Platform Vision for the Cheetah Customer Engagement Suite

Manoj: Good morning, good afternoon. Welcome to Cheetah customers. Thank you all for attending Signals 2021. I'm thrilled to be part of this team and part of today's session focused on product innovation at Cheetah Digital. I hope that over the next 30 minutes, you'll get a good perspective on Cheetah product vision and where we are headed next. As mentioned by Bill Ingram, our president, at the beginning of Signals, our brand promise is dedicated to helping you, our great customers, in becoming relationship marketers and grow profitably. We have listened carefully to your feedback and are excited to share all the innovation we have produced. Before we get into the concept of relationship marketing, I'd like to spend a few minutes introducing myself. In the last 25 years, I have worked at enterprise software companies across the globe, helping marketers drive personalization engagement strategies that delight the consumers. I was the senior vice- president for OpenX, a real- time advertising platform. I later became chief operating officer at Velocify, as sales engagement suite provider. Then I had the pleasure of serving as chief product officer at Marquetto, who became a leader in B2B and B2C marketing engagement under Adobe, partnering with global leaders like Tealium and acquiring firms like ToutApp. I was then brought in by Oracle to lead their customer data platform initiative called Unity. As group vice- president, I focused on creating a personalization platform for Oracle responses and Eloqua, as well as I helped acquire CrowdTwist loyalty solution for the customer data platform. When I arrived at Cheetah Digital, my jaws dropped. I quickly discovered that the company had innovated well beyond my wildest expectations. Cheetah is doing things that most vendors in competitive landscape haven't achieved yet. What Cheetah has done is brought customer data platform and engagement suite together and set the foundation for what we call relationship marketing, I'll spend a lot of time describing that in this session. As the world has changed, so has B2C marketing. We have seen B2C marketing transform from the early days of transactional, volume- based messaging to a more conversational engagement strategy. In the COVID world, you are under more pressure than ever before and are required to do more in less time. The concept of engaging consumers across the entire customer lifecycle in one unified strategy, from acquisition to retention, is essential. The key to achieving true lifecycle engagement ties back to customer obsession. According to Forrester research, customer- obsessed businesses expect to be 7X more relevant to customers and 4X more profitable, that's an amazing stat. According to the Temkin Group, a moderate improvement in CX could impact the revenue of a typical$ 1 billion company by an average of$ 775 million over three years. Furthermore, Forrester notes that only 15% of enterprise firms are customer- obsessed today. Where are the gaps? The problem is leaders don't know how to operationalize customer obsession at their firms. At Cheetah, we see the world of customer experience and marketing engagement becoming intertwined. At Cheetah Digital, we hear four key teams from you, our customers, that are critical to unlocking the value that lies within customer obsession. It all starts with creating a value exchange with consumers, moving from static engagement to real- time engagement, unifying loyalty and marketing engagement, and knowing all that is there to know about your customers. Let's explore each of these briefly, creating a value exchange. It is critical to know consumers by engaging with them in immersive and interactive experiences that help them share deeper interests, hopes, and values with a brand. This all starts with customer acquisition and enrichment strategy, leveraging zero party data, data that consumers are willing to share with the brand in order to facilitate a value exchange. Traditional approaches to acquire customer data include ad tech and third- party data, which derive customer insight without express consent, or even worse, anonymous cookie data about consumers. Leveraging third- party insights to engage consumer comes across creepy and invasive. Getting to know the consumer and showing them that you know them is crucial to your success. In fact, brands like Air New Zealand and Pure Archery Group are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from adopting a zero party data approach to creating a value exchange with consumers and enriching the experience over time. Be sure to watch the Pure Archery Group session that we'll play later on at Signal to get the full details. Let's see how you can deliver a brand promise around value exchange to your consumers.

Iain Short: Hi, I'm Iain Short, VP of product management at Cheetah. In this demo, I'm going to show you just a quick example of how you can acquire a new customer using a value exchange. Here, a user's being browsing our store for a while, looking at various products, it seems like they're still learning about our offerings and are not quite ready to add anything to their cart. There are quite a few options for engaging a user in this situation and helping them to move forward. We could, for instance, just do nothing, let them continue exploring. We could unlock what we've discovered to be our most effective offer for new users, or perhaps we could display a product selector to help them narrow down their options. With Cheetah's next best experience, we can now help you navigate these decisions and select the most effective experience for the situation. In this case, the platform has selected an experience focused on acquiring the user, so that we can begin a relationship with them even if they're not ready to make a purchase today. It asks not only for their contact details, but also what their primary interest is and once that's been selected, it uses a branching form to understand further nuances. The experience offers two primary value propositions to the user. A more tailored brand experience suited to their primary interest, both here on the website and across other channels, and the reward for connecting with us that incentivizes participation right now in the experience, but also incentivizes their first purchase when they're ready to make it. For our brand, value is derived from acquiring a new contact, the declared interests that can help us serve this customer better, and a clearly articulated incentive out there with the customer to encourage them to move from acquisition through to first purchase. The data collected in the experience flows in real time to the Cheetah platform and it becomes actionable right away. A single view of the customer is formed, bringing together web and mobile signals, contact details, declared interests, and over time, further details such as engagement data and purchase data, and much more. Based on insights about the current user, as well as similar users and audiences, we can then make a decision in real time about the next best action to get this relationship off to a successful start.

Manoj: Next, moving to real- time engagement. There was a time and place for loading a static list and sending emails at scale. In fact, it's a great way to initiate your first touch with new customers. However, if this tactic is employed over and over again, it can lead to customer fatigue and customer opt- outs. Today, consumers are more empowered than ever before. They interact with your brand on multiple channels. They're unpredictable, they jump from awareness, consideration, evaluation, and purchase. They engage on digital channels and on your mobile apps and they expect you to be flexible and adaptive in your approach. The way to engage the modern consumer is through real- time hyper- personalized experiences. This approach includes providing intelligent offers, recommendations, and delivering the next best action at the right moment. According to Gartner real- time offers and content can be 10X more effective than traditional outbound campaigns. Brands like Salling Group in Denmark are increasing speed to market and daily lift by creating more targeted real- time offers and content for customers. The Cheetah machine learning engine analyzes millions of Salling purchases to make offer recommendations on thousands of products. Let's have Iain showcase how our Journey Designer brings all of these concepts together to create amazing consumer expects.

Iain Short: Thanks, Manoj. Journey Designer brings together many of the core platform capabilities, helping marketers plan and execute smart, real- time campaigns. In this case, we've designed a journey that kicks into life as soon as we detect an abandoned cart. For each user, it determines the right course of action to recover their cart and to complete their purchase. Let's take a closer look at certain features of this journey and journeys more generally. First, journeys can react to inbound real- time signals and change course as they need to. In this case, when the cart is abandoned, if the cart is emptied and when a purchase is made. Second, journeys have declared outcomes. The primary one in this case is the successful recovery of that cart and the purchase that follows. Journey Designer is smart enough to track performance against these outcomes and help you optimize journeys. Third, Journey Designer can make decisions that influence the overall experience for the user. For example, to determine whether or not a user is eligible for an incentive, we might take into account factors such as the value of their cart, or whether they've recently received a cart offer. We can also have the platform help us make other decisions, such as what type of incentive is the right style for this user. And finally, we can personalize that shop window, the content, the offers, the product recommendations that we put in front of the user, as they interact with us. Here, we use intelligent offers to recommend an offer that our machine learning model predicts to be the most effective for this user. And then, when we tell the user about that offer, not only do we include the contents of the cart that they left behind, but we can also add in product recommendations as alternatives in case they weren't 100% sold on the items they selected previously. And that's it for now, very quick, whistle- stop tour of Journey Designer, but hopefully it gives you a little glimpse of the power of Journey Designer and how it can help you bring real- time personalized experiences to life.

Manoj: Thanks, Iain, let's talk about unifying loyalty and marketing engagement next. A loyalty program should not be a standalone, isolated tactic in your marketing strategy. It's not a box to be checked, or just a coupon to be given out. It should be an integral part of an overall customer engagement strategy. This allows you to engage with your loyal customers differently than your prospects. In order for you to stand out from your competitors and grow profitably, you need to identify who are your best customers and create an everlasting relationship with them. This is where omni- channel loyalty comes in, unifying the world of marketing engagement and customer retention. It helps you accomplish your goals of creating a community of meaningful brand advocates and growing customer lifetime value. An effective loyalty program must be connected to an omni- channel engagement system. To the customers, this omni- channel strategy should appear seamless. Whether it's through email, mobile wallet, SMS, websites, kiosk, social media, or POS, it gives the customers a consistent experience in engaging with your brand. Cheetah has seen brands like& pizza and Tune transform their approaches to omni- channel loyalty during the pandemic and create new and innovative ways to engage with their most loyal customers in the right touchpoint. For example, Tune was able to launch a new loyalty program very quickly and generate almost million active program members& pizza was able to double their monthly program registration, leveraging Cheetah as they went from 60% in- store sales to then 100% digital sales during COVID. That's transformative. I hope you have time to watch our session later today with the CMO of Torchy's Taco, Scott Hudler. Scott will be talking about their journey with Cheetah Digital and how they're embarking on a new loyalty strategy, leveraging the customer engagement suite. Next, I'm excited to show you how we are infusing loyalty concepts into marketing engagement. Take it away.

Iain Short: Thanks, Manoj. What better place to highlight how certain loyalty mechanics can be integrated into your wider marketing efforts than in Journey Designer? Loyalty mechanics are incredibly useful in helping us improve engagement and retention of existing customers. In this journey, we're nudging users deeper into our customer lifecycle, hoping to convert them from being a first- time purchaser into a repeat purchaser. To help us along the way, we'll first send a heartfelt thank you from our founder, and then make sure everything went okay with that first purchase by sending a quick survey. If everything's fine, we can determine the next best action by looking at what they've purchased so far. In this example, we'll choose between encouraging a series of similar purchases or attempting to increase the value of the user's next purchase. Depending on the answer, we'll deploy some mechanics traditionally seen in loyalty programs. To encourage repeat purchases, we'll use a punch card that rewards users if they make three similar purchases within a certain period of time. To increase the value of each purchase, we will use intelligent offers to choose the most appropriate minimum spend coupon for the current user. As with more formal loyalty programs, a commerce integration contract coupons all the way through to redemption either online or in- store and it can use this conversion data to optimize the machine learning models, as well as to engage the user at the time of redemption. Furthermore, Journey Designer can help you track and understand the impact of these decisions on your target outcomes, so that you can experiment and optimize over time. This is just a small glimpse into how loyalty mechanics can be leveraged outside of a formal loyalty program. If it's piqued your interest, make sure you tune in to the product innovation panel, airing a little bit later today.

Manoj: I hope these demos are giving you a perspective on how you can take some of these ideas and transform marketing strategies in your shop. Let's talk next about knowing all that is knowable about customers. The ability to deliver hyper- personalized experiences in the moment that matters most, is all underpinned by a sound data management strategy. Data is the lifeblood of customer engagement. The most relevant data needs to be available at every touchpoint of the customer journey in real time, in order to deliver these experiences. One of the key obstacles of success for marketing personalization is access to the data itself. According to Gartner, 27% of the marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization, revealing their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection. Marketers need to be able to access batch data, streaming data, event data and leverage it for real- time triggered interactions. Data needs to be secure. With GDPR in effect and CCPA coming in 2023, privacy compliance is of paramount importance. In order to build a trust value exchange with consumers, you need to provision copies of data for consumers and allow them the right to be forgotten and delete their history with the brand. The CDP market is riddled with niche data and analytics providers that only solve one sliver of this problem set. You need a comprehensive data platform that's natively focused on engagement, allowing you to understand customers, activate insights and engage across all channels and touchpoints, and that needs to happen in real time. Cheetah customers like Bloomin' Brands are taking a significant step forward to unify insights collected across multiple brands and touchpoints to generate an actionable, single view of the customer that can be leveraged for insights activation across all channels and touchpoints. Bloomin' Brands was able to launch a new virtual brand called Tender Shack, which can deliver all things chicken strips and sandwiches to your doorstep within minutes. They established Tender Shack based on detailed consumer insights they were able to generate across brands, leveraging Cheetah. Saving the best for last. Now, we'll show you how our platform has gone beyond CDP and created intimacy with engagement suite, for what I think is really giving birth to a B2C CRM.

Manoj Das: Hi, I am Manoj Das and I'm going to show you how marketers can use our Citizen Data Scientist tooling to easily build machine learning models, on top of all the rich data signals collected as part of our platform. In this case, I want to predict who of my customers are likely to have a high lifetime value, so I'm essentially going to build a lookalike model and I select the different kind of model types available to me. A propensity is what I need to use for lookalike. I go ahead, create a model. At this point of time, the Citizen Data Scientist tooling provides me a very easy to use, inaudible kind of a tooling, where I can specify as much or as little as I want. At the very minimum, I want to specify what outcome I'm trying to predict. In this case, as I mentioned before, I'm predicting a lifetime value and I'm doing this by selecting lookalike audiences. So I'm saying," Find me lookalikes of people with lifetime value, a greater than 500." I can specify what period of time I want to look at. So, consider all activities, transactions, behaviors, and every other signal of the four months. At this point of time, if I want, I can go ahead and do more. I can go and configure feature selection or configuration, but otherwise I'm done. I can go ahead and save and I have a model. When I drill down into this model, I have presented with some very interesting insight. To start with, I see the distribution, this many people, we have a 80% likelihood of being high lifetime value, lifetime value greater than 500, so I can use this to build my audiences. On the right- hand side, I see gauges that show me how good or bad my model is. If I'm curious, I can see in the bottom panel, what factors went into making this prediction. Thank you.

Manoj: I want to thank Cheetahs for making all of these amazing innovation happen and being able to give you demo vignettes of all the innovation we've been working so hard over the last 12 months. I hope that you'll be able to talk to your CSMs and account executives to see how you can incorporate this into your marketing strategy. What we have been talking about across these four themes is best represented as relationship marketing. In this day and age, it's all about establishing long- lasting relationships with data and insights and delivering on them in the right moments that matter. Relationship marketing to me, is like inviting your customers to your home. It's about having them meet your family and join you for a great home- cooked meal. It's akin to saying," You're always welcome to visit, the door is always open." It's ensuring that you take great care of things that matter most to them and leverage that knowledge and insight for good and to help strengthen that relationship over time with them. Relationship marketing is about acting upon these insights and ensuring that you're always providing a value exchange and treating them like your very best customers. The result is powerful, it can drive profitability while also reducing the cost of acquisition. Relationship marketing bridges the gap between data and contextual engagement, and ensures that you can easily and fluidly understand your customers, activate insights, and deliver personalized experiences across all channels and touchpoints in real time. I'm hoping that you're not tired of me saying real time, it's so important to driving results. Relationship marketing is how we think customer engagement suite technology delivers our vision to you, our best customers. Our relationship marketing strategy is underpinned by our platform. I refer to our platform as a B2C CRM system. The goal for a B2C CRM system is to provide you with a foundational data platform for ingestion, data management, analytics and integration, that combine to create a single marketing view of the customer. And to us, that's an important distinction because we are trying to create a powerful consumer profile that you as marketers can use to drive hyper- relevancy. CRM solutions over the past were not purpose- built to address these challenges. In this environment, we will continue to expand our abilities to ingest data of any shape and size, including batch or real- time streaming data. We can hook into multiple data sources, such as business intelligence tools, CDPs that you might've implemented, data warehouses and leverage, extract, transform and load processes, as well as our own real- time data exchange, to bring data from anywhere into the platform. This brings up integration as a key point, we support and will continue to innovate on a vast array of social channels, such as Facebook, Google, Salesforce, point of sale systems, Adobe Analytics, responses email, and many others. Our platform is truly differentiated as the only solution in the market that can natively collect and activate data in real time for true relationship marketing. Once we have all this data together in a single view, we can evaluate insights using artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate the next best action, the next best offer, and the next best experience all in real time. In the last decade, I've spent in a lot of time driving insights from large data. This is an area I'm quite passionate about, and it's the only way to deliver personalization in the digital- first world. Cheetah Digital is right on top of this and now provides a world- class marketer's toolkit for model creation, deployment, and optimization, something we call Citizen Data Scientist. We called it Citizen Data Scientist, because we wanted you as marketers to be able to have data science and machine learning at your fingertips. We also support a library of machine learning models that you can leverage right away, whether it's for send time optimization, clustering analysis, automated recommendations, predictive marketing, and many more. This will help you scale your personalization efforts and reduce all of the manual work to identify your best customers and act on insights. In fact, our product experts, Schuy and Nick have a session next week on generating insights from data with Cheetah Citizen Data Scientist. In the session, you can learn how to generate advanced diagnostic analytics or predictive and prescriptive capabilities without having much analytical or statistical background. This is a must- see session. To go with all of this innovation, this week we also launched a series of new resources just for you. First we have the Cheetah Circle, our business community, where you can interact with your peers and engage with Cheetah experts and earn credit for redemption supporting Cheetah's advocacy program. Next within our community, we provide Cheetah Learning, which includes over 50 hours of high quality, hands- on product content to get you up and running more quickly and easily with Cheetah solutions you heard about today. We will also be making Cheetah Learning available inside our products in context, starting with Cheetah Experiences and Messaging and coming very soon in Cheetah platform, Personalization and Loyalty. For more in- depth product information, we have Cheetah Help Center. We have been adding to this environment for the past year, and it's a great resource for more in- depth product content go to help. cheetahces. com to access latest documentation, release notes and content around our release and detailed capability descriptions. Last but not least, we have new support packages, including free, standard and enterprise support packages designed to give you the technical resources and staff needed for your unique business challenges anywhere it's needed across the globe. You can learn more in our community and on cheetahdigital. com. Thank you for watching this session. Next, check out our panel on product innovation, including my namesake, Manoj, Iain, and Rez, as they talk about roadmap themes for 2021 and beyond. I hope you enjoy Signal's'21 content series, and I look forward to engaging with many of you soon. Thank you.