Amplify keeps growing and evolving. We were all looking forward to reconnecting with our customers, partners, and friends at our annual summit for a day filled with new knowledge, learning, and camaraderie. But, the world being the way it is in 2021, we decided the sensible thing to do would be to keep Amplify online. Distance couldn’t dampen the good feeling, as we hosted over 600 attendees at our largest customer summit ever.
Read on for a recap of the day, including video excerpts from each session. And if you only watch one video, check out this highlights reel:
Setting the scene: Past, Present, and Future of CDP
Our CEO and co-founder Kabir Shahani kicked things off with recounting how Amperity was born out of a need to make customer data available and accessible to teams across the enterprise. Unlocking value in customer data allows brands to deliver extraordinary experiences to consumers, build strong relationships, and spark joy in every interaction.
Brands that flourished through the most challenging periods of the pandemic all shared one trait: they understood shifts in customer behavior and were able to quickly respond to them on an individual basis.
Today, customer expectations are sky-high, but luckily, there is ample opportunity to leverage data and deliver stellar experiences. Diving into this trend and more, Kabir and Joe Stanhope, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, discussed the CDP's rise in popularity in a fireside chat.
"Marketers have a lot of raw data but they recognize the value of making it available and making it work harder to get their jobs done," said Joe, "That has become the secret sauce in marketing and customer engagement — it's not what tools you have, but the ability to put that data to work."
We then heard from Chris Jones, Head of Product at Amperity, about the new features, advancements, and capabilities debuting in Amperity 4.0, the latest generation of our CDP. The upgrades we implemented build on our core capabilities by answering emerging needs in the market, including rising expectations for real-time personalization at scale, proper governance in cloud data management, and strategies to deal with the impending deprecation of third-party cookies.
BCG: Enabling Growth Through a Modern TechStack
Evolving consumer expectations have forced rapid changes in approaches to marketing. To supply customers with meaningful experiences, marketers must know, understand, and be able to activate and engage with consumers. Alex Barocas, Partner and Associate Director of BCG, walked us through why CDPs are a core enabler of today's marketing and why having the right marketing technology is essential to providing richer customer experiences.
Alex also highlighted some best practices when deploying a CDP, such as identifying high-value use cases when starting and building capabilities iteratively.
Brooks Running: Winning the Race toward Business Growth & Customer-Centricity
Melanie Allen, SVP Chief Marketing Officer at Brooks Running, shared her experience working with Amperity and seeing us grow from version 1.0 to 4.0. Before working with Amperity, their data was siloed and in different formats, and they were unable to glean information as basic as a runner's shoe size.
Now Amperity is at the center of their tech stack, and they can build a complete view of the runner from a trusted single source. "Better data quality delivers better results,” she shared, “and when you're winning the heart of a consumer, it means they're making a choice for you. At the end of the day it's about delighting the consumer. When you have the data on the backend you can really do that in a smart way."
BECU: Using Amperity CDP to Build the Customer 360 of Your Dreams
Brian Knollenberg, Senior VP of Marketing at BECU, spoke to us about the value of a Customer 360 for marketing and analytics organizations and how Financial Service companies can find value in a CDP.
FinServ companies have a significantly larger load of data than other verticals, and often have trouble unifying it. Brian spoke about the massive amount of time saved on gathering and understanding data after standing up a CDP, saying, "It used to take more than 10 hours to do that stuff, and it was only on a weekly basis or biweekly… so it's just a huge amount of timesaving. When you're talking about tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of outbound executions, you're talking about real results."
Accenture: Experience of Consent — Turning Market Forces into Positive Customer Experience
Accenture's Jeannette Kocsis, CRM Strategy Lead, and Rob Fuller, Managing Director of Customer Data Orchestration, shared their thoughts on how consumer privacy impacts the marketing game.
They emphasized the importance of viewing stricter privacy laws, cookie depreciation, and Apple iOS 15 not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to build trust with customers.
"To put in terms of the consumer, it really comes down to, 'What matters to me, what's in it for me?'" Jeannette said. "And that ties back to consumer-centricity, and why we need to start to rethink how we're talking to consumers and how we're putting their needs first — that leads to trust."
First Hawaiian Bank: Measurable ROI on CDP Investment
We heard François Ascani, VP and Data Scientist at First Hawaiian Bank, discuss why a CDP is essential for any banking strategy.
It helps to deepen the understanding of the customer, allowing banks to move away from product-centricity and move toward becoming customer-centric. In addition, becoming more data-driven empowers stakeholders to have access to data which will enable them to serve the customer better — for example, offering certain products that the customer was sure to enjoy based on their banking portfolio.
François shared that with Amperity, they discovered that groups of customers who received personal banking calls saw a lift of 25% — in short, they were able to place value and a return on their investment on a call from a banker.
Deckers: Customer Insights to Fuel Your Multi-Brand Strategy with Advanced Analytics
A conversation with Jack Bush, global consumer analytics leader at Deckers, shed light on customer data's huge role in shaping their strategic initiatives. Fully understanding customer behavior is key to Deckers' overall growth strategy, and his team's responsibility is to drive better decisions using first-party data and help the rest of the organization do so as well
Jack's team constantly looks to learn more about their customers: for example, where they were acquired, how they continue their relationship with Deckers, or if they prefer to shop online or in person. Jack shared, "From a marketing point of view, that's where Amperity has really been critical in terms of activations. We can automate a lot of day to day tactics that are critical to running a modern online business."
Our community continues to grow: Amplifiers
Jeanne Jones, our Vice President of Community and Customer Marketing, joined Amperity after a 10-year stint at Alaska Airlines and has since worked tirelessly to keep our customer community thriving.
Our new customer community group, Amplifiers, was born out of meeting with customers and hearing their questions and what opportunities they wanted. Available to all Amperity customers, regardless of how they use the platform, it's the place for events and resources to learn the best practices and standards of excellence for customer-centric and data-driven growth.
The power of three
We asked our customers and attendees to describe Amperity in three words, and throughout the day people shared what came to mind. We had an artist livedrawing some of the results and here's how it turned out:
We are deeply thankful to everyone who participated in this event, from attendees to speakers to sponsors, and we're already excited to do it again next year!
You can find the video repository for the event here.
Brooks Running, First Hawaiian Bank, and Deckers all run Amperity on AWS. BECU runs Amperity on Microsoft Azure.