Interview with Global Head of Marketing, Arm Treasure Data – Tom Treanor

 

“Technology allows us to give a faster and higher quality response to our customers”

1. Tell us about your role in Arm Treasure Data?
I am Global Head of Marketing at Arm Treasure Data. I am responsible for marketing strategy, campaigns, events and inside sales for Arm Treasure Data’s CDP (customer data platform).

2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
My background is in martech. I founded Right Mix Marketing, a social media marketing, content marketing and search engine optimization consulting firm. In 2013, I became Head of Digital Marketing for Meltwater’s Digital Marketing, SaaS Social Media and PR Solutions and was Director of Content Marketing at Wrike. Prior to my current role at Arm Treasure Data, I was Senior Product Manager at Alexa Internet, engaging with marketers, consultants, analysts and website owners.

I have an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and a Master of Arts in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

3. How do you think technology is upgrading the customer service industry?

Technology allows us to give a faster and higher quality response to our customers.

It allows us to provide a better and more seamless customer services experience (if done right). For example, using a CDP allows organizations to have a fuller picture of the customer – what they’ve purchased, what content they’ve downloaded, and how often they’ve contacted support, and if they’ve filled in feedback surveys. Technology will help us predict what kind of support they need to be able to proactively reach out or provide content or tips. In addition, we conducted a recent study on automation and, in some industries, bots are preferred to humans for some interactions because certain information can be delivered more quickly than human interaction.

4. What do you think will happen if everyone starts using a CDP?
A lot of companies would better understand their customers! CDPs collect data from many different sources and perform Identity Resolution to decide which data relates to each customer, building a full, unified view of each one. Using this data, you can gather insights from an individual’s history, preferences, and behaviors —both online and offline — and use AI to deliver more targeted offers, creating outcomes that increase sales.

5. Why do you think organizations need strategic support in reaching to the customers?
Companies are awash in data but often lack actionable, meaningful business insights. There are too many tools online and companies often lack the means to combine their online and offline data.

6. Do you think the frequency of technological updates in the customer service industry necessary or can it become a tad bit unnecessary?
Customer service leaders need to keep their eye fixed on the goals of improved and faster service, and to not get too enamored with updating or adding technology for technology’s sake.

7. We recently covered your news about the launch of your new products i.e. Treasure Boxes and Custom scripts. Can you throw some light on the same?
Treasure Boxes and Custom Scripts accelerate business results customers will see from our customer data platform. Treasure Boxes are the industry’s first CDP solutions library of prebuilt sets of code and applications. Treasure Boxes can be easily deployed in a customer’s Arm Treasure Data account to seamlessly leverage customer data for specific use cases.

The Treasure Boxes library applies nearly a decade of data learnings with a combination of code snippets, entire components and visualizations, enabling companies to immediately take advantage of new data and analytics use cases for their businesses

Custom Scripts provide companies with the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics on their data within the Treasure Data platform to drive actionable insights for marketing campaigns. Custom Scripts delivers the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics to enrich data and tap into new data sources through Treasure Data CDP. Custom Scripts allow all data pipelines, regardless of the language or library, to be leveraged on the platform.

8. What advice would you like to give to the Martech StartUps?
There is a lot of talk in the news these days about consumers being hesitant to share their data with companies in the wake of major data breaches and privacy scandals. We conducted a survey in late 2018 and found that people will give up their personal information for the right rewards. It has to be done responsibly and the consumer has to feel they are getting value from sharing their data.

9. What digital innovation in the Martech scape you think will make its mark in 2020?
With more of a focus on a seamless customer experiences, versus optimizing in siloes like email, web, programmatic, SEO, social media, tools like CDPs that collect data across a customer’s journey becomes critical. They will be an even more important part of any company’s martech stack.

10. How do you prepare for an AI Centric world?
Long a topic of science fiction and academic research, AI has finally become a mainstream technology. AI adds value by cutting away irrelevant noise to engage consumers. The trick to using AI profitably is to identify high-value customers at scale, make relevant recommendations, and deliver more delightful consumer experiences. To accomplish these steps, you need to collect as much customer data as possible, unify it across different systems, and analyze it using the latest AI and machine learning algorithms.

11. What major developments are you planning in terms of enhancing your capabilities?
We constantly listen to feedback from our customers. We have a customer advisory board (CAB) where we solicit feedback from our most engaged customers. Broadly speaking, we are always looking to add value and boost return on investment (ROI) for our customer’s personalization efforts.

12. What do you think is the major driving force behind a good CDP?
Successful personalization, which a CDP provides, must be knowledge-driven, agile and real-time. Our Customer Data Platform (CDP) enables the unification of data from different sources and reduces the need for data cleaning and preparation. Because of the innovative architecture used to ingest structured and semi-structured data, Arm Treasure Data business rules can be created to pull from the schema-on-read data and sent to most any system, allowing automated, personalized marketing.

13. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
I interact on social media quite a bit, primarily LinkedIn and Twitter. Living in the Bay Area, Waze is a must. I also frequently check my Ring app and use Strava.