1. Tell us about your role at Cyara?
As the Chief Marketing Officer at Cyara, I lead all aspects of marketing – from advertising, to public relations, to customer communications.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
Prior to joining Cyara, I was the EVP of Marketing and Strategy at Equilar, the leading executive compensation and governance solutions provider, where I led marketing, events, content, branding, pre-sales/sales, and client success. I was also VP/GM at Deem, Inc. and spent more than 10 years at Intuit, where I led marketing and customer support for the company’s Small Business mobile and SaaS solutions, QuickBooks, and Quicken.
Earlier in my career, I drove global marketing for Crest toothbrushes at Procter & Gamble and graduated from the Technical Leadership Program at GE. I have an MBA from University of Michigan and a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering from University of California Berkeley.
3. How do you think technology is upgrading the marketing Sector?
Technology enhances marketing for companies in the way that matters most: improving the customer experience.
This can include customer-facing features and capabilities, such as AI-supported message personalization; or business-facing features that enhances the company’s ability to provide seamless customer journeys and experiences, such as automated CX validation.
4. How, according to you, is digitization amplifying buyers’ journeys?
Digitization is amplifying and improving the customer journey. Thanks to digital technologies, enabled by cloud migration, omnichannel customer communications are more seamless than ever. Further, once call centers make the jump to a cloud-hosted communication platform, automation becomes much easier to implement and manage. Automated technologies enable companies to deploy efficient tools to validate the customer journey and ensure an elevated customer experience.
5. What do you think is the impact of enhanced customer experience on sales?
An enhanced customer experience keeps the customer happy with their provider, and helps to ensure that the customer will return with more business in the future.
6. What is the significance of CX automation for businesses?
Automating CX processes and validation holds huge promise for customer-serving businesses. By automating CX aspects such as validation, agents can not only dedicate more time to resolving customer service issues, but also be assured that their systems are functional, and customers are able to reach them through the appropriate channels.
7. Why do you think it is necessary to test omnichannel journeys from outside-in?
Think about omnichannel customer journeys like a traffic grid with an imaginary control room of engineers that manage traffic flow and light changes. Now, say the control room shows that a light is green and traffic is moving, when in reality the light is red and traffic is stopped. While everything seems to be working fine from the control room, the situation on the street is getting worse. The experience that the drivers in this scenario have is not at all what the control room expects. In much the same way, omnichannel journeys must be tested from the outside in. Just because a system or process appears to be working internally doesn’t mean that the customer experiences it that way from the outside.
8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
Many startups fall into a trap of chasing valuation or a ground-breaking IPO. Don’t let ambitious goals get in the way of your company’s true mission – delivering value for your customers. If the customers have a good experience doing business with you, the valuation and growth will come naturally.
9. What is the Digital innovation in sales technology according to you that will mark 2020?
The pandemic has irreversibly shaped the way that companies around the globe do business and interact with their customers. Because of the pandemic, sales and marketing teams are being forced to learn how to execute their jobs in virtual, digital environments. Face-to-face meetings were a keystone of customer relationships, but now those relationships must be established and nurtured via video conferencing or voice calls. To cut through the monotony of Zoom calls, marketing and sales teams need to develop methods of digitally engaging the customer in new and unique ways. This could involve tactics like virtual conferences, with easily digestible, short presentations or panels that address customer pain points and needs; or virtual round table discussions and happy hours where representatives meet to discuss and learn about ongoing operations and plans for the future.
10. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
AI technology can help customer service and marketing teams better analyze and understand consumer behavior. Rather than spending countless human resources to comb through customer data and identify behavioral patterns, AI systems can quickly analyze vast swaths of information in quick succession to highlight customer habits and preferences. However, for AI technology to work efficiently and accurately, it must be trained with large amounts of standardized data. Migrating to cloud-hosted systems will enable organizations to eliminate data siloes from legacy systems, and more easily capture and share customer journey data with the AI system.
11. What are the major developments you are planning, in recent time?
We are working on Live Voice Quality assurance for remote agents. With COVID, many companies had to move thousands of contact center agents to work from home. Since the “last mile” of connectivity is dependent on numerous internet service providers, where our customers had no control over the reliability of the internet connect, voice quality has become a big issue. We are looking forward to launching Live VQ in early to mid-2021, first to support Amazon Connect cloud and then expanding to other platforms in the future. You will also see enhancements in our core platform to improve user productivity on our platform, including best practice test cases, automated audio analysis and more.
12. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
At Cyara, we believe that a diverse team of innovative thinkers, who each bring a different valuable skillset to the table, is the best way to serve our diverse clientele of innovative CX leaders. Our strategically built agile, creative and fun-to-work-with team has an incredible passion for efficiently and rapidly developing and executing effective marketing strategies to evangelize the advantages of automated CX validation to the business world.
13. Which book are you currently reading?
Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team, by Simon Sinek
14. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
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