Service at Its Best: Getting Right to the “Core” of Customer Satisfaction
Things have become so convenient for us! We can sit down in front of our computers, click a button, and instantly order what we want or need. We do this so often, we develop patterns that reflect our gravitation toward a cadre of things we most commonly consume. This consistency is exactly what Max Bennett and his team at Bluecore want to see. As the Co-Founder of a “cross-channel Retail Marketing Platform” that specializes in email, Max believes it is possible to give customers what they need while making sure that companies maximize their revenue. Tracking spending habits and giving careful attention to the things that interest consumers the most is Bluecore’s specialty. Given that most of the emails people receive in their inboxes each day are quickly discarded, Max knows that in order to grasp and hold the attention of consumers, he has to filter in content that is most relevant. At Bluecore, Max opens the door to greater sales and increased customer loyalty by going straight to the “core”.
Tamara: Describe your company and the AI/predictive analytics/data analytics products/services you offer.
Max: Bluecore is one of the world’s largest consumer retail data companies. Our retail marketing platform, which specializes in email, is used by over 400 retail brands to better understand their customers, match them with the products they’re most likely to be interested in, and improve their experience with the brand (rather than annoy them with irrelevant communications).
We facilitate interactions with more than 400 million individual customers across a combined retailer catalog of over 125 million products, making the product set we manage larger than Walmart and second only to Amazon.
This is a ton of data — way too much to parse through, analyze and act on manually. That’s where our technology and AI come in.
In 2017, we introduced an AI layer that predicts with very high precision which customers will have a high affinity to specific products and/or categories, what customers are most likely to buy next based on what they’ve purchased or interacted with in the past, their lifetime value, and other actions they’re likely to take. It then gives the marketer the ability to surface those audience sets for one-to-one email communications to be deployed by Bluecore’s platform.
Tamara: How do you see the AI/data analytics/predictive analysis industry evolving in the future?
Max: In a few ways…
First, AI will evolve from being seen as some watershed moment to simply a continuation of a several-hundred-year-old trend of automating tasks away from people (think everything from weaving machines hundreds of years ago to ATMs, automated checkouts, factory robots, the list goes on). AI is different than past technological innovations in that it’s not just automating repetitive rules-based tasks, but also autonomously executing entire complex jobs. Because the public’s initial exposure to AI was largely through inconsequential events (a robot beating a human at Go; Watson dominating Jeopardy) and pop culture (Terminator), it still feels out of touch to many. But as it’s applied to more day-to-day business processes — and infiltrates the daily lives of the masses — it, like other seemingly exotic technologies before it, will become more familiar.
Second, unique data sets will become the currency of the future. In the AI industry, having differentiated access to nuanced data sets will be even more important than having the best algorithms. Algorithms are becoming public and open source, whereas unique data is more scarce. Ultimately, data is what fuels and enhances AI’s ability to make decisions and increases AI providers’ control.
Third, AI companies and products will be tailored to industries, not job functions. This will be hugely disruptive to existing software companies and business models, and could lead to a completely new landscape of leading tech companies. Instead of building AI around specific job functions (i.e. HR, accounting), it will be tailored to certain industries (i.e. retail, media). This is because an AI tuned to the specific goals, actions, data, and nuances of a specific industry, will always outperform one that is built generically. And in an AI-first world where the quality of an AI’s decisions is what differentiates products, verticalization will be necessary component of achieving this.
Fourth, we suspect that AI will lead to large scale adoption of performance-based business models . In the pre-AI world — where you use technology to augment and scale the work that you’re doing, it made sense to price software based on “usage” (i.e. number of “seats”, “API calls” or actions taken). But in an AI-first world, such pricing units are not a good proxy of value between customers and technology companies. Rather customers will opt to pay the AI for how well it does the job they asks of it. In other words, on performance.
Tamara: What is the biggest challenge facing the industry today in your opinion?
Max: In the retail industry, every retailer that’s not Amazon has to figure out how to survive in a world where a single dominant player is already winning at three of the four factors that influence customers’ buying decisions: How cheap it is, how convenient it is, and how much variety it offers. This leaves them hyper-focused on offering things that Amazon can’t offer — and competing on the one remaining factor: how unique the experience is.
Rather than a huge selection and five-minute delivery times, companies like Warby Parker are successfully competing on peripheral value adds, such as creating a brand that consumers want to align with, prioritizing the creation of its direct-to-consumer channels and relationships, and offering highly curated product selections. That’s just one retailer, though. The industry as a whole needs to determine what that experience piece is and tie it to their core competency
Retailers also need to decide what role their offline retail space will play in the future. There’s recently been a lot of talk about the death of retail in response to the widespread store closings we have been seeing over the last few months. We shouldn’t conflate retailers overinvestment in offline retail space with the idea that offline retail space is not a necessary and core part of the differentiated experience they will have to offer to survive. While it is true that retailers are largely over-invested in physical retail stores. For the stores they keep, they will have to figure out how to evolve them into vehicles for experience delivery, instead of just a glorified distribution center.
Tamara: How do you see your products/services evolving going forward?
Max: At Bluecore, we’re working to evolve our AI, which is currently focused on completing specific tasks, into a wholly autonomous email solution that’s programmed to act on the insights it uncovers in pursuit of very specific business outcomes. The way consumers will experience this is that all the annoying, irrelevant emails will go away. Right now, retailers don’t know what consumers want and their inboxes reflect that.
Bluecore will additionally continue to power a lot of the non-email content that consumers see when they shop online. The key differences will be that the ads they see will be based on driving future experiences rather than taking consumers back to past experiences or items they’ve interacted with.
Our vision is that our technology will move retailers away from websites that look like glorified catalogues and direct them toward discovery vehicles that driving unique experiences, personalized to the individual users.
Part of how we will achieve this is by giving customers far more sophisticated mechanisms of providing feedback on why they didn’t like a certain part of their experience. They’ll get better experiences as a result.
