How Real-Time Data Drives Unparalleled Customer Loyalty

John O'Melia: If you get enticed to go to an application to go buy this thing and you're going to get a 30% discount code. If that code doesn't work, you're not necessarily going to spend the next five minutes trying to figure out how to make it work. You have a one shot deal on many of these situations. So your ability to spot that you've got a problem with that code or that checkout page and be able to deal with it, is the difference between having a great Black Friday or having a so so Black Friday.

Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data Better Marketing. I'm your host Kailey Raymond. Today's episode is packed with insights on how to use real time data to monitor and improve digital customer experiences. John O'Melia from Content Square, breaks down the critical role of capturing comprehensive data sets to provide actionable insights and adapt quickly to evolving custom customer expectations. From real time monitoring during Black Friday to applying AI for predictive recommendations, we're sharing practical use cases that illustrate how real time data enables businesses to enhance customer satisfaction and maintain a competitive advantage. You won't want to miss this.

Kailey Raymond: Today I'm joined by John O'Melia, Chief Customer Officer at Contentsquare, where his team works to ensure all customers harness the full power of Contentsquare's technology and drive significant business value. Previously he was the CEO of Seal Software, which was acquired by DocuSign in 2020 and held leadership roles in customer success and sales at Dell EMC. John, welcome to the show.

John O'Melia: Thank you Kailey. It's nice to be with you.

Kailey Raymond: I am excited to hear about what you've been working on at Contentsquare and a little bit more about your career journey. There's a lot you have to share with us today in your own words. You've been in kind of C-suite leadership roles talking to customers for quite a long time in your career, but tell me about your career journey in your own words.

John O'Melia: It's a long career to look back on now. I'm sad to say, but I very much started life as a consultant, so I'm going to date myself. I joined Coopers & Lybrand a long time ago, and Coopers & Lybrand became PricewaterhouseCoopers and I spent the first chunk of my career in the consulting world, which is a great place to develop your customer hands. You charge by the hour, and if you're not delivering value, they're gonna switch that off pretty quickly. So that was a great place to learn. And then probably a little over 20 years ago, I switched to the software SaaS World, where I got very much involved in the technology. I led services organizations, I moved into sales, and then I became general manager, I became a CEO. And so I lived an incredible life. And if you told me at the start of my career journey I was gonna do all of those things, I never would have believed you.

Kailey Raymond: That is a good way to look back for sure, to say that. Wow. It was above and beyond my expectations.

John O'Melia: Yes. Yeah.

Kailey Raymond: So tell me a little bit more about kind of the role you play at Content Square. This kind of chief customer officer, I think, is this thing that's kind of emerging more and more these days. Tell me a little bit more about kind of where you fit into kind of the entire customer lifecycle and journey and that engagement strategy that you're delivering back to them.

John O'Melia: Yeah. And I think there's probably two sides to the role. There's the functional side where you're responsible for certain parts of the business and you have a day job, and the expectation is those parts of business goes well. And then there's a second part to the role, which is very much being the customer advocate for the company. From a functional standpoint, I essentially own parts of the business post sales. So once a customer has made the decision to buy our technology, it's my job to make sure they have a great experience.

John O'Melia: So the onboarding goes well. They, through education, they get enabled around the technology. Well, we have customer success managers who help them on that journey to make sure they're getting the value. If they run into issues, we have technical support to help them work through those problems. If they need more support, we have a professional services team. So all of those functions roll up to me and I look at my job really is to say it's my job to make sure customers are happy getting value. They become great references for us. And when the time comes for them to renew their subscription, that should be the easiest decision they make that quarter to renew that subscription.

Kailey Raymond: It is always a beautiful thing when you're talking to a vendor and it's a no brainer decision. Absolutely. 

John O'Melia: I've worked for a lot of companies and if you talk to any company, they'll turn around and say, "We're absolutely customer centric. Every customer you meet will tell you that." I think the difference is, what do you do in the difficult moments? And when you have a choice of putting the customer first or putting you first, which way are you gonna lean and how far are you gonna lean in those situations? And I think those companies that have built an incredible reputation for customer experience, for taking care of those customers and have great brand loyalty, do that consistently. And it takes action and it takes consistency. And you can break that trust easily and it takes a long time to build it. So you've got to be really careful.

Kailey Raymond: I fully agree and I think that that's exactly right. Is any anybody you talk to will say, "Oh yeah, customers are the most important thing." And it really shows up if it's decision making is embedded within your processes and you can actually feel it show up in day to day work that most employees understand. I'm wondering, obviously you've been kind of in this space and overall kind of been, delivering for customers for quite a long time and in particular in tech. But I guess I'm wondering about some of the trends impacting customer experience. What are some of the things that you're watching that you care about that you kind of like have your thumb on today? 

John O'Melia: I think one of the things that amazes me today is just the speed of change. And how quickly things evolve. And how something can be really innovative one day and within a few weeks or even months, it becomes an expectation that everybody you meet has that capability. And then a few weeks later, if somebody doesn't have that capability, it's viewed as a real weakness for them. So in my world I travel a lot, I visit our sales teams around the world, I visit customers around the world. So I feel like I'm always living on a plane and I'm amazed at like the flight experience these days, my favorite airline out of San Francisco has got a pretty good mobile app. They tell you when the plane is boarding. They tell you which baggage claim your baggages gonna come out of before you've even got off the plane. And the speed between being wowed by those features where the first time you see it and you say, "Wow, that's a really nice update." And then you go and get on another airline and you don't get that, and suddenly that airline is poor because they're not up there.

John O'Melia: And so I grew up in a world where initially we perhaps do a software release every year, and if you had some killer features in that release, they were going to carry you through the whole year. And today's world, that doesn'tt happen. It moves so quickly that something's got wow factor one week and doesn't a few weeks later. And if you're not continually moving, not continually raising the bar, from a customer experience standpoint, you're falling behind. So that speed of change is very impressive, but quite daunting. When you're a technology provider.

Kailey Raymond: You're 100% right on that. There's a recent article, kind of like post Black Friday about some of this. The delivery companies having your packages that you just ordered show up the next day, and all the effort that it takes to kind of put into that, but how that actually reaps rewards in terms of loyalty and customer value over time. And it's just, in your world, I'm wondering how you think about keeping up with those evolving customer expectations at Contentsquare as it relates to especially digital experiences. What are some of the ways that you can actually match those evolving expectations? 

John O'Melia: Well, it's a really cool space. So one of the reasons I love Contentsquare is where we are working with some of the leading customers who are all motivated to put in place an amazing digital experience or mobile experience. And when I joined four years ago, I remember being wowed by the technology. We capture an incredible amount of data for our customers in terms of what's happening on their websites or what's happening with the mobile applications. We capture every visitor, every mouse click, and we capture all the data around that. And we built an incredible set of visualization tools that allow customers to be able to look at that data and glean really important information and be able to do deeper analysis to understand those insights that then lead to action. What do I need to improve on my website? Where should I start? What are they going to be the most impactful areas. And four years ago, those... The fact that we had the data and the fact that we had visualization tools, was a wow factor in itself. And if I roll on now, four years later, the customer's view is, that's great. "Do the analysis for me automatically give me the answers and just tell me what I need to do. And you don't just leave me with the data, don't just leave me to figure it out myself. You guys are smarter than I am. You've got AI, you've got all these tools. Just give me the answers."

John O'Melia: And that is real today. So the bar is always lifting for somebody like us is really a tool to help our technologies to raise their game. They're continually looking at us at the same time and say, "Help me to do more, help me to do it quicker, help me to do it better, and make it easier for me to figure out what those next steps are."

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, the insight extraction kind of market I feel like has completely blown up in the past couple of years of it's not enough to your point, to show you the data. You have to have machines in the background that are actually starting to make some of those decisions on your behalf. And then you're the one that intervenes, but nothing else. So that's really interesting.

John O'Melia: And maybe in the future that, those decisions go straight from the data to being recommended, to being actioned automatically, and there's no checkpoints in between. The technology self regulates, self improves, and that cycle goes on. So it'll be interesting to see how that evolves.

Kailey Raymond: Agent to agent handoff. I think that you might be dabbling in the topic of AI at the moment, John. Let's go there. Tell me a little bit about how AI is kind of entering the chat with Contentsquare. How are you using AI to improve customer experiences and drive business value? 

John O'Melia: Well, I think we're doing a lot of what I've talked about where we historically have the data, we capture the data for our customers, and we have a really cool user interface that visualizes that data in a compelling way for customers. But now customers are really looking to say, "Okay, take it to the next level. Go do that analysis for me. And when I wake up in the morning, tell me the top five things I should do to improve my digital experience today." So looking at technologies like Copilots or automatic recommendation tools for next best action are very much alive and well today. And that, as we're releasing technology today, that's more and more what we're delivering to our customers is that taking it to the next step and recommending the action for customers too. So they don't need to be the data experts, they don't need to be the data analyst experts that were helping them on that journey.

Kailey Raymond: That's a really beautiful thing. It's driving a lot of efficiency there, I am sure. And I guess I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on what those guardrails are for people.

John O'Melia: This is a hot button for me and it comes back to a little bit about my role and the moral side of things. I think we're at a very interesting point where just because something is possible, doesn'tt make it a good thing. And I'm sure you have experiences day in and day out that you look at and think, does that cross the line? Does that not cross the line? How does that sit with me? And I had an example recently where we've obviously just gone through the election and I'm not gonna talk about politics, which side I'm on, but like everybody else, I probably got 10 emails a day asking me for donations. And one email said, "This day last year, you donated this amount of money." And it spooked me. The fact that you was badgering me every day to make a donation, but the fact that you then had the audacity to tell me a year ago, I did make a donation of what the amount was.

Kailey Raymond: Using my data against me.

John O'Melia: And it's like, I'm not sure that sits too well with me. And I think that is increasingly a topic for people who are in the customer experience world. I did a panel recently, we had an event in New York and I was working with one of the luxury brands and it was a really cool company and she had this great case study where, they use the mobile app. They really want to optimize the in-store experience. And they want to use the mobile app to get people to the store. And they really prided themselves on this wonderful experience when you got there. But what they also discovered is they like most companies, they understood who their top customers were. And so they were at the point where through the use of mobile phones, mobile applications, they could tell when a high value customer walked through the door.

John O'Melia: And so, the debate is, do I tell my server of a person who's helping customers to drop the current customer you're with because they're not a high value customer and run over to the lady with the blonde who's just walked in because she's one of our top customers and goes spend touch of there and that's entirely possible in today's world, but it's not necessarily a great experience. And for one user, they may be delighted that they felt everybody dropped everything and ran over to pander to their needs. But to another user, that might be the worst thing that's happened to them all day. And feeling singled out like that and thing just could offend them in different ways. So that sophistication of who your user is, how they're going to respond, what's possible, what's right, I think those guardrails, I think we're just starting to think about those and we're sort of giving so much power to marketeers, to technology today. And those guardrails about how to use that wisely is really important.

Kailey Raymond: Okay, I have like 600 thoughts after this. It's an unbelievably like, yes, this is exactly where we're at today. I was talking to the marketing team at Allergan and they do Botox. And so they now have the ability to, when somebody is in their doctor's office, on their mobile app, their loyalty rewards program, pop up a cross sell offer for some of the other products and they get a pretty healthy, redemption rate on that. And it's just a really interesting thing that doesn'tt cross the line in terms of the creepy factor that I think that you just spoke about, which I wanna dissect a little bit because it's talking to a couple of things which is an omnichannel experience. What is the digital preference versus the in person preference? Are those things the same? Are they different? How do you know that information? And just overall the concept of personalization, which we know does increase conversions, generally increases loyalty, increases therefore revenue. But what's the line between creepy and personal? So I wonder if you have any thoughts on any of that. But in general, how you think about helping companies achieve personalized interactions at scale in a way that is the right way and not the way that is perhaps crossing some of those boundaries that we want to set.

John O'Melia: Yeah, I think it's a fascinating topic and I think that intersection between really good data. Where you've got the data and the understanding of that data of your particular topic and that incredibly sophisticated world of personalization today. And then you start to marry the capabilities of AI with that. The art of the possible becomes almost boundless and how to police that and how to do that well. And I love companies who've got clarity and values and really trying to do that. And so back to the luxury brand I was talking about. They recognized that they had this challenge and they had some clear guidance from a company standpoint. So one of the guidance was, we're not trying to use our mobile app or our websites to be our primary sales channel. People can go out on there and buy and we're not going to prevent that, but that's not our primary way. But we want to try and use those things to get people in store because the long term relationship is feeling connected to the brand and feeling connected to the product. So we want this customer to be a customer for the next 10 years, not for the next 10 minutes.

John O'Melia: And so they were very clear about that and that was the guidance. And then they started to look at things and say, okay, these things are possible, but are they in line with our values as an organization if we're trying to do this? So that example of do we drop everything and run over to the high value customer who's just walked through the door. Or do we sort of give a nod to that person to let them know that we've seen them and we'll get to them as soon as we can and really try and coach and train those behaviors in line with the values and not let the art of the possible overstep. And I think that's gonna be increasingly important to customers and to brands to say, what are we about and how do we use this incredible cool technology that we've now got to reinforce our values and our brands and not wander away from it. And I think the hard thing is it's hard to police. Because if you've got a incredibly gifted technologist who gets carried away and goes and does something without the right supervision, without the right controls in place, something could happen. That you've just broken your values, you've broken your brand promise in an instant. It wasn't a conscious company decision. Somebody just pushed a button and it impacted thousands of customers. And now you're trying to be in recovery mode on that situation.

John O'Melia: So I think it's a really important topic that I think we're defining a new profession as we speak here in terms of how to be the brand police and put those guardrails in place.

Kailey Raymond: 100% I can think of so many examples in this arena and one of the more kind of interesting ones that I've been seeing recently is, perhaps you've heard the chatter around the death of Outbound and how all, AIs. I don't know if I necessarily agree or subscribe to all that. I do think that Outbound is changing, but with all of these new kind of like AI bots, you really do have to rely on excellent data. And as we know, data isn't always excellent. And sometimes the data that you have you might not want to use. So for instance, there's a story about an SDR. I believe it was a bot reaching out to somebody referencing a death in their family when they had posted it on LinkedIn. And it's like sometimes you don't wanna go there and it's something that you need to be a little bit more in it. And a robot obviously wouldn't know that. And so like, to your point, putting the guardrails around something and making sure that a human being has the ability to intervene is incredibly important.

Kailey Raymond: And I think that we're going to see a lot of these mistakes and some of this backlash against brands, maybe having these like AI fails in the next year or more. It's gonna be interesting.

Kailey Raymond: On the topic of AI, obviously what you're doing is you're piecing together a vast amount of data sets and extrapolating insights and making sure that you're recommending things to your customer base of the next best action. And all of this takes a hell of a lot of good clean data. So I'm wondering if you had any definition for me about what you think good data is. What does that mean to you? 

John O'Melia: The way our technology works I think really plays into that. We capture everything. And so we capture data on every visitor and every click, every view, how long you spent on the page, how long you hovered your mouse over the spot before you clicked it. And we're not necessarily interested in who the individual is. It's what's happening on that site or that mobile application, where are visitors coming from? How are they navigating, what's engaging, what's not engaging, what's leading to sales, what's not leading to sales, where's the frustration? Where are people dropping off, what's causing that drop off? So because we capture everything, we can say with absolute certainty, this is what's happening on your site. And for us, when you have website designers or mobile application designers, they all have storyboards of what they think will happen. This is the journey. They're gonna start here, they're gonna go there, they're gonna read this, they're gonna choose this, they're gonna buy size 13 traders and go to the shopping cart. And that isn't generally what happens. And so we actually take all of that data. So because we capture everything, it's a complete set of data, whether you like it or not.

John O'Melia: The data doesn'tt lie. And we can then present that in a way that's meaningful in terms of "Look, this is what's good, this is what's not so good. And here's how you can improve based on that data." So I think having that rich, clean set of data that is just factual, the data never lies. And then once you get that, your ability to then analyze, drive insight, define this best action is built on a solid foundation.

Kailey Raymond: Right. And really what you're talking about is also first party data. This is data that's like you are consented collecting, it's tracked, information. So it's helpful that the quality of that data is a hell of a lot higher than other sources. That luxury brand example that we were talking about, I love that example of, one of kind of your customers in that borderline of, what should we be doing? And I'm wondering if you have any other examples from your clients of how they're using this like really good data set to build some great customer experiences.

John O'Melia: We just had a very cool few days. For us, a lot of our customers are e-retailers and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are amazing days. And I'm not somebody who sits there waiting for codes on Black Friday and starts buying, but I guess I'm in the minority that not the majority, but for some of our customers the amount of business they do in those specific days and on the days leading up to the holidays is incredible. And what we've been doing for the last few years is we offer our customers a war room around Black Friday through Cyber Monday where our consultants, our specialists will literally sit with them in their war room and monitor what's happening in real time. And if we spot a problem, they can turn on a dime and deal with it. And some of the numbers we've seen that we've impacted for our customers, where we literally saved them tens of millions of dollars by spotting that there was a problem with this offer code, not converting and being able to see it and fix it in real time. People's patience levels are very thin these days.

John O'Melia: So if you get enticed to go to an application to go buy this thing and you're going to get a 30% disc code, if that code doesn'tt work, you're not necessarily gonna spend the next five minutes trying to figure out how to make it work. You have a one shot deal on many of these situations. So your ability to spot that you've got a problem with that code or that checkout page and be able to deal with it, is the difference between having a great Black Friday or having a so so Black Friday. And it was really cool for our team to really engage with our customers to that level where we literally sent people out to the customer sites in the war rooms and was there almost around the clock helping them with that. And again, from a chief customer office standpoint, that buys you some brand loyalty. When they say this vendor came in, spent those days with us and made magic happen, that's a good place to be.

Kailey Raymond: Well, that's an amazing example too because one of the things that is the thread I think John, of our conversation is the importance of real time. Right. And how that's been an ever growing expectation from consumers. This Amazon effect of, I need it now. And you know, this is in my inbox immediately, it's in my mailbox immediately. I think that that is certainly translated into digital channels, probably even more so tenfold. And a real time data set is critical for you to be able to make those pivots in a time that you'll actually be able to make that money back, right? 

John O'Melia: Very much so. And the expectations are so high these days. You know, we live in a world of DoorDash that you order a pizza and if it's not at your door 20 minutes later, there's something, something wrong. And so the rules around customer experience and what good look like is moving so quickly. And as a brand. If you can't live with those expectations that people have, then your brand's going be viewed poorly. So there is certain a level of things that you have to keep up with the times you have to make those advancements.

Kailey Raymond: I want to kind of like end the show with some questions around, some inspirational kind of topics to leave, some listeners with. So I guess do you have any examples or thoughts around who's doing this right? In terms of customer experience? 

John O'Melia: I guess from a personal standpoint, I travel a lot and anything that makes my travel life easier is super good. So one that I had fun with recently, I went to Australia and I was getting an Uber from the airport to the hotel and I tried to go through the regular process and I was waiting for them to match me with a car and say, look for this license plate. The driver's name is this. And they didn't do that. They just give me a code number number. And they said, go to the line and when you get to the front of the line, give the driver your code number and the driver will then see where you need to go and will complete that. And what they'd figured out was, getting in and out of Sydney airport was hard. So rather than have all these cars trying to find different people at different point, they just sent all the drivers in one line to the pickup area and all the passengers to that pickup area. And when you was at the front, you got the next car, you gave them your code number and they knew where you went.

John O'Melia: And I was like, that's amazing. I flew into New York at midnight on Monday and the chaos at New York airport trying to find your Uber driver for them to find you was just chaos. And Sydney solved it. And it was like, wow, that's pretty cool. That was technology at its best. That was a better customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: I'm also laughing, John, because actually what I think you're describing is a cab line.

John O'Melia: Yep. In fact I know. A modern day cab line.

Kailey Raymond: Oh, that is so funny. It is, you're right, it is like, it's definitely the better way to do it, but it's also. It's a cab line. It's a reinvented cab line.

John O'Melia: Very true, very true.

Kailey Raymond: That's great. One last question for you, John, is if you had any recommendations to somebody that was looking to up level their digital strategies, what would those be? 

John O'Melia: Well, I think the easy answer would be to invest in Contentsquare, do a shameless plug. But I think there's a lot of truth to it as well. I think what happens on your digital properties or your mobile applications, you have to take away the mystery, the guessing of what you think users are doing or where the friction is. And technologies like Contentsquare tell you with absolutely certainty, this is what's happening statistically on your website. These many visitors, they come at these places, they take these journeys, they spend so long here, they do this, they do that. And once you have that level of data, if you've got the right analytics to be able to interpret that data and come up with really insightful recommendations, then you have a clear path of what needs to change to optimize that performance. That's what we do really well. And that partnership then to team and say okay, how do we prioritize? How do we get those things done? To put yourself in a much better place. And that's why I love that the Black Friday exercise that we did. So to see that in real time and for our team to work with customers hand in hand and make those changes and see the change in real time and see the improvement in conversion as the day went on was wonderful to see.

Kailey Raymond: Real time customer journeys is the future to invest in today. John I appreciate it.

John O'Melia: I've really enjoyed it, Kailey.