Using orchestrated serendipity allowed one brand to improve its conversion rate by 15% - Interview with Gregg Johnson of Invoca

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today I have Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. Always great to see you. Can you remember the last time you were on? You know I was thinking about this. It's the equivalent of I don't remember what's off the record and on the record so I talk to you often enough. I don't remember the last time we recorded it but probably two and a half years. Do you remember the last time? I looked it up. When was it? March 2018. 18. You're kidding me. Nope. Wow. Well, that just goes to show that you can have friends outside of podcasts.

0:34Indeed. Indeed. And so that was the thing, because we were talking about the future of voice and customer experience back in then, which was... And now some of that stuff has come true. It is.

0:47For people that don't know you and don't know Invoca, do you want to just say a few words and introduce yourself? Yeah, of course. Of course. So at Invoca, we're a revenue execution platform where we basically connect digital marketing commerce and digital product and contact center together to deliver a seamless experience for consumers typically as they're buying products and services from a brand for the very first time so we do a lot of work sort of at the intersection of crm cdp ccast digital advertising platforms which is why we're at a w summit awesome and thank you for mentioning that because we decided to record a podcast because we're both here at Summit.

1:26And this will come out a bit later in the Summit because at the time of recording, we're in April. This will probably come out a little bit later. But just to round that off, what have you seen in the last couple of days that you thought, that's cool, we like that? I mean, in general, so for full disclosure for the audience, I've been at Invoca nine years, but before that I was at Salesforce for a decade. So there's a little bit of blue blood that continues to flow through my veins. Although this is probably my seventh or eighth Adobe Summit, I've gotten to know the people at Adobe very well and their products and really enjoy working with them.

2:02I feel like I continue to see this fruition of Adobe that really struck me the first time I came to Adobe Summit, which is I think Adobe has these two, a unique combination of two assets. And a lot of their announcements this week, I think, are about leveraging the combination of those two. Great content-creative workflow capabilities and great data. Right. And like my first impression at my first Adobe Summit was like Salesforce was a great data company, but was not a content creative company. Right. And I think about like Google in the same way, really great around ads and creative and every, or ads and data and everything else.

2:38But for me, the interesting thing this week was just seeing the continued integration of like creative crowd and experience cloud. And I thought it was interesting that you had both Anil who runs the experience cloud business and David Wadwani, He runs the Creative Cloud business, you know, both on stage. Yeah. Whereas it used to be sort of like, hey, you creative and content folks, you go to Adobe Max and the data people, you come to Adobe Summit. Yeah. And so for me, sort of the way that they're using and leveraging AI to sort of connect all the proliferation of the content that you can make with, you know, more automation, less work.

3:17You can see sort of the stitchings of Workfront through a lot of the announcements, but then connecting that to the data and the outcomes that then drives back the personalization. Like for me, it was just interesting to see Adobe continue to lean into the combination of those two things strategically. Yeah. Whereas I felt like, you know, I'm now dating myself back to 2018. Back in those days, sort of like, where's all the creative cloud assets? And someone looking from the outside in who tends to be a product and technology thinker, that for me was always the kind of weird thing initially. And then I feel like over the past four or five years, Adobe is really focused on the intersection of those things where in my mind, like that's where the magic really happens.

3:55If you're in a, that's why you buy into Adobe. Well, that's it. It's almost, you're a bit like, because they talk about into the platforms and ecosystems. They're, they're, they're, they're going to where people kind of work and helping them execute work in a better and more efficient and more kind of creative way. And I think the interesting thing that I heard when Shantanu Narayan was talking to Jensen Wang from NVIDIA on the stage. That's a fun interview. I'd brag, if the audience, if you get a chance to watch that interview, it's fun to see the two of those. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they, they, they, competitive is, is, is an interesting kind of way of describing it.

4:33But Jensen Wang had an interesting way of characterizing sort of like work. And he said, there's, if you think about work in two different ways, sort of like there's, or has two components, purpose and task. And he was saying that the role of technology is to eliminate, to reduce the amount of time that we spend on tasks, doing the mundane stuff to allow to create the space for us to do more, which is on purpose around whether it's strategy or being more creative or kind of driving insights or all those different things. And I think that's, it feels like that's what Adobe's trying to do is trying to make the task easier to create the space for more creative.

5:11Yeah, and full disclosure, for me, I don't like opining about things that I don't know a lot about. I try to acknowledge my own information or lack of information. Our business and the work that we do with Adobe is very heavily oriented around data measurement personalization. So I'm not super close to the content and creative world. But I think my interpretation of what's happening with AI is the price, the cost, I should say, the cost of creativity is coming down. and your ability whereas in the past you know you're working with an agency and you know you'd be saying i'm going to go spend a million dollars on the campaign like bring me a couple creative concepts and they'd go away for two weeks and pull all-nighters and come back with three concepts well and the cost of those three concepts was you know two or three works of human work now you can concept to your heart's delight and i think about like a good friend of mine he's a creative director at a mortgage bank, but his wife has a startup company that does organic baby food.

6:08And they did a Super Bowl ad, not at a national level, but in their specific market. And it was an amazing ad that was only possible via AI. And this is because he is dove heads first into creative exploration of AI. And it was all this, like, had little babies doing all these things that, you know, no baby would ever do in the real world. But from an entertainment perspective, the creative is amazing. It's awesome. And so I just look at it as like the cost of creative exploration is going down. And that task is going away. And the purpose that you can lean into is now like, you know, the obstacles of creativity are really removed.

6:45Yeah. Perfect. Right. So we could talk about rummage around that sort of stuff for ages. But I actually want to, on purpose, I wanted to ask you about a couple of things that you shared with me before the podcast. Yeah. And because I think it's really interesting, you said to me, the buying experience is broken at the exact moment customers need help most. And I thought, okay, help me understand what you mean by that and what's going on to break the customer experience and what needs fixing. I mean, I think, so we spend a lot of time helping brands at the point in the journey where someone who is just getting to know them for the very first time makes the penultimate decision of, do I want to be a customer?

7:33And one of the things that kind of irritates me intellectually is that people who focus on customer experience do not tend to focus on that particular part of the journey. They tend to think a lot about existing customers and all the things that you can do. And frankly, I think like the existing parts of the customer journey, they're harder and easier in ways because you have more data. You have a better understanding who the customer is. But I just think about like this is the make or break moment for you as a brand. And the verticals that we serve, so think financial services, telecommunications, property and casualty insurance, health care, automotive.

8:08These are big decisions where you're making a decision about having a relationship with a brand for a decade to two decades. Like, think about wireless. If you look at the churn rate on wireless providers, when you choose between AT &T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, on average, that is a decade-long decision. And so the ramifications of getting that experience right are really high. And, you know, about age-old phrase, like, that how important first impressions are. And so I think point A, the stakes are super high. Point B, because you don't have a lot of data about the customer, I think that's a feature and a bug.

8:49One of the things that I've come to learn about data is that I think most companies spend too much time collecting it and not enough time using it. And so I have this own mantra when we operate within our company internally, as I say, like, collect a little bit of data, use it, and earn the right to collect more data. And so I think one of the benefits of this point in the journey is you're not overwhelmed with a 10-year longitudinal history of the customer. Like, you've got a set of data in the moment that you can go use, but in the verticals that we serve, a lot of times the consumer is bouncing between a digital experience, an AI-powered experience, a human consultative experience, if I'm getting a mortgage for the first time.

9:28Like, I love, I want the reassurance and the confidence of like somebody helping me decide what's the best product, even though I can tinker with mortgage calculators all day long. I'm worried about like, am I going to get my mortgage complete in time to close on the house that I put a bid on? And so I think there's a huge amount of opportunity and importance in this moment. And I think if you focus on the right things, you can kind of bring together the experiential elements based on data and you can deliver a great first impression. And if you win that moment, you've won the next decade. Whereas in the existing customer side, like you continue to win moment by moment by moment in a light way.

10:02But I just, I feel like this area of the journey and experience is overlooked and people don't think about it. And I'll also add from an organizational dynamic, I can speak as a CEO. Our ability as a company to acquire new customers is one of the top three metrics that we think about how we drive the business. And I find a lot of times CX folks are like looking for connections to power and relevance and budget within the organization. And this is like one of the top three things you can do. and it's staring right in front of your face. So what? Go do it. Yeah. So anyway, sorry to interrupt. Well, I mean, I think the thing is that, you know, I oftentimes kind of think about, I say to people that business can look complicated and complex, but it's sort of not really.

10:42If you think about it, if you really boil it down and think about most businesses sit on the same sort of chassis, you know, it's a bit like your ability to generate interest, your ability to convert, that drives your number of customers. Then there's like how much they will spend with you on average and then how frequently they'll buy from you any given kind of period that drives your revenue. Then you've got your cost of operations and that's your profitability. Yeah. I'm not going to do that. Customers, revenue, and profitability are all outcomes of all these other kind of lead levers. So go figure out kind of how you can influence one of those kind of like other sort of things like conversion rate or how you attract, you know, drive interest and all that sort of stuff.

11:19And that's how you make an impact. Yeah. And it's not rocket science. Well, and I think the beauty, especially of acquisition, marketing, and sales, those tend to be business processes that are very well instrumented from a data capture point of view. And so if you make an emotional difference in the buying experience, then you can actually measure the impact of it. Like I'll give you an example. I have this new phrase. This is not a, I haven't run this past our marketing team, so I'm sure there's a better version of this phrase, but I call it orchestrated serendipity. Okay. And what this means is like one of the things we've done with one of our customers is if we understand, you know, what you search for and what you're looking at on the website, and then you're looking to get consulted advice from an agent in the contact center, we'll pass that data to the agent desktop, or we can pass it to like an agent assist, you know, AI-powered type of thing.

12:17And so what that gives the agent the ability to do is instead of starting with a generic... How can I help you? ...how we're going to help you meeting. now again like what i don't want to do is like i see that you search for xyz like you don't do it that way either but if you can say hi how you doing today we've got a special promotion where if you sign up for two years of our service we'll give you 10 off xyz xyz is the thing that they search for and the thing that they were looking at emotionally like what do you feel like as a potential because you're like it's my lucky day it's my lucky day yeah and that is a I mean, that's the first impression that you're making in human touch with that consumer.

12:56So that's great. We've run A-B tests with a customer. Like, we saw 15 % improvement in conversion rate. So, like, not only are you delivering a better experience, but you're doing it at a point in the journey that is highly instrumented, so you can A-B test it, and you can see if it has a business impact or not. And it feels like magic. And, like, customer experience, when you get it right, feels like magic, but it's not magic. It's like you roll up your sleeves and you do a lot of data and technology work behind the scenes, you have to work across organizational boundaries. But the outcome is magic.

13:29And in this particular part of the journey, the magic can be fairly well correlated directly to lower expenses, higher revenue. And like as a CEO, what more could you ask for? Indeed. And I think the thing that's sort of almost building on that, because you talked about first impressions and you talked about how people feel and you talked about data and things, But then you talked about this idea that, because there's a lot of talk in the market right now about moats and things changing the competitive landscape. But you talked about, you said trust is the competitive moat, and it starts with whose data the AI is trained on.

14:05And this sort of speaks to something else that you've been working on. I wanted to, because it's related, but I also wanted you to explain to me what you meant by that around the sort of trust is a competitive moat and the point around - I mean, I think I would encourage people just in general, if you look around and see sort of messaging from technology providers, or if you go talk to buyers, trust is a word that is, if I played the word association game, trust in AI, those concepts are getting closer together. And that's both from a consumer perspective, I think, around AI, and also from a technology buyer perspective, around like can i trust the system what's happening with the data that we're feeding into everything else and so um now we're fortunate in that we have been building ai products for a decade but it's a pretty sharp difference between our first generation of ai products and our second generation our first generation is we were using ai to understand conversations between brand and consumers getting deep insight into it turning it into individual data points on on an individual consumer journey basis that you could then go activate in Google and Meta and Adobe and Salesforce, and not just, like, look at trends or charts, but, like, activate the data in real time, fully automated.

15:27And then the thing we've been doing over the past two years has been actually using AI to drive and orchestrate consumer-to-brand interactions. And so we built an SMS product where you can, like, instead of filling out a form on a website and then getting a random call back, you know 36 48 hours later from the number you don't recognize like you can hook up an ai agent to the website and it'll directly text you back and start asking you more questions or answer any questions that you have and right then set up a time for you to talk to somebody that's convenient like deliver a more seamless experience but the number one question that when we deployed this product customers that they had was like can i trust the experience it's going to deliver i think everybody has had some challenging experiences with chat bots and they worry about all the And so like one of the things that we did from day one, a lot of our customers, we have data on journeys of like digital touches and engagement, and then human-to-human conversations.

16:23We're like, hey, why don't we use and extract the insights we can from you as a brand, your conversations that you've had with consumers, identify the patterns, leverage the best practices, surface that back up to you. So if your business has changed, you can tweak it. But like doing the hard work to when you go activate AI, ensure that it's not just looking at a general purpose reasoning model from Cloud or OpenAI, but it's actually leveraging the business context, the business knowledge of you and your organization. And I think a lot of people when they deploy AI, they want to have that business context.

17:03The challenge is that technology providers like, well, great, Adrian, like go find that business context for us. You go search around, you go collect all the data. and we're just trying to make smart use of the data that we have to make it easier than ever for customers to go deploy AI in a way that they can trust and they can verify and they have confidence it's going to work. Would that be safe to say that then you're getting close to helping kind of brands develop their own sort of like SLM? So because it's built on their data. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And like we're really trying to kind of leverage the best of both worlds in the sense of like broad reasoning and inference is useful.

17:40Yeah. But really tailoring that to the brand experience. And then one of the things we're working on right now is like, how do we continue to refine that brand knowledge set in an automated way? Because obviously like your business doesn't stay static. It changes your products and services evolve and change. So we're looking at, you know, how can we take that inherent knowledge, that flow of information that's happening back and forth and sort of build that into the AI brain for your company to go engage the people, the SMS or voice or other channels, and how do we keep that up to date over time?

18:10But it's really about the more that we can apply and the more that we as a technology partner can do the hard work of applying your brand's context to your brand's AI, we just make it easier for you to adopt. And I think everybody knows right now there's tons of pressure from boards and CEOs and executive teams like, how do you go deploy AI? What I keep saying to our team is, every customer I talk to has two questions. Number one, can I trust the experience? And so, like, all AI products of this next generation, we're giving customers access to them for 60 days for no charge at all. Yeah. To answer that question.

18:45And the second question, which is, can I build a business case that supports investing in this? And the benefit for us is we're already wired into where you spend money in advertising, where you make money from a revenue point of view. So anything that AI does that improves that, like, we can instrument it, we can measure it, we can A-B test it, and we can hand you as a customer a business case that you can take to your boss and get used to justify investment. Nice. I mean, because I think that's the whole thing around, you talked about this kind of like trust. I mean, but also there's a perception thing, gap thing going on because all this talk of where people are talking about AI is going to improve the customer experience, the buying experience, all these different things.

19:27And then your own research has said, I mean, this is, it's almost like a perennial sort of thing. More of the research finds the same thing. There's a gap between, was it 86 %? Your research found that 86 % of marketeers believe that AI improves the buying experience, but only 35 % of consumers agree. Yeah. Well, it's also one of the surveys that we did a year ago, and we asked marketers, how would you self-rate you and your team in terms of, are you ahead of the curve or behind the curve on AI adoption? And like 90 % of marketers said that they were ahead of the curve on AI adoption, which by definition can't be true.

20:00But I mean, I think that's one of the beauty of working with marketers is marketers are optimistic people who are forward looking or thinking about the future and are striving to be good. And the job is like, how do you help them deliver on that problem? So there is a real problem in that sort of perception gap, because it's like relates back to that. Was it the old Baines statistic, which said like 80, 90 % of companies think they're killing it when it comes to customer experience and only like 9 % or 80 % of customers agree. And so the gaps got a little bit smaller, but it's a gap nevertheless.

20:32Yeah. I mean, so, and that's a perception gap. And it's what should marketers be doing to collapse that? I'm going to go back to the data point, which is marketers, and I'm going to include like digital product folks when I think about this. Because when I say marketers, sometimes people include people who own the website, mobile apps, sometimes people don't, which kind of depends on your definition. marketers generally have lots of data around where the gaps are wrong they just need to use the data and so for example you know one of these cases i've been talking a lot about with adobe customers this week is you can use customer journey analytics to understand how people get to your site how they navigate through your site do they buy do they not buy do they abandon and like one of the simple things that we do with our customers is we say hey sometimes when people abandon they're truly abandoning sometimes when they abandon they're actually escalating offline into your contact center and they're having conversations with people and like with our technology you have a direct feedback loop where you can see i as a person landed on the website i went to go look at information about this product maybe i put something in my shopping cart and then in a digital only world do you think i abandoned what i actually did is i called into your contact center and i had a conversation with an agent now that may be a conversation back to Like, when I got my first mortgage, I had an MBA.

21:54I'd worked at BCG. I'd done the math. The math was not a problem for me. Yeah. I'd never bought a house before. Uh-huh. I had, like, my wife and I had put an offer on a condo in San Francisco that, like, we both... we just had our first child. Like, we had our hearts set on that. And I'm just, like, nervous about the process. And addressing that nervousness and giving me confidence is not something that a website does... You can provide content around that, but a lot of that is, like, human touch. It's emotional reassurance. Whereas if somebody else called in and was like, I'm just not really sure about the differences between a five-year and a 10-year, that is explainable on the website.

22:28And so a lot of the work that we do with customers is help them understand what's abandonment versus what's escalation, the contact center, and what's good escalation. What is a human being playing a role that only a human being can play versus where can you take some of those issues and solve them with technology? And I always believe if you work with engineers, if you... There's nothing more frustrating than trying to tell an engineer about a problem that they can't see. And there's nothing more empowering, motivating, that leads to success than, like, letting an engineer see a problem firsthand themselves.

23:01Because engineers are problem solvers by definition. And so, I'll say, like, hey, let's go show the path. And show even down to an abstract level, but also an individual level. Like, let's let you see a session replay of someone on the website and then hear the conversation they had in the contact center and an engineer will see that end-to-end experience and then it'll be like by definition i want to go fix that like what can i do to go fix that so i think a lot of it's like using the data that you have you can survey somebody after the fact and ask about their experience but you've got the data of what their experience was go look at it and use that data and i think that's where you can start to narrow some of that gap i think that's right i mean i think that there's there's um but it's all i think what you're talking about then speaks to a sort of a larger thing where people need to sort of experience stuff because i talk about the there's a couple of things that i talk about one is let's talk about um so there's different levels of leadership because sometimes you have to influence leadership is that there's the first first level there's like there's leaders that use data and it informs them and then there's another level where people enrich that data but with like stories and the stories move them yeah right but But then the third level is when they go further and they actually have these experiences.

24:13They actually go and speak to people or they serve them or they do whatever. And the experiences, because it's another level of data, it compels them. So data informs, stories move, experiences compel. And I think that's really interesting. And I love the way that you collapse in that distance where you show an engineer the whole thing and then you listen to somebody because that's an experience sort of thing. Right. And these sort of gaps exist all over the place in organizations. And I think that's, it's a really, um, it's always struck me like, you're going to stay in like a fancy hotel. And I always wonder, or you go to a nice restaurant, well, not a nice restaurant, not in a restaurant, but like a hotel, you go to a hotel and you go, say something like a five-star hotel.

24:57And I often wonder how many of those people that work in that hotel have actually experienced what it is to be a guest at that hotel yeah yeah and i have a position where i go i say well if you haven't experienced it then you're guessing about what a good experience should feel like on what you know and what it should look like and i think that's the the what many businesses don't do they don't collapse that distance between kind of what their people what they want their people to do and and then and what they want their customers to to experience Which is like the highest level of empathy. I'll give you an awesome experience that I had as a consumer probably four or five months ago.

25:40Okay, so shout out to GEICO. GEICO is not a customer. Uh-huh. So this is not me talking my own book, advertising my own technology. But my wife and I have had auto insurance with GEICO for quite some time. And my oldest son was going away to college. Uh-huh. And he'd been on our auto insurance policy, but he was not taking his car. And so I went into chat session Really just with the idea of like, what's the right thing for me to do here in terms of his coverage when he's going to be away at school, but he's not going to have a car, but he's going to come home on the weekends. And so in general, they use their data well.

26:17They understood what products and services already had. They could see that he was 18 year olds. He was about to be a freshman. Like they did the mechanics well. But there were two things that just made me go, wow, that was a great experience. One of them is very simple. which is probably about halfway through the chat. I don't know what I expressed that sort of indicated it was clearly human on the other side. Mm-hmm. But she started using emojis of me. Okay. And that just immediately brought a shared level of humanity to the conversation. And then the thing that just blew me away was at the very end, I made a comment.

26:56Maybe it was, like, talking about, like, the time when the policy change would come into effect. And I was like, yeah, I'm just trying to wrap this up before he goes to college on Monday. Okay? It's my oldest son. If you had asked me five years ago before he went away to college, what an emotional experience sending your first child to college or university would be like, I would have been clueless. Mm-hmm. This person, unprompted, said to me, I have to imagine this is a really challenging time you're going through, and it's really emotional for you. And I just hope that that goes really well for your family.