Announcer: [00:02] This is MarTech Interviews. A podcast from DK New Media, publishers of MarTech. The leading publication for sales and marketing professionals to research, discover, and learn how technology is driving business results. Your host is Douglas Karr.

Douglas Karr: [00:22] Well, welcome back to MarTech Interviews. I'm excited to be back. For anybody listening, you know that I took a little hiatus there. That was just kind of reshuffling and working with my clients and everything, but we are happy to be back today. Today we're going to be talking about digital customer experience. Via Skype I have Audelia Boker. Audelia is the global vice-president of marketing at Glassbox Digital. So, we have kind of a trifecta of goodness here. We have an expert in the field, we have a platform that helps, and then, of course, we're going to explain what it is for people listening out there. A lot of people don't even realize that this is a rapidly growing demand and we're going to talk about that today.

Douglas Karr: [01:12] Audelia, maybe give everybody a background of how got where you are.

Audelia Boker: [01:17] Right. With pleasure. Actually, I started my career about two decades ago, very, very, far off from where I am today. In class moving, consumer good, marketing detergents. So, extremely far off, but at some point in my life I moved to Israel and quickly realized that my value add on the market was bringing a global kind of approach to things. As well as, realizing that Israel being a very small country, if you want to make a decent living, you kind of need to be in tech, because that's the part of the market that is really growing.

Audelia Boker: [02:13] So, I'll keep all the details, I can fast-forward. Basically, from detergents I moved on to telecommunication, because I really, really wanted a mobile phone at the time. So, that just shows you how long ago that was. From there, into the vendor side, so I moved on to a very... At the time, the flagship company of the Israeli high-tech, which was the inventors of the voicemail, so still in telecommunication.

Audelia Boker: [02:56] From there on, I moved on to another domain, which was customer service and contact centers. There, all the voice analytics and everything that has to do with making sure that contact center became compliant, as well as improving quality, et cetera. Then the way customer reps are being trained and coached, et cetera.

Audelia Boker: [03:27] From there, four years ago, about four years ago, I joined Glassbox. At the time, a very small company. I think I was employee number eight or nine. Since then, we've been growing extremely fast. I think what makes us the most proud, is the type of customers that we're working with. Our clients are really the top companies in their specific domains. The vision of Glassbox was to say, "Okay. Basically, what has been happening in the contact center, meaning every single call being recorded for quality assurance purposes and for compliance purposes, and dispute management purposes, would happen in the digital world as well."

Audelia Boker: [04:22] Today this vision has become a reality. We see that, actually, those large companies that we're working with, not only do they need to keep record of what's actually happening to their customers on their digital channels, but they also benefit from understanding what is really happening on those digital channels, in order to improve customer experience.

Audelia Boker: [04:49] It's kind of a very long answer to your question and not a straightforward path, but I think, at the end of the day when you look at the journey itself, it makes complete sense. That's with-

Douglas Karr: [05:03] It absolutely does. Too, for listeners, we've had, I think, a handful of companies on from Israel. The Israel tech community is absolutely phenomenal. One of my heroes, by the way, is Dr. Orna Berry. I got to interview her and she's absolutely just an amazing woman that works for Dell Technologies, and is one of the pioneers. I think she actually ran the Israeli cyber-security force. Which is-

Audelia Boker: [05:31] Absolutely.

Douglas Karr: [05:32] Which is incredible. Your journey is parallel to, maybe, the customer journey, as well. That's that, we used to have two sides of the marketing equation. That was, we had our outward branding and crafting of our messages, and everything else. Then, of course, we had the internal customer service and that was never really exposed. Then we started to see over time, things like ratings and reviews, Consumer Reports, everything else that started to talk about how people were servicing their customers.

Douglas Karr: [06:05] When mobile broke out, and obviously, the internet, all of the sudden customer experience actually combated if we were doing a poor job, combated the marketing efforts that we were doing. It didn't matter how much money you spent on marketing, if your customer experience was lacking, you were basically just throwing money at problems that couldn't be fixed.

Audelia Boker: [06:28] Absolutely. It's a very, very good point that you're making. I never thought of it this way, actually.

Douglas Karr: [06:34] Yeah. So, now it's becoming an imperative, as I talk to CMOs, we're telling them, "What are you doing on the customer experience side to change it?" Then, even now, I was speaking with a group just yesterday, and I was talking to them, how even in financial technology, my relationship is no longer with my bank. My relationship is digital. It's with my mobile application, and how well it works, and whether I can use it well. Whether I can get answers that I need, and everything else.

Douglas Karr: [07:07] So, Glassbox, obviously, started in the right direction, at the right time, because you guys have grown phenomenally. So, tell people what the customer experience platform like Glassbox, what does that enable companies to do at scale?

Audelia Boker: [07:26] Yup. I'll use an analogy, and this will give you a hint on the name of the company, as well, actually. When, god forbid, an airplane crashes, the first thing that investigators are looking for is the black box, where everything that has happened on the flight is being recorded. Now, that's basically the idea behind the name of our company, which is really to say right, our customers, those huge organizations, they build amazing websites, they invest fortunes in their websites, and their native mobile apps. At the end of the day, they don't really know what is really happening. How is the customer or the visitor experiencing that channel.

Audelia Boker: [08:26] We wanted to bring transparency. We wanted to actually bring digital... One single source of digital truth into the organization. That's really where we're coming from. Now, as I said, the way we work with our customers, is that we actually help them by collecting anything a person does, so it can be any mouse movement, any scroll down, any tap, if it's on a mobile device. Any zoom in, zoom out, you're shaking your phone, et cetera. Anything you type in, as well, can be recorded and actually all that data today, with the power of big data infrastructure and a lot of other technologies behind the scene, can be reconstructed in real time.

Audelia Boker: [09:31] So, for organizations, it really gives them clarity and a better understanding on how is it people are using my website. Where are they struggling, but much more than that, why are they struggling? Because the traditional web analytics tools, which have done a great job, and we're not here to replace them, they can only give you insight up until a certain point. They tell you that they give you quite a good picture in terms of acquisition, in terms of the engagement of people on your website, and on the end-point, on the exit-point.

Audelia Boker: [10:20] If your conversion rate drops, it's very difficult, or even impossible to find the answers and the root-cause through Google Analytics, let's say, just to name them. I'm not putting them on the spot.

Douglas Karr: [10:36] No. No. Yeah.

Audelia Boker: [10:38] The fact that there are today other solutions and very powerful technologies in the market that can actually provide session replays, in the industry lingo, that's the term we use, it's session replay and very advanced analytics. More than that, our solution is applying machine learning in order to understand what a normal pattern of data looks like and actually trigger alerts if something goes wrong.

Audelia Boker: [11:13] So, that really helps business analysts, dev-ops teams, and actually a lot of other stakeholders within organizations to have a better understanding, and being able not to spend time on looking for the issues or trying to reproduce the issues, or the errors, but rather spend the time on fixing the issues in a very agile manner.

Audelia Boker: [11:41] So, that's in essence, what we do. The beauty, and what is unique, there's many, many things that are unique about us, about Glassbox, I don't want to sound to sales-y, but one of the main blind spots that we see in a very large organization, is kind of a silo between the business and the IT guys.

Audelia Boker: [12:07] Just to give you an example, typically, what we'll see is that the CMO and his team, the customer experience people, the business, in essence, are looking and focused on their metrics, on the things that matter to them, which can be, as I said, acquisition, engagement, conversion, driving the top line on their digital channels.

Audelia Boker: [12:33] On the other end, the IT teams are focused on a completely different metrics, and using completely different tools, as well, to measure things such as the performance, or the availability of a website, or how often an app is crashing, et cetera. Now, just to give you a very, very simple use case that we see quite often actually, is if there is a server availability issue on the technical side of things, this means this is going to translate in, let's say, a page on your website taking a lot of time to load. Okay? Now, us, people as human beings, we've become very, very impatient, and our threshold and our patience is such that if a page takes probably more than three or four seconds to load, we are abandoning the session. We're completely abandoning the session and leaving the website or the app.

Audelia Boker: [13:43] That in turns, is going to impact my conversion rate and the revenues that I'm driving through my digital channel. Now, those two phenomenon are correlated, right? Actually, there is even a causality relation between the two. One is a server issue, the other one is conversion rate that is dropping. No one in the organization, in most organizations today, actually see or is able to see the link between the two. That's exactly where we step in.

Douglas Karr: [14:24] Wow. That's absolutely incredible. I should say that Glassbox has been named as a leader by Gartner. You recently announced a partnership, was it? Yeah, a new strategic partnership with Microsoft.

Audelia Boker: [14:43] Absolutely.

Douglas Karr: [14:43] So, you guys have just exploded in growth and it's really working, what you're doing. Visualization of seeing the patterns of customer experience, and then juxtaposing that against your analytics and conversion metrics, and everything else, that's incredibly powerful. It's finally putting the weight of customer experience into the equation for companies to really start investing and paying attention there.

Audelia Boker: [15:12] Absolutely. I think we see ourselves, very often, as the ultimate feed for your digital data, your digital customer data, basically. Because, again, we collect the data, both from the customer, the client side, and both from the server side. Really, we're the glue between the two. Even more than that, we see... It's very interesting to see that what we're doing has actually also an impact even on the offline customer experience, because the fact that our solution works in real time, means that... It brings me back to the previous domain I used to work in, the call center, right? Let's assume, Doug, you've been banking on your favorite bank app and trying, I don't know, to take a loan, to transfer money, whatever, and you had a struggle, and for some reason you don't have any other solution but to call the contact center.

Audelia Boker: [16:30] Unfortunately, these things still happen. The poor customer representative on the line, has absolutely no visibility on what just happened, whether it was five seconds ago, two weeks ago, doesn't matter when, right? With solutions such as ours, actually by a click of a button and because we have, as you said, we've got a lot of very strategic partners, so Microsoft is one of them, but Salesforce is another one of them. The fact that we can integrate with the most powerful CRMs, and put the session replays at the fingertip of that's customer service agent, who can understand very, very quickly, what was it that you were struggling with. If you're still logged in, but the way, that person can help you on the go.

Audelia Boker: [17:25] We've seen some of our customer reducing the, one of the most important metrics for customer service, which is average handling time, reducing that from a call duration of minutes, to a minute and a half. So, that in terms of operation efficiency, is huge, but from a customer experience, as well. It's removing so much frustration, because you don't need to explain what it is you've been trying to do. The agent sees it by himself or herself, and can help you solve the problem much more efficiently.

Audelia Boker: [18:04] There's also another part of the equation, which is our journey is mainly digital today, but it's not only digital. We provide value in both areas, if you will.

Douglas Karr: [18:17] That's fantastic. That is incredible. Well, tell everybody where they can find out more information on Glassbox Digital and then where they can get more insight on customer experience management, and it's impact on the enterprise.

Audelia Boker: [18:31] Sure. Well, very easy. Glassboxdigital.com is our website where you can find a lot of information, as well as contact us, and even request a demo, and really reach out to us if with any inquiry. I'd say, Gartner just published a couple of days ago actually, the Digital Customer Analytics Vendor Guide. Oh sorry, it was the Hype Cycle of customer analytics. There's a lot of valuable information there, as well. It's a market that is, on one end, is growing tremendously, but is also going through rationalizations. It really reaching maturity and Gartner say it by themself, they consider the benefit of this category as very high for customers and the penetration of such solutions is anywhere between five and 20 percent, depending on the region in the world.

Douglas Karr: [19:48] Wow.

Audelia Boker: [19:49] The Gartner and the Forrester's of the world are good sources of information. As well as, 451 Research, Frost & Sullivan. All of these, we're covering all of these, so you can find valuable insights and talk to analysts in all these firms.

Douglas Karr: [20:09] Fantastic. We will put some links within the show notes for people to get to that information. Then, I'd encourage everybody too, at glassboxdigital.com, you'll see on the core menu, you'll see an Insights tab, and that has white papers, eBooks, webinars and upcoming events. Audelia thank you so much for joining us today. I think that large companies, and maybe you can tell me whether you're seeing it and it's true or not, but I think very large companies are going to see that this is having as much impact on their conversion rates and marketing spend, as any type of advertising that they're doing.

Audelia Boker: [20:49] Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Next time we can talk about privacy and security, and why is that extremely important, as well, in that context.

Douglas Karr: [21:00] Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of companies struggle there, aren't we?

Audelia Boker: [21:03] Yup. Yup.

Douglas Karr: [21:05] Well, thank you so much of joining us today.

Audelia Boker: [21:07] My pleasure.

Douglas Karr: [21:09] Yeah, that's fantastic. So, everybody go to glassboxdigital.com for more information. We'll have that link in the show notes, as well. If you enjoyed this episode, of course, we'd love you to subscribe and rate the podcast on whatever platform you're using. You can always check out all of our podcasts at interviews.martech.zone or you can find them in the sidebar at martech.zone. Thank you so much for joining us today.

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