Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 5)

Christopher Dean: We think that users today demand and in the future will demand even more a set of user journeys that are much more personal and conversational. No more do you have the broadcast-the-same-message-to-everyone system or a traditional marketing funnel where people start at the beginning and fall out at the bottom. It has to be delivered when we’re having the conversation.

A lot of my competitors can’t update their segments of users for a few hours or overnight. If you can’t do it in real time, then you can’t deliver a personalized interactive conversation. The last real nugget there is you have to build systems on top of a predictive marketing engine and on top of machine learning to take those signals in, to pull away all the data, and learn over a period of time on what’s working in terms of their interactions with their consumers like when to interact with them, how to interact with them, and what channels work better at which time.

One of our basic predictive models is we score users. We bring in different predictive models and we train them by vertical industry. We have predictive models that could tell when a user is about to churn, when a user is about to convert, and what their spend level will likely be. If I know a user is about to churn, I should be sending them a re-engagement message. If I know they’re about to convert, I should be sending them a buy-now message. If I know what their spend levels are and I know that there’s a certain segment that is going to spend in the high level, I should be sending the a spend-a-lot message.

Making sure that messages are personalized to users based on the predictive models of what they’re going to do, and then being able to inject their name and other content into the body of the message is really the core of where and how brands need to interact with users to meet, in my perspective, the minimum requirement of what it takes to satisfy a user.

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a company, where would you start in this domain?

Christopher Dean: I would be looking at bringing together a unified user profile in terms of data. Think about all of the data that sits locked up in legacy systems and bringing that all together and making that available as part of the unified user profile. It’s a full profile of an individual. You also need to attach that to an action engine like Swrve. How do you then take action across the different channels?

I think that bringing data together as a unified user profile is a big area. I hear so much about data, data, data. I don’t feel a lot of people doing a lot with the data that they have. Spending more time around machine learning and predictive models to understand the signal from the noise, and then to then take action are all very fertile areas in our sector that need further work.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve
1 2 3 4 5