience and that crossover exists for a reason. Everybody needs to be able to do a little bit of everything.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. Listen, it's a great call-out. And I'm a firm believer that marketing cannot be divorced from product experience, it cannot be divorced from customer value. It doesn't matter how much money I spend on performance marketing and how much... What I say, if at the end of the day, I don't provide the reasons to believe and the proof that I'm driving value. To me, enhanced product market fit goes hand in hand with higher return on investment from the marketing perspective. So if I want my ROI to go up in performance marketing, and if I want my brand awareness to grow, it all needs to connect to a great customer experience, led by great outcomes and satisfaction. If all of that's not tied in, then nothing works. And that's why my job at Thumbtack is, I'm the CMO, obviously, but more importantly, I'm the chief customer officer. I really am accountable for demand and the entire customer journey.

Llibert Argerich: So from that perspective, functionally, all the marketing levels are reporting to me, but cross-functionally, product, data science, design are all geared to drive that holistic customer experience. So I am accountable for the customer strategy and experience and the value we drive. And I think that's fundamental. And for those marketers who've been in situations, and I think most of us have been in that situation where you're asked to drive growth through only spending money on Google, or Facebook, or sending more emails, and you're find, "Well, but this is one or two levers, but really I cannot do much if the landing page experience is not better. I cannot do much if the conversion funnel is not improved. I cannot do much if the customer support afterwards is not the right one."

Llibert Argerich: So I think that's where connecting the dots through the entire journey of the customer from the moment that you hear about the brand for the first time with an insight that really resonates with you, that touches that, "Oh, damn, yes. It's so hard to be a homeowner," down to, "It was amazing to have this pro come to my home, fix the boiler, get it working," and that just brings people back. And that's really... Every single step in the middle is part of the greater customer experience, and this is what I think marketers should be thinking holistically about, not just about the specificities or a channel here, a channel there. It all connects together.

Kailey Raymond: It's so funny [chuckle] what you're saying about just spending on Google. You're just deep, deep cuts for a lot of marketers in the room of things that they've heard throughout their career.

Llibert Argerich: Of course.

Kailey Raymond: And the reality is you're exactly right, it's like building a really valuable brand of loyalists, you need to be able to fire on all cylinders. All the things need to be able to connect together from the first interaction that you have with your brand, to how it feels when you actually open the app and the experience that you get with somebody who's chatting you. All of it goes hand in hand, and I think often we're in the place of trade-offs, of it's this or that, when in reality, it's this holistic, everything is really working together to make sure that you're building the best experience possible.

Llibert Argerich: Yeah. You were talking about modern marketing. And I think there's, don't get me wrong, functional expertise. Having a team that really is amazing at driving conversions from Google, it's key. All of the attribution, all of the modeling and expertise on really being able to gather all the right keywords, put the right copy of the bidding, all of that is fundamental. And the same thing with having a great creative brand team that will come up with those key insights and turn those insights into great creative. And at the same time, it's important to have a great UX design team that comes up with fantastic user experiences and a product engineering. So all those things are important, and I think the magic is when you're able to bring it all together to work in favor of the cost. At the end of the day, if anything comes up from the podcast is using data for the customer. At the end of the day, you're only as good as the value you give to your customers, in our case, our homeowners and our pros. And everything we do, we try to always ask us, who do we do it for and why? And those dictate. And what is the data that we have that informs the next steps? 

Kailey Raymond: Absolutely. There was somebody on this show recently that said that data is so essential. It's like people always compare it to oil, but it's actually like water because it's everywhere and it's so essential and it's like already a part of you. That was a really interesting take. I'm wondering if there is anything surprising that you've learned about your customers based off of some of the data that you've pulled.

Llibert Argerich: One of the things that we're noticing is that, and I think it's related to what I was talking about earlier on natural language, so people are looking for ways of expressing their needs that are not the traditional way. So we've been taught by Google to be very succinct on our searches. So if we're looking for travel, we say, "Hotels in Cabo." But we're not going above and beyond. It's like, "Hey, I'm traveling with two kids and I'm looking for a vacation to be relaxed and I want to have activities, blah, blah, blah." We've not been taught. I'm seeing more and more of that behavior emerge, especially in younger generations who are now leaning more into these different forms of expression, whether that's image, video, natural language, and especially in complex queries.

Llibert Argerich: And one of the things that we're saying is that people gather information from multiple different sources. One of the key also challenges of being a homeowner is that traditionally you need to find trusted sources. And usually what you do is you ask your neighbor, "Hey, do you know a good plumber?" And the neighbor will say, hit or miss, "Oh, yeah. I know that great guy that did a job," but you don't really have much data behavior. So people will naturally look for sources that they can trust and then will go to multiple different areas and try to gather that. I think the tendency is just trying to go to one source, whether that's a social engine and ask a community or increasingly more so with conversational AI, just packing more information into the query to try to really get the answer. And I think that's the key emerging trend that we're seeing is we need to be more comprehensive in our ingestion of the problem and more tailored in the answers that we provide. It's not good enough to say, "Oh, here are the 500 hotels in Cabo, choose the one you want now." We just need to find the right one for you based on the data that we can infer.

Kailey Raymond: That's really interesting. And I was actually talking to somebody on my team about this yesterday of leveraging ChatGPT, but not always feeling like I'm writing the prompts in the right way. I need to train myself to be a better prompt creator to actually get the insights that I'm looking for. To your point, it's like it's something that we haven't been trained to do. We need to retrain ourselves in this new era. And it does go down to that specificity of that one-to-one personalization and what AI can really enable for that. So that's that's really interesting what natural language can unlock if we can retrain our brains to not speak to a computer like we think a computer needs to be spoken to.

[music]

Kailey Raymond: I'm gonna pivot. I'm gonna see if you think that there is any companies that are doing it right that you are interacting with, that are delivering great customer experience. Is there any places that you draw inspiration from? 

Llibert Argerich: Listen, when it comes to best usage of data, and I think this is gonna be maybe a bit of a cliche answer, but I think best in class is Netflix. Every time I look at my recommendations, my algorithm, my profile and my wife's, [chuckle] it's just like night and day. It is like it's just amazing, we have two completely different Netflixes. It's just like their ability to really understand and know what you like and provide recommendations and just keep nurturing the experience and nudging you to new content in a way that it just feels right and feels like, "Yes, you get me."

Llibert Argerich: And again sometimes by mistake I just land upon my wife's profile, I'm like, "What the hell is going on? This is not what I wanna watch at all." So I think it's fascinating. It's the same product, it's the same interface, but it's fundamental different experience and it's all based on the data. And all that data helps Netflix also inform the type of content they produce. And I think this is such a clever use of the data that really helps them keep evolving the model and creating an amazing flywheel that just goes from consumption to creation and back and forth. I think definitely in terms of matching data and user experiences, it's definitely a north star that I think every marketer should aspire to to get to.

Kailey Raymond: And if you've ever been to an Airbnb that has a shared Netflix account, you really feel that acute pain of, "What is going on here? I've never seen that show before."

[laughter]

Llibert Argerich: Yes exactly. It's like...

Kailey Raymond: Do you have a favorite piece of data or like a database campaign perhaps that you've run in your career? 

Llibert Argerich: There's so many campaigns. I think that the... It's not a specific one, but I think one of the things that that my team is working on is, on using data and building this one source of truth, is experimenting on how to connect push notifications with the customer experience. And so what I mean is we launched this app in April and in this app we have a understand guide plan flow; so understand what problem you have, guide you to what kind of solution and then start planning all the tasks and projects you want to do. And that has created a vast amount of new touch points for the customer. So there's guides and then there's a calendar and then there's different tasks you can put in there, reminders and schedules and so on.

Llibert Argerich: And what I am really excited about is how our push notification program has flourished from generic seasonal reminders to very specific, "You have this cleaner scheduled for Wednesday. Remember to call them. They're coming at 9:00 AM and so on." And you become an assistant in helping you manage the owner's home. And I find that very exciting and we're just at the very beginning of it but the potential to drive higher engagement, get people to come back to the app and ultimately drive repeat behavior and ultimately repeat business is a super exciting to me. And just that transition between, "Something's broken, I need to fix it now," and then, "I'll be off and I won't think about Thumbtack again," to, "Oh, yeah. I have to get the lawn mowed. I have to get the pool cleaned 'cause it's a summer. I need to get my shades fixed," and so on so forth. And that steady bit of like, "Hey, it feels easy to manage my home. Yes, there's a pro coming in. Yeah, I know that they're coming in and Thumbtacks put me in touch with them." That ease of making something complex, stressful, uncertain, easy is very exciting. And the database marketing helps massively on that. It keeps customers coming back to the experience and taking that proactive approach to managing their home.

Kailey Raymond: And talk about a beautiful omnichannel. They're coming in your app, they're telling you this information, maybe they're scheduling some things or getting text messages, which great if you have great deliverability. It's one of those things that is what? The open rates on SMS are wild compared to email.

Llibert Argerich: Wild.

Kailey Raymond: It is like an unbelievable...

Llibert Argerich: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely.

Kailey Raymond: And you're building such trust with folks if they're you know allowing you to talk to them on that channel, that is one of the most powerful things that you can do as a brand. I love it. What steps or recommendations would you have to somebody who's looking to uplevel their customer experience? 

Llibert Argerich: What I mentioned earlier, just it's not about a channel, it's not about a feature, it's about the entire journey. Use data to understand what customers needs, what their pain points are, and how your brand can help them achieve the outcomes they need. And at the end of the day, it's what's the value you bring to the customer? The more you focus on unlocking value, the better product market fit you'll have, the higher the conversion rates, the higher the ROIs, the more money you will be able to spend in marketing, and up the funnel, the more things will flow. And at the end of the day, it's just really coordinating that entire journey and focusing on the areas where you don't have the best experience, improving where you have a moat or a difference compared to your competition, and really building that source of truth that will enable you to keep building that end-to-end great experience for your customers. That's really my advice.

Llibert Argerich: And obviously that's probably more at a senior level. For folks earlier in their career journey, be curious about what's happening across the marketing organization. I think it's very important that someone to go back to paid search, who's deep into AdWords and setting up keywords and thinking about billing, lift their heads once in a while and think about the down funnel customer journey, the landing pages and what steps happen afterwards, because all of that has an influence in their ROI. It's not just about the click you get and the conversion has many steps after. So the more you understand that, then the more you can work cross-functionally to improve the funnel. So I think it's just that holistic 360 perspective on the journey that modern marketing demands us to really think about constantly.

Kailey Raymond: Beautifully said. That value exchange is something that we cannot ever forget as marketers. And you're so right, staying curious and also learning cross-functionally, making sure that you are teaching yourself along the way, I think is really important. Llibert, this has been really great. I learned a ton today. You're doing some incredible things especially with AI at Thumbtack. Appreciate you being here.

Llibert Argerich: I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

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