Alicia Arnold is the founding father of a consulting company, AK Arnold, and draws on 20 years of experience working with Fortune 500 corporations to assist them transform digitally. She can be a valued contributor to MarTech and a speaker at The MarTech Conference. We discussed the importance of having the ability to translate technology and break down silos in organizations, all while never losing sight of the customer. (Interview edited for length and clarity.)
Q: How did you first get into marketing and technology? How did this lead you to customer experience?
A: Oh boy, I started off in direct marketing. When I first graduated, I made a decision I desired to focus on marketing and got a job in direct marketing. I used to be really drawn to latest things, so the whole idea of internet sites, and online ecommerce was really beginning to brew. I got pretty quickly into the world of digital marketing. And in that space, I spotted I even have a capability to “speak technology” — I can translate very technical things to individuals who aren’t technical. And that led me to moving into the construct side of digital marketing, constructing ecommerce platforms globally. From there, with the background in marketing and digital, I began fascinated with how all of it starts to come back together. And really all the pieces of a business come together to serve the customer higher. So that’s where I moved into customer experience.
I fell into it by trying to find things that were latest and all the time learning. What’s interesting is that the proliferation of technology and the marketing side is just crazy — you possibly can’t see all of the logos in the martech graphic and not using a magnifying glass! I feel this really speaks to how the industry has grown.
I feel back when colleges were starting to show marketing, they were focused on the 4 Ps — product, price, place, promotion. As technology has advanced, it’s turn into embedded, and it’s an element of selling you possibly can’t untie.
Q: Direct marketing is typically related to unsolicited mail, an old-school traditional medium. But data has all the time also been an element of it — through mailing lists and reaching specific customer segments. It’s form of old-school and new-school. Did you discover that to be the case?
A: I feel that’s an excellent point. All of the skill sets that you’ll have picked up in unsolicited mail and direct marketing apply today. And possibly much more so because now it’s not only making a testing matrix and putting it on the market. Now, you’re testing in real-time, so the belongings you’ve learned come together much more quickly.
It’s quite a bit more complex now, but the whole idea of understanding behavior, segmentation, ensuring you’re developing creative that reaches the right people at the right time, personalization — none of that’s latest! These are things that individuals in marketing have been talking about since the starting of time.
Q: In finding your talent to translate technology, who were the individuals who needed it translated?
A: I remember a conversation where we were talking to the marketing department at a really large sports apparel company. They were putting out their first ecommerce platform and so they needed to make a choice about the style of technology they’d use for his or her website. And their tech folks hadn’t been brought into the process yet, so I used to be talking to their marketing and business folks. And our tech folks at the agency were attempting to get them to determine the approach. They asked in the event that they wanted to make use of the MVC approach — model-view-controller. And I could see the look in the eyes of the client and that we were coping with words they couldn’t understand. It wasn’t English to them. So I simplified it and told them about the good thing about using the approach, and a lightweight went on. The marketers said after all they wanted that. It would make it easier for his or her team to administer the products on their ecommerce platform.
Q: How do you go about translating technology for non-specialized marketers and business leaders?
A: It’s really about breaking down those technical requirements into easy-to-understand bits and pieces. But beyond that, what does the technology allow you, as a corporation, to do? You need to debate what the pros and cons are and prioritize those different pieces of technology and what skill sets those marketers are going to want once the technology is in place. There’s loads of change management that goes together with implementing latest technology.
Q: Change is fearful for loads of people after they have a job to do. What are the fears or other barriers that factor into these changes?
A: For loads of organizations, changing to a latest technology isn’t something they do fairly often, otherwise it will be an old hat and so they’d just push the button and get it done. When you herald a latest technology it’s necessary to bring the right people into the meetings. Finding the individuals who work cross-functionally on multiple teams and getting those people to seek advice from each other tends to make things easier than simply talking to the business leaders who’re going to own that technology moving forward.
Dig deeper: 5 easy ways to enhance customer experience
Q: Where does an understanding of the customer come into this process?
A: When you’re attempting to bridge a conversation about what path to take as a corporation, there are sometimes silos inside the business, all these departments. I’d take these conversations from the outside in and suggest that they appear at it through the customer’s lens. You’re seeking to do technology A, B or C. What does that help your customers do, and is that a pain point after they work with you or buy something from you? And that becomes one in all the ways you possibly can start a conversation where everyone comes together on a standard ground inside the organization. It’s not likely about what I’d want, or what the person next to me wants. It’s about how you will improve the experience for purchasers, and by doing that, improve your enterprise overall.
Q: What are a few of the biggest changes you’ve seen in customers or customer behavior over your time in marketing?
A: Wanting transparency. Wanting to know the ins and outs of the decisions that corporations are making and the why. I feel that’s very necessary and also you see it quite a bit in financial services products and healthcare. It was that employers gave employees healthcare. When I say “gave,” I mean they offered the plan and paid for it as an employer. But what’s happening now’s that there’s rather more direct-to-consumer going on in these complex areas. So consumers need to get smarter about what they’re purchasing. And they don’t all the time know in addition to someone who’s in the industry the different terminologies and what the tradeoffs are. So should you’re capable of create a digital experience where they learn, understand and, with transparency, get a way of what it really means to them, it is rather helpful for all of those various kinds of complex experiences.
Q: Do you think that chatbots play a task in the way forward for providing these experiences, translating complex knowledge for consumers?
A: I feel it’s already happening. When you take a look at ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of the different chat engines like google on the market, the population out there’s actually asking questions that they possibly feel intimidated to ask a human. Or they feel like in the event that they ask this to an individual on the phone the agent will think they really don’t know what they’re talking about. So they’ll dive slightly deeper with that have in AI.
It’s interesting since it implies that these models must rise up the curve and be smart enough to offer the right information and to have the opportunity to interpret what persons are saying in natural language. The customer may not be using those very technical keywords that your bot is being trained off of, so that you’re going to need to make certain it’s learning and also you’re teaching the models about your enterprise.
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