The Modern Customer Podcast

B2B marketing is not for the faint of heart. Translating technical products and services and turning that into engaging content is not the easiest. Being a marketer in today's complicated digital environment takes courage, patience and persistence. Being CMO isn't for everyone—the average length of stay for a CMO is 18 months, not a lot of time to prove your worth. It's important to turn results around fast and today's podcast guest Susan Ganeshan knows how to do exactly that. Ganeshan has been CMO of text analytics and customer experience management vendor Clarabridge for two years and contributed to some of the major success they've had. Before that she held senior roles at a few different software companies and while there, she mentored four different individuals who all eventually rose to the rank of CMO. Ganeshan believes all tech marketers should be able to give a demo of any product their company is selling including the major components of the technology they're supporting. Ganeshan believes that marketers fail when they can't get the right metrics and measurements out of their campaigns. She has success to draw from and lessons learned, and in our podcast we talk about some of the major top of mind issues facing modern marketers today. In this podcast you will learn: The number one challenge sitting on every marketer's desk today How to approach a global marketing strategy First steps to building a high level marketing strategy Susan Ganeshan's one personal business secret Disclosure, Clarabridge has been a client of Blake Morgan's.

There's never a dull moment at Yahoo! The company is in the news daily with rumors on who will purchase it, what Marissa Mayer is up to, and it's been like this for years. You can imagine it might affect the employees that work at Yahoo from day to day. However according to Yahoo's SVP of Global Operations John Devine, this is not the case. With a redefined approach to customer care that is directly impacting the development of Yahoo's core products. Instead of just being reactive to user problems, this program is designed to channel the feedback, wants and needs of 1B+ users to product teams in a meaningful way that evokes material changes. Today's guest on The Modern Customer Podcast is leading the effort of enriching the company's product roadmap through user feedback. In this podcast you will learn: Who Yahoo's modern customer is How the company manages the external noise internally The ingredients of Yahoo's company culture The strategy for Yahoo's VOC program Marissa Mayer's management style

Most of us can't even conceptualize life before digital. In the "old days" people looking for a hotel would drive down the road. If the hotel was all booked up, they would drive on down the road to the next hotel. Enter Hilton, a 96 year old brand that has innovated at every turn. In the 1950s Hilton wanted to make it easier for customers to book rooms and created the world's first central reservations office where customers could book over the phone, telegram or teletype. The office consisted of a team of eight "agents" who would write on a chalk board to book reservations. How times have changed! In this week's modern customer podcast we talk with Mark Weinstein, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Loyalty and Partnerships for Hilton Worldwide. There is much change to the travel industry, and Hilton has had to stay on its toes. The demographic of their travel has shifted with people traveling at younger ages due to increased accessibility—it's simply much easier to get around than it used to be (see above paragraph around how one would find a hotel in the old days). There are market shifts such as the sharing economy that have altered the hotel industry. Hilton has created numerous programs in conjunction with the sharing economy including a partnership with Uber. It might make your head spin to think about Hilton's scale, with 13 brands, spanning more than 4,500 hotels across over 100 countries and territories. That said, they are a fantastic case study in thinking about how today's biggest companies are tackling the complex modern digital landscape. In this podcast you will learn: Hilton's customer engagement strategy (including social and mobile) Hilton's approach to surprise and delight Hilton's thoughts on Airbnb

You might have heard of @Veronica because she has 1.76M followers on Twitter. While she frequently speaks on topics like listening to your customers on social media she rarely uses social to complain herself. The only time was when she hosted the Season 6 Premier of Game of Thrones on Facebook Live and her dress showed up with a hole in it. As a writer, producer, and speaker, Veronica's primary goal has been to educate both savvy and mainstream audiences about how technology can improve and enhance their lives. A guest on this week's Modern Customer Podcast she gives golden advice to brands on how to make a fan in a moment of failure. -Brands that are doing social media right -Why brands fail at engaging with their customers on social media -How brands can maintain authenticity on social media with customers

When it comes to industries where brand advocates play a key role, perhaps no industry does influencer engagement play a bigger role than in sports. Superstar athletes play a key role in driving engagement to the brand—we see it every day especially on social media. TaylorMade-adidas Golf company has seen a sales conversion rate of almost 3.5 times higher than the overall site average thanks to brand advocates. For TaylorMade the order value of customers who engage with advocates is 50% higher than the site average.Today on the Modern Customer Podcast we get advice from Chief Marketing Officer Bob Maggiore of the TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company. Bob oversees brand, product & consumer marketing efforts for TaylorMade Golf, which include advertising, public relations, social media, experiential, design and eCommerce functions. A 20+ year veteran of the golf industry, Maggiore, 46, has overseen nearly every key product launch since 2000. TaylorMade has been the number one driver brand played on the PGA TOUR for 15 years and counting, and its Tour staff includes Dustin Johnson, Jason Day, Justin Rose and Sergio Garcia, all of which are currently ranked in the top 20 of the Official World Golf Ranking. In this podcast you will learn: TaylorMade-adidas approach to influencer engagement on social media The CMO's role in developing a customer strategy How a CMO new to the role can get started

When Chris McCann President and Chief Executive Officer of 1-800 FLOWERS.COM was sitting in the F8 keynote with Mark Zuckerberg, he had no idea Zuckerberg would be including 1-800 Flowers in the presentation. The reason 1-800 Flowers was everywhere in the press is the announcement of the chatbot release. 1-800 Flowers has always been on the brink of technology innovation. They were the first to allow customers to call them to make an order for delivery in the early 80s. They were the first retail company to have an ecommerce presence on the web in 1992 when they partnered with AOL. Now they are one of the first to take advantage of the Facebook chatbot release. Facebook will now allow businesses to deliver automated customer support, ecommerce guidance, content, and interactive experiences. 1-800 Flowers uses a few different technologies to run its large ecommerce operation that includes brands such as Harry & David and seven more. In this podcast you will learn: Understand the process of launching the Facebook chatbot for 1-800 Flowers. How 1-800 Flowers ensures the quality of suggestions delivered by the chatbot Learn about 1-800 Flowers customer service strategy

You don’t hear the word simplicity very much when it comes to customer experience. But according to Siegel+Gale CMO Margaret Molloy simplicity is the key to running a strong operation. Molloy is responsible for all marketing, communications, and business development initiatives globally. She is a modern Business-to-Business CMO with 15+ years as a marketing leader, a must-follow marketing minds on Twitter (Forbes). Molloy has led marketing organizations at Siebel Systems—where she was a member of the Siebel Systems CEO’s Circle—and served as vice president of Marketing at Telecom Ireland US (eircom). She has her MBA from Harvard Business School. In this podcast you will learn: The one customer experience challenge sitting on every CMOs' desk today The changing role of PR and advertising as consumer behavior changes Golden advice for personal brand building

This is the 2nd post in a two-part series featuring Fidelity thought leaders. Find the first post here. It seems that every innovation story you hear today comes out of a start-up. Big companies are often described as dinosaurs, slow with trouble pivoting. So what can big companies do to ensure they too make it a habit of creating an environment for disruption? Big companies today would benefit from thinking about what they can do to prepare for a new environment where business changes at ever corner. What can big companies do to make themselves more nimble, better able to pivot and competitive in the marketplace? Evan Gerber, VP of Digital Strategy and Mobile at Fidelity knows a thing or two about disruption. He believes big companies can be just as innovative and disruptive as small companies—they just need the right approach. An avid technophile and self proclaimed device geek, Gerber is fascinated by the interplay of business, technology, and consumer behavior. Evan's first engagement in the mobile space was over a decade ago, and he has been at the forefront of developing customer experiences across multiple devices ever since. In this podcast you will learn: Key patterns or trends that disruptors offer The conditions for an organization to disrupt How can brands move faster to be the disruptor, not the disrupted How large brands can leverage their size to cause disruption

Imagine a small rural village in Sweden. It’s nighttime and a new dad drops the only remaining bottle of baby formula on the floor as his hungry son wails. The closest grocery store will take at least 40 minutes round-trip. That was the moment that technology expert Robert Illiason started thinking about alternatives. He realized living in a rural part of the world, where shops close early puts a strain on customers. He came up with the idea for Näraffär (meaning “shop nearby”), the first unmanned grocery store where customers can buy small items such as baby food at any time of night or day. The store is run using a mix of cameras, apps and other technology which he describes as fairly simple to set up. In this podcast you will hear from Illiason, who is an IT consultant specializing in databases and business intelligence, mainly working with automating processes and data flows. He has worked with customers such as Ericsson, TeliaSonera and, mainly, IKEA. He is also a writer and who keeps his finger at the tech pulse for several Swedish IT magazines. In this podcast you will learn: The key components of an employee-less store Surprising insights into customer behavior Future predictions around retail technology

There’s a major challenge today facing every B2B company, and that’s customer engagement. Gallup has recently released a new guide discussing some of environmental factors causing B2B companies to ask themselves about their customer engagement strategy. The guide is based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of thousands of customers and analysis from measuring the engagement of 18 million customers. B2B companies need to work to be just as agile and ready as B2C companies when it comes to how they engage their customers—and how engaged those customers actually are. In this podcast I speak with Ed O’Boyle Gallup’s Global Practice Leader who oversees strategic vision for the company’s worksplace and marketplace practices. Ed brings more than 18 years of marketing and branding experience to Gallup. He previously served in roles in brand management, strategic planning, and innovation at Diageo, Capital One, and Frito-Lay. In this podcast you will learn: The biggest risk B2B companies face today Gain tips on how B2B companies do to improve customer engagement? How companies are playing defense because they don't know what their customers want The social media strategies of leading B2B companies What successful global B2B have that others don’t