At SundaySky’s recent SmartVideo Summit in NYC, I had a chance to speak with newly-installed 1-800-CONTACTS CMO Phil Bienert. Phil’s personalization history is long and deep, having previously served as CMO of GoDaddy and having run customer-experience teams for AT&T and Citibank. Digital transformation in today’s age of the empowered customer means that marketers need to get personal or get ignored, so the evolving role of the Chief Personalization Officer (CPO) has become more important than ever before.
I thought my chat with Phil would serve as an ideal starting point for our new blog series, the CPO of the Future, so here are a few excerpts from my Q&A with him:
What are the building blocks of a great personalized experience?
Start with a foundation grounded in the customer experience and the end-to-end customer experience. Identify every single time that you touch a customer, whether it’s a pixel or a human being or some other type of impression, as an opportunity to make an impression and bring that customer closer to your brand.
How do you counsel companies in terms of prioritizing their personalization initiatives?
Start with those high-velocity touchpoints. Get someone to the next level of engagement, meaning an upsell or a personalized sale or a personalized service message. It may not always yield something, but at least it starts to get the wheels turning. It doesn’t have to be something incredibly complicated and powerful. It can just be something as simple as versioning with something that’s one iteration better than having nothing there.
If you had to write the job description for the Chief Personalization Officer of the future, what might it look like?
The heart of the job description has to come down to helping the organization have a passion for its customers, and keeping the organization grounded in that mindset. If you start with that grounding and that vision, the technology aspect becomes easier. If the Chief Personalization Officer in your job description is about the technology and it’s not framed in terms of the customers, rewrite the job description to make sure it’s not just about buying a bunch of technology from vendors.
