Combining Attribution and Real World Insights

Kailey: Multi-touch attribution models, supply us with rich insights into our pipeline and channel performance. But to rely on these attribution models alone can be dangerous. While you're getting a well-rounded digital view of your customer, you're often lacking on real world interactions and the details gathered by speaking with your customers in the wild. The power of customer interaction is not lost on Laura Trotter, CMO USIS at Equifax. In this episode, I sit down with Laura to discuss macroeconomic uncertainties, organizational alignment, and the dangers of attribution.

Kailey: Welcome to the show. I am very excited to have Laura Trotter here today. She is the Chief Marketing officer of the USIS at Equifax, which is one of the largest consumer credit reporting agencies. She's been in the marketing business for over 20 years with experience across high tech, big data analytics, life sciences, so a wealth of experience across industries as well. Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura: Thank you, Kailey. I'm happy to be here.

Kailey: I am excited to learn from you today. You've been across a lot of different industries in, mainly marketing roles for your entire career. I wanna know how you got to be where you are today as CMO at Equifax.

Laura: Yeah, so I actually started off my career in sales, believe it or not, looking back, even though I didn't believe it was a gift at the time, it was indeed a gift to start off in sales, especially if one desires to go into B2B marketing. And so I spent my first four or five years in the real like professional world being a pharmaceutical salesperson, quota carrying salesperson. And that taught me a lot just in terms of like having empathy for salespeople and you know what it's like to be out in the field. But I knew in my heart of hearts I always wanted to do marketing. So when I got my first kind of shot at a legit marketing role, I leapt at it and have been in marketing ever since at various different, as you mentioned various different industries. I love that. I love learning and yeah, it's been great.

Kailey: I love that. So I did this too. My first roles were all in sales, was the person that ran kind of business development for the first start that I worked at, and then, yeah, quota carrying rep for even into enterprise for a few different years. And then I jumped into field marketing. So what was that transition like for you? Did you have a particular role that you went into when you raised your hand?

Laura: Same, I worked at Nokia Mobile phones as my first marketing role. I was hired as kind of an interim, like a contract employee, and they had just decided to sponsor at the time, which was called the Nokia Sugar Bowl, and they were trying to get some benefit from their sponsorship. So I worked on that project. But after that, my first like real time role, full-time employee was indeed field marketing. Yeah.

Kailey: Tale as old as time. Makes a lot of sense. You're probably going to a lot of those trade shows or events as a rep and you fully understand it. That's great. So I wanna learn a little bit about you and your team today at Equifax In particular, what is your role in building the customer experience in that journey?

Laura: Yeah, so customer experience has actually divvied up amongst several executives and several groups within the company at Equifax. Obviously marketing plays a huge role in that, not only kind of in the pre customer journey, if you will, but once they are, kind of onboarded and a customer of Equifax's we absolutely play a role in terms of education and continued retention and just that kind of thing. So we do everything from soup to nuts, so from a kind of a thought leadership perspective, demand generation, product marketing. Once they're on board, then we turn into the customer retention, helping sales with our quarterly business reviews. We're also in charge of all insights, so customer insights, business insights, competitive insights, and making sure that the various stakeholders have those insights so that they can serve up a better customer experience. We have a lot of improvement to make and I'm really excited about one project in particular that I'm sure we'll hit on at some point. But yeah, I think marketing plays a big role of customer experience at Equifax.

Kailey: That's great. It sounds like you're hitting really that whole bow tie, the B2B bow tie of revenue, all the way from thought leadership awareness to where that conversion happens as a customer, and then growing those accounts, making sure that not only you're retaining them, but you're upselling them, you're cross-selling them. Hopefully that's the language I speak to a lot of times.

Laura: I'm very familiar with the bow tie graphic. So [laughter]

Kailey: MQL is a four letter word on this show. Let's not talk about it today. I love it. Well, you've been obviously in marketing for 20 years now across a lot of different industries. I'm sure that you've seen a lot of both consumer and macro trends impacting the different businesses that you've been in. I'm curious about the moment that we're living in today.

Laura: Yeah.

Kailey: Are there any macro trends in particular? I imagine Equifax might have some unique insight into some of the macro trends today. Any comments about how that's impacting the way that you're seeing customer experience?

Laura: Absolutely. So as a data and analytics company, Equifax does indeed have a very rich view of consumers and has a pretty unique perspective in terms of the macroeconomic environment. And as anyone will tell you, we're in some uncertain times depending on who you talk to, we're either headed towards a recession or maybe we'll have a soft landing but all you have to do is go out and try to buy a house right now and then realize that the world is a very different place in 2023 than it was in 2022 and even more so in 2021. Interest rates for mortgages are at a 22 year high and so the mortgage market is in a really tough spot right now. But I think a lot of Equifax's customers fall into the category of lenders, be it financial services, particularly automobile manufacturers or auto lenders or as it mentioned, the mortgage market.

Laura: But they are seeking to continue to grow their business, obviously grow those deposits, but also mitigate the risk out there. And so they want to make sure that they're doing that smartly and they're not sitting back and being afraid but rather focusing on the future. And so within marketing we used those insights to frame up our year long campaign called Focus on Forward and it's exactly that. It is about how armed with data and armed with insights, how companies can move forward with confidence while still mitigating some of those risks.

Kailey: That's great. So walk me through some of those campaign elements. I'm curious to hear a little bit more of that. It seems part educational giving them rich insights. Tell me about some campaign elements.

Laura: Yeah, so I think the biggest one is our flagship program that we call Market Pulse and Market Pulse is both a monthly webinar and then Market Pulse is also a podcast, ironically. So we use that as the media's piece of content that the marketing team delivers, again on a monthly basis on a variety of different topics but still under that umbrella campaign of Focus on Forward. And we use the content that is generated from that webinar and the podcast to chunk it up and create additional pieces of content, whether it's blog posts or emails or ebooks or video snippets or what have you.

Laura: This most recent Market Pulse that we had was on the topic of student loans and as you probably are aware that's another hot topic in the market right now, it was the student loan debt relief program was shot down by the Supreme Court, but then the Biden administration announced this new program. What does that mean for lenders? If you put yourself in the shoes of a financial institution that may have millions and millions and millions of dollars of student loans either on their books or their consumers owe student loans with other lenders, you can imagine how that might influence their lending strategy or their deposit growth strategy.

Kailey: That's amazing.

Laura: Yeah.

Kailey: So you're taking something that's highly relevant and timely and making sure that people feel educated and in the know and hopefully giving them some sort of unique perspective that you have. I also like what you just said of obviously podcasts for B2B. Some people scratch their heads a little bit, but I think it's a really natural place for evergreen, right? And it seems like you do too.

Laura: Absolutely.

Kailey: So walk me through some of the ways that you think about B2B podcasting and some of the ways that you are. You said you're chunking it up into different campaigns, you're leveraging it for ebooks and other ways. Walk us through some of those tactics, 'cause I do think that a lot of B2B marketers, it's pretty new as a channel.

Laura: Yeah.

Kailey: That people are thinking about for the first time.

Laura: So one of the observations that we made is that there is a core group of market pulse webinar attendees that have attended like five or six or more webinars, and these webinars are an hour long.

Kailey: Groupies.

Laura: And so we're like, okay, well, those are super fans. We need to probably glean some insights from them, some data from them. Let's ask them what they want to hear about. And so we polled them. And by the way that... The result of that poll, our polls, 'cause we do it every month, informs our content strategy moving forward, specifically as it relates to podcasts, what we were learning is that there was interest in topics that might not be an hour long webinar topic, but certainly could be a really robust 20, 25 minute podcast and what we're seeing is that's bearing out on the numbers, people are subscribing, they're listening, they're downloading. That's been really refreshing. And I also think there's just this movement, if you will, B2B marketers sometimes forget that the buyer on the other side, they're people at the end of the day, yes, they are part of a company and they're part of a buying group and all that, but a lot of the trends and a lot of the tactics, if you will, that you see on the direct to consumer side, are very relevant in the B2B space. And I argue that podcasts are just one of those examples.

Kailey: You're so spot on. People that listen to this podcast are probably really tired of me saying that, like yes, exactly. You're in B2B, you're talking to human beings and people forget that they get caught up in the jargon and the buzzwords and our bow tie and all of that and you're forgetting that at the end of the day, people buy from people. And a podcast is a way to speak directly into the ears of the group of people in your community.

Laura: That's right.

Kailey: And those are really the people that you want to make sure on your side that you're getting ideas from. I love that feedback loop that you've created that is essential to make sure that you're.

Laura: Absolutely.

Kailey: Delivering relevant information.

Laura: That's right. Yeah.

Kailey: That's a great program that really ties directly to macro themes. I'm wondering, off the back of some of those macro themes, have you noticed any new consumer behaviors in the past couple of years, especially?

Laura: It kind of ties back to something I said earlier, and that's the expectations around B2B buyers, which are still consumers. That the expectation around consumer experience is that of, they want their Equifax customer experience to be just as refreshing and connected and holistic as their customer experience with Airbnb or Delta. And so that's different. I think that a lot of times B2B companies were able to kind of get away with a subpar customer experience and that is no longer the case. The customers are expecting those same consumer-grade experiences that they experience in other digital channels.

Kailey: You're spot on about that, which is really I think under this macro, huge umbrella that we're kind of calling personalization, right?

Laura: Absolutely.

Kailey: Amazon, probably at the forefront of this really pushing a lot of different businesses into the need, the necessity to transform every part of their business to be multi-channel, to be real-time, to be personal. And you're right, it's kind of blended into now B2B, and a lot of...

Laura: That's right.

Kailey: B2Bs are going B2B2C, and they're trying to build these little communities of folks to make sure that they can really know their customers to the best of their ability and not just kind of like third party data from these very large organizations that are trying to give you ideas of an industry which doesn't tell you who Laura is as a person that is in that company that's in that industry. Need to be more tailored.

Laura: Absolutely. And the nirvana is being able to pull all of those, that customer information into a consolidated place that will help all of the different customer facing teams. At Equifax, we have six different businesses. We have over 20 customer facing teams. God knows how many databases of customer insights that we have and customer engagement activities over here. The nirvana is pulling all of those insights together so that all of the engagement is based on all of the insights and not just one or two or three.

Kailey: Laura, you're talking my language now. Yeah. So this [laughter] this is something... Working at ACDP is something that we hear all the time from our customers, which is as businesses have grown, they've seen these silos in these organizations and they put up software to hopefully try to solve a lot of the problems that are happening on the sales side, on the marketing side, on the contact center side. And what that's done over time is it's made it really challenging to piece together full customer profiles to really understand exactly who your customer is from all these different interactions and all these different teams. It's been a challenge.

Laura: Absolutely. We're in the process of... In the early stages of conducting a project that's probably gonna be a year long at least, bringing together all of our various different disparate, siloed bits of customer information for exactly that reason. Because, wouldn't it be great before you're going to reach out to a customer about, oh, I don't know, an issue to know how many tickets do they have open? Where are they at in their renewal process? Have they been impacted by an issue in the past? Are there any billing that's in arrears? All of that information is extraordinarily vital to have context so that when you do engage with them it's a good engagement.

Kailey: 100%. Yeah. An absolute, massive undertaking for an organization of your size.

[laughter]

Kailey: Absolutely.

Laura: Yes. Absolutely.

Kailey: Cool. I'm wondering, obviously that's a challenge that's kind of coming up on the roadmap for you for the next year so I'm wondering if there's been in your career any other large challenges in building this journey towards customer experience and customer engagement? Any of those roadblocks that you look out for?

Laura: Yes. This has not just been one organization although I feel like we've made significant headway at Equifax, so I'm gonna put Equifax aside for just a second. And that's go-to-market. Number one, it's defined differently at every single company, but I think so many times people assume that there is a shared sense of understanding of the roles and responsibilities and the workflows and the handoffs when... As in a go-to-market motion, and that isn't always the case. And particularly when you have a really broad set of products and solutions to bring to market, you can't do it all, your customer can't ingest it all. So, having that aligned sense on priorities of the products and solutions and the market so the customers that those are gonna go out to and the teams that those are gonna brought out to and the training that needs to happen, of course the marketing and all of that, that sometimes can be a very tough situation because it spans across multiple organizations, products, sales, marketing, customer service, onboarding, all sorts of pieces in the organization and that can be a sticky wicket for sure.

Kailey: Oh. 100%. I mean, not all... You're talking about really organizational alignment and strategy and then enablement, like really tricky human problems. One of the things that I think is really interesting at this exact moment is where AI is gonna be able to slot into some of those in particular as it relates to predictive abilities to say "This is actually the next best thing that you're gonna be able to do with this particular customer," which hopefully builds a little bit of alignment because you're seeing it in the data and it's saying, "This is the product you should sell them next based off of everything that we know about this person." So I'm hoping that in this bright new future that we have some of these out of the box algorithms that tells you exactly based off of all of your customer data interactions what the next best thing for you and your go-to-market team to do will be pretty cool.

Laura: I completely agree, and I will add that all of the marketing leaders out there, you might wanna look at hiring a data scientist as part of your team because I can tell you that as exciting as all of this AI is, the amount of upscaling that needs to happen across marketing teams. Across, by the way, not just marketing, but other teams as well is enormous. Enormous. And so, talk about a trend. If I had a dollar for every email [chuckle]

Laura: From a salesperson.

Kailey: Oh, absolutely.

Laura: Vendor wannabe, invitation to a webinar, newsletter mentions, whatever, on AI, I would be a very, very wealthy person, but it's here. And what are we gonna do about it and how can we use it in a responsible manner? And not only how are we gonna use it responsibly, but who on the team right now is capable of ingesting AI into their daily. And there's so much to do.

Kailey: There's so much to do.

Laura: I feel like the technology's already here and we're not ready.

Kailey: No, you're spot on. You're spot on. And I speak with CMOs frequently on this show that say the same thing. I think at first, earlier this year ChatGPT, GPT-4 comes out and people are like, this is amazing.

Laura: This is great.

Kailey: My life just changed. Fast forward, we're in the dead of summer right now and everybody's like, we're figuring it out. We have some use case and so there's been a little bit of a lull, but I do think that it's gonna pick up and I do think that people are kind of mapping out exactly which use cases they're going to be able to leverage per organization.

Laura: That's right.

Kailey: But to your point, privacy, trust, you gotta do it carefully. You gotta do it to make sure that your customers have those opt-ins, they know exactly how their data is being used and you need to have clean data. You're not gonna wanna run...

Laura: Absolutely.

Kailey: AI on sloppy databases. So I mean, with the talk of AI, one of the things that we're hearing pretty often is one of the kind of like stops for growth for a lot of people with leveraging AI right know is they don't trust the data that they would be able to use to actually create some of these new automations. So I'm wondering at Equifax, if you've been able to put definition around what good data, what quality data means for you and how you use it on your teams.

Laura: I don't think it's ever been formalized. Particularly in marketing. We have an entire organization called the DNA team, the data analytics team. And my peer that leads that team is... I'm sure she has a formal definition just in terms of the consumer data that businesses use to make informed decisions. But on the marketing side, I would say obviously there's an accuracy, there's a quality bit of what you just said. And I'll add that it needs to be actionable as well. A lot of times I see marketing folk throwing up information. I'm like, "Why?" What's the takeaway there? What's the insight that you're gonna glean from that? It's just data for sake of being data. So I would say good data also needs to be actionable.

Kailey: As a marketer, I love that, because I really do have the sense that most organizations are just sitting on this mountain of information and data that they don't really have any use cases for. And it's like a pretty expensive thing to do to collect and store all of the data that you might not necessarily mean. So I like what you're introducing with the concept of activation Activation is that use cases need to be mapped, you need to know what you wanna do with it.

Laura: And use cases is what I wanted to make sure that we talked about today. Because whether you're talking about AI or just data in general, I think a lot of times teams rush to what's the tool, what's the piece of software that we need? And they're not thinking about how are we gonna use the data. And so making sure that you collaboratively create a set of use cases, so he as the very first step.

Kailey: Yeah, I love that as a starting point. You need to make sure that you understand where you wanna go to understand how you're gonna get there. For sure.

Laura: That's right. That's right.

Kailey: We've been kind of talking around some of these, we talked about one of your big campaigns, but I'm wondering if there's any campaigns or customer experiences that leverage data at Equifax that you would wanna highlight? Any tactics or programs?

Laura: We have a lot of it. We definitely fall into that category of company that has a lot of customer data and it's just a matter of pulling it out in terms of what we wanna do. I mentioned a little bit around the super listeners of Market Pulse. That's been a really big win. I would say the other big win is... So as part of our kind of value proposition, we obviously have consumer credit data, enormous consumer credit database, but we also are in the unique position right now to have what's called NCTUE plus data, which is essentially telecommunications, wireless utility in data. And that data is actually very predictive in terms of how consumers are able to pay off up maybe larger bills.

Laura: And so there's this whole set of consumers in the US that are either underbanked or thin file. Maybe they're young, maybe they're a new citizen, new to the country or what have you, and they don't have years and years of credit history. But guess what? They probably have a wireless phone and they've probably been paying that bill off on a monthly basis. And if they have that information is incredibly valuable for our customers to be able to use that. And so from a marketing perspective, making sure that our lenders understand, "Hey, by the way, we've got this layer of data that we can use to help make those smart credit decisions more informed." Equifax's purpose is helping people live their financial best and that includes people that are thin files or underbanked as well.

Kailey: That's incredible. I love that insight. And it's actually funny, my wife works for a company that they have a credit card for the underbanked for folks that might not necessarily have the ability to open a credit card with many of the major companies and they look for information exactly like this. So that insight, that paying your phone bills on time or whatever else is predictive to somebody's future credit score is...

Laura: Absolutely.

Kailey: Incredibly insightful for a lot of your customers. I love that. I'm wondering if there's anything as it relates to perhaps attribution that you think are like missteps or things to watch out for, the dangers of calculating that in a B2B Space?

Laura: I would love to talk about the dangers of attribution. It's funny, I just had this conversation yesterday with one of my employees who is responsible for demand generation and I was very specific when I kind of laid out the vision of how my team was gonna be organized. And I called it demand gen, not lead gen, but it's funny, like, unless you say that to some marketers, they think demand gen and lead gen is synonymous and it's not. And so I had to have a conversation with this person, not so much with this person who got her team and I was like, "Hey, by the way, demand gen is different from lead gen?". I'm not saying that we don't, especially in markets that maybe we don't have deep penetration or maybe we're going after a completely different kind of buyer, we need to do some lead gen, but we've got a really rich database, dollars of donors, a lot of those quote-unquote leads are already in there and we need to nurture those leads and turn those into hand raisers versus just creating new leads.

Laura: So I think one thing, I think marketers sometimes over index on leads and I think that connected is attribution. And so, many companies, Equifax included have moved to a multi-touch attribution model, which of course is a smart thing to do. However, it would be a mistake to look at only the touches that are measured in a multi-touch attribution report and think that those are the things that matter the most. Because what you're missing is you're missing all of that really top-of-funnel kind of earned media conversations that happen at a trade show, dinners that happen with customers or prospects that don't show up in a digital touch.

Laura: And so you need to remember that If it doesn't show up in a digital journey, it doesn't necessarily mean it's not important. So that's why it's really important to not only just rely on your quantitative data, but like talk to customers too. Find out, like talk to them when you're at a trade show, actually ask them, like tell us how you learned about us. And then you'd be surprised at what they would say. You'd be shocked at what they say. So, and I guarantee you it's not, oh, I saw your ad and I clicked on it. Even though, by the way, you should do advertising, we do advertising, but, it's not just that. And so you have to be careful not to over-index on what your attribution software is telling you.

Kailey: I don't think I've ever been in a B2B conversation where somebody said, "I clicked on your ad. That's how I found out" like never, ever. It might've been great, but that's like more of an inception technique. They're like, "Oh, I don't know". And so I agree with you. It's like, you need to, but Instagram like consumer ads may be the only time that somebody admits to buying something directly from an ad.

[laughter]

Laura: Right. I tell you, there's a difference between lead conversion, and like that just happens to be where they decided to fill out a form and then you were able to put cookies on it. It's a different situation.

Kailey: 100%. No, I like this... This is something that you're coming back to, which I think is just a really great insight and something that people forget, which is you ask people. And it's like the simplest thing in the world, of course, as most great ideas are, is, I don't know, why don't we just ask them how it went? Oh, surveys, form fill, like let's actually get that data directly from the person that we want it from. We have their attention. I think oftentimes because we have all of these different digital touch points interactions, we're trying to piece together this lead scoring model that's really, really complex.

Kailey: Sometimes we forget about the easiest thing to do, which is just say, "How'd you learn about us?" Yeah, one of the things that I think has been just really incredible here at Segment is we've developed a pretty robust feedback loop with the sales team. They're the tip of the spear. They talk to consumers every single day. They understand exactly what's happening, the trends that people are saying that they're scared of, that they're excited about. That's a great way for you to be able to create new content, for you to be really on the pulse with them, and to make sure that they feel heard too, that you're delivering things back to the sales team that they need.

Laura: Absolutely. At the end of the day, one of the key predictors of any success of a marketing campaign is there alignment, is there buy-in amongst your stakeholders? And asking sales for feedback, especially if it's "Hey, what are you hearing from our customers", is so key.

Kailey: I'm wondering how else you build alignment with your sales stakeholders. I think one of the things I've often found is definitions around the funnel can get a little bit shaky across GTM. Different people might have different ideas around attribution as well of, Oh, where this lead came from is the thing that matters the most. Yes and no. We know that people probably have at least 10 touchpoints before they're actually going to jump on a phone call with you. I'm wondering if there's any like point in the funnel that you agree upon is like the source of truth or any other tactics that you kind of generated with the sales team to make sure that you have that alignment.

Laura: Yeah, it's funny this just came up. It was about a month or so ago. We were in a monthly operating review meeting and marketing was doing a presentation and as we do every month, we start off with a slide that talks about how much pipeline and closed one revenue was sourced and influenced and breakdown by industry and all that. And one of the sales leaders was like, that doesn't make sense to me. And Laura, why are you reporting on closed one revenue, booked revenue, and not rev rec, and I was like oh boy, do we have a disconnect going on? But it was great. I was like, what? I'll take that offline with you. 'Cause I do want to understand why you think rev rec is the right metric here. 'Cause I was thinking, "Oh my gosh", like marketing should not be like measuring its performance off revenue recognition. We need to run our plays like an investment banker, which is like, we got to look into the future and all this kind of stuff.

Laura: But it turned out, once I actually had a conversation with the person, what they were really concerned about is the fact that what happens if marketing hits its numbers and sales doesn't, and what that might feel like. I was like, oh, thank you, because I'd like to reassure you on something. Yes, marketing has goals, and yes, we measure our campaign performance on that. But while we're not quota-carrying employees, everybody's bonus is based on how the company does.

Laura: So if you don't make your goals, we don't make our goals. And so I think there's this incumbent responsibility on sales and marketing leaders to ensure that, by the way, the comp structures are set up to support that kind of partnership. And I would say that there is an understanding from company goal of revenue, what marketing is gonna be responsible for, what sales is gonna be responsible for. But understand at the end of the day, If this party makes it and this party doesn't, it doesn't mean this party's having a party in the street.

[laughter]

Laura: We're all in this together. And so it was a soft conversation. It wasn't a hard numbers conversation, but that's how it showed up in this meeting. It was all about, you need to be reporting on rev rec. I said, no. So.

[laughter]

Kailey: That's a really great example. And I think things like that happen all day, every single day. And it really is about, well, first of all, doing exactly what you did, having that conversation, making sure the education is there, making sure that everybody feels like we got your back. We're on the same team, we're in the same shirt.

Laura: And I'll add, I think that there's sometimes, I always tell my marketing ops leader, I was like, don't ever use the word credit. Like marketing gets credit. Don't ever say that. Like I know what you're talking about, but like, don't say that nobody on this team is actually taking the order.

[laughter]

Laura: And we're not trying to take credit for anything. We're just saying marketing is definitely helping out the situation. We're influencing the situation and sometimes we are indeed sourcing the deal that the salesperson, but try to avoid language that like puts it into an us versus them kind of mentality.

Kailey: This is something too that I've been picking up on recently, which is the power of language. And a lot of folks have been mentioning, and I think it applies to the funnel too, but a lot of folks have been mentioning the way that they speak about in a marketplace business, a guest and a host. So making it feel like you have a real connection to those people. And it's, I think it's the same thing with different parts of the funnel and making sure that folks really understand that it's not a me versus you. And it's like where's the handshake in the middle for us? And I think for a lot of companies, we're kind of landing closer to meetings and opportunities.

Kailey: So making sure that this is the point where sales and marketing really meet. This is like...

Laura: That's right.

Kailey: The exact handoff where you can see where the magic happens. MQLs are important, but forget talking about MQLs to sales leaders because they don't necessarily care about it.

[laughter]

Laura: That's right. That's right. Yeah. We have MQLs, we rarely talk about them as sales. Totally. It's about what kind of meetings, where do the opportunities, that's where that, the handshake, the handoff occurs. Oh.

Kailey: Absolutely.

[music]

Kailey: I'm gonna switch gears and I'm gonna ask you if you have any folks that you look to, companies, people that you think are doing it right in terms of building great customer experiences?

Laura: Yes, I do. Actually. As a fellow Atlanta-based company, I think Delta Airlines does a great job. But I do think the experience, especially the digital experience and then the app and all of that, I think is pretty top-notch. I've had a problem and have had to resolve it via Twitter. And so that was pretty good. I think that's one example. I think Starbucks is another one that comes to mind, both consumer brands, but for better or for worse, a lot of these really robust, truly connected, personalized experiences do take place in the consumer world. At least right now.

Kailey: Right now. More B2B personalized experiences...

Laura: That's right. We're coming.

Kailey: Coming to you soon.

[laughter]

Kailey: I think the example that I come back to for those two is they meet you where you are, right? So like they have an app, they have a website, and then they have in store and all of those things feel connected. They feel completely like they understand who you are and all the touch points that you've had with them previously. I'm a SkyMiles member, so you don't have to sell me on Delta. I think they're great. They greet you in your seat. Nothing have.

Laura: Can be written notes sometimes.

Kailey: Yeah. Absolutely. Now that's something that it feels like it's, could be something small, it takes somebody 10 seconds to write a handwritten note, but it actually makes somebody's day. And that's something that goes above and beyond, which is actually pretty easy to do. And it's something that we should look to do too for B2B. I'm wondering, we talked about kind some of the trends that, we've been looking at today, but I'm wondering if you're looking into your crystal ball for the future, 12 months from now, anything's on the horizon that you have your sights on, your eyes on as it relates to customer experience.

Laura: Yes. I kind of alluded to it before, we've got this siloed customer information and then we have lots of engagement taking place in a variety of different customer facing teams. I really wanna look at customer data platform and aggregating that all together into one place to benefit, sales, marketing, customer service, operations, the whole kit and caboodle. That's one. And then as I think about, I'm a big believer that campaigns need to live in market for at least 12 months. I might be sick of it, but I'm pretty sure my customer target isn't yet. I don't think we're gonna be out of this like macroeconomic, situation in 2024, maybe even in 2025. And so I think that, instead of just like hitting the continue button, I think we might pivot and look at leaning in on Equifax's purpose, which is helping consumers live their financial best and really speaking to our customers through the lens of consumers and the consumers that they ultimately serve 'cause we do have that shared kind of connective tissue between the two.

Laura: So it's this idea of a consumer in the center and what that might look like for at different stages and different types of consumers and where Equifax plays in that kind of consumer financial journey and how we can help customers meet those consumers where they're at regardless of where they're at. So...

Kailey: I see the signs of a customer marketing campaign coming your way 2024.

Laura: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Kailey: That's great. Yeah. That's aims one of the most powerful... We were talking about being human. One of the most powerful ways that you can show somebody the impact of your work is by having...

Laura: That's right.

Kailey: A human being and how you've impacted them. Show up firsthand. Laura, this has been great. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being here.

Laura: Thank you for having me.

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