Making the ROI Case for your Customer Data

THOMAS KOEP: Welcome everybody. Quick disclaimer — PSA — this is not the NYU Finance 301 that's down the hall, so just make sure you're in the right room. Welcome. We are going to talk about return on investment, which everyone is probably super jazzed about, with me and Marcus as resident corporate therapist. He'll be talking about his piece here. I'm Tom Koep, the Amperity VP over customer strategy. We are going to have Lisa and Victoria come up and actually give us a customer experience. And with that we'll get started with intros.

THOMAS KOEP: We'll cover three different sections. First, an overview of ROCD, which Tony called out as part of the keynote. Also, what are our learnings, what are our insights? And finally, a panel discussion so you actually hear from a customer on what we did, what their key learnings were, and what they brought back to their business. With that, I want to set a stage. The idea is you're in your office and your boss walks in. For those who are remote, this is probably terrifying because you're first asking, why are you in my house? But needless to say, we'll unpack that later. They're in your house, they're asking you one simple question: is it done? And you prop yourself up trying to figure out — back to the question — why are you here? But then you ask, is what done? And they go on.

THOMAS KOEP: They go on and say, we've done implementation, we've unified our data, we're doing activations, we're doing campaigns, we're measuring. And you're sitting there, you're nodding, you're saying, yeah, I mean we've done all the things — I think it's done. I don't really know where this conversation's going, but yes. Then they ask a question that terrifies you: so what's our ROI? And you panic. You don't panic because you haven't been thinking about this for the better part of the last few months during this whole process — you panic because it's a miserable experience. You're sitting there going quickly through your mind trying to understand, oh man, where's that customer lifetime value number? Where's my multivariate test? Where's my incrementality number? And you're trying to quickly put all that together, trying to figure out how am I going to prove the worth of the thing that our teams just spent all their time and energy doing.

THOMAS KOEP: The benefit though is — what if we did that for you? What if we spent our time and effort? What if we automated it? What if we got to the point where we could actually build bespoke use cases tied to revenue, tied to margin impact, and actually did all of that hard work for you as part of what we provide as a service from our company? With that, I'll introduce you to ROCD. ROCD is not just a value assessment, it's not just a scoring methodology. Every vendor can do a scoring methodology and give you some numerical output. It's actually us partnering to understand how we can implement this product, understand your business, and drive value as soon as possible for you to have a defensible position going back to your leadership to talk about what you just did. And ROCD is interesting because we actually don't do this in a very generic manner. Every business is different. Your business, my business — I was a customer having gone through exactly what I just outlined in that scenario. It was a miserable experience.

THOMAS KOEP: We do this across a variety of different dimensions because everything is going to be tailored to your business. The first, as we mentioned, is business outcomes. What are we driving? What are we going to show you from a value perspective? From measurement, optimization, technical capabilities — we've got unified customer profiles, intelligence, activation, orchestration — and then a few must-be-trues. Obviously AI; I don't think I can stand here and not say the word AI. The other is data trust and security — right to know, right to delete, all those processes, GDPR, CCPA — those take time and energy. So it's a new method of actually quantifying a lot of those things that your teams are spending time on, and not just the activation component. So what we do with ROCD is we actually sit and send all of these out to your team. It starts as a 24-question survey.

THOMAS KOEP: You do it, we'll send it to your IT teams, we'll send it to your marketing teams, engineering, InfoSec, all those folks. But then we go through it with you — our experts, our resident expert over there in the red shirt — from our lens, from an outside-in perspective, and get you to a score. The score could be a 20, a 30, a 50, a hundred — you're best in class, you're transformational, you've got a little work to do. All of those are scores. And a lot of vendors stop there. They just say, you're a 20, good job, it's a number. What's interesting about our process is that we take that further. We will then sit with you, do an assessment, and do a discovery workshop.

THOMAS KOEP: The idea is that we are partnering with your business to understand what did Sarah say, what did Sally say, what did John talk about? And we go through that and record it to understand what are the key points — not just the numbers, but in each one of those things, what are people talking about as part of those sessions? And we come back to figure out what are the bespoke things that we can go do together. And I feel like I'm on a QBR — and there's more. The next step is we will go and audit all those surveys, but actually run through your Amperity tenant and look at all the features you're using, all the features that you're not using, and bring that into the equation to understand what's the best use of your team's time, your money, your understanding of the platform, to then come back and hit each one of those different dimensions.

THOMAS KOEP: What's interesting is that back to the use case of you sitting in your office trying to figure out how to prove worth — we also bring in things like your customer data: your customer lifetime value, average basket size, return on ad spend, advertising revenue, total number of employees. That all goes into a mathematical model that actually comes back and gives you a monetary number to bring back to your teams and say, we think we can drive X. And not stopping there, but actually bringing in margin impact by line of business. So you have tailored recommendations that go all the way to a business model that allows you to go back to your internal teams and support what we've provided from a return on customer data. But there's more. The next piece is actually the best part — we get to the fun part.

THOMAS KOEP: We have experts internally and we have use cases that we have built out through so many different industries — retail, travel and hospitality, automotive. We then pull all of those use cases combined with all of those call transcripts, all of your survey scores, all of your margin impact, all of your revenue numbers, and sit with you and prioritize hyper-specific areas that you will spend time and effort on, organized to your business, to go prove out each one of those monetary numbers. The idea is we'll come back to you with — current outputs are around 15, 20, 30 — and we'll sit there and say what matters most to you? But it's tied to your business, it's tied to the way that you view it, the words that your team brought up to our team in those conversations. And we then prioritize and bring that back to the senior leadership team saying, hey, these top three use cases, these top five use cases can drive $7 million — $3 million of which is margin impact.

THOMAS KOEP: Therefore we're showing an incrementality number. But that is what we now provide to you — not just in a very individualized way, but actually in an automated way that never ends. So the idea is that we would do this every six months, every twelve months, and you're continuously getting value from our services, from our platform, from everything that Gregory just brought up, and from new features, to come back to your teams and actually show them the monetary impact of your customer data. I'll pause there and have Marcus as facilitator go through and explain his portion.

MARCUS OWENS: Hey everybody. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Marcus Owens, lead solution consultant here at Amperity. I wanted to talk about two specific parts of this journey because Tom talked a lot about the quantitative part of ROCD — which we all want, an ROI score, we all want that. Fortunately or unfortunately for those of you who are big on interpersonal interaction, there's a qualitative element to this too. And frankly, he said the fun part is the recommendations — I think the fun part is what I'm about to talk to you about, which is the discovery workshop. A really important part of this process is that workshop where we get people into a room together that maybe don't usually speak, that maybe don't have the opportunity to take two hours out of their day and be really strategic about where you're going as a business.

MARCUS OWENS: I wanted to share a couple of things that have kind of emerged as surprising to me as we've been doing those discovery workshops, as well as share the general range of the type of recommendations that you might see out of us. And some of them might kind of surprise you, because — spoiler alert — it's not all "use this Amperity feature." So first, before we get into that: who do you want in the room? I mentioned getting people together that don't usually communicate. You want to have as many people in the room that are close to the product, or maybe a few steps away from the product. And you want to bring people together from a lot of different stakeholders. You'll hear from Lisa and Victoria — we had some conversations in the room during their assessment that kind of unveiled new things and changed some priorities.

MARCUS OWENS: And part of it is just being able to get those people together. That's really the first sort of aha moment as we started going through this process — almost to a T — and you'll hear the word "group therapy." I think I'm going to add therapist to my title. Even during the discovery workshop we heard from customers: this is a huge enabler, just getting us all together. And we also learned that — much like an agile retrospective — having somebody like myself that's not working day to day with the account, who can maybe ask some dumb questions and provoke conversation, has been really powerful. It starts to reveal those things that change the direction we're going, or just to solidify and align on something that might have been nascent in our interactions previously, that is now our North Star that we want to go attack.

MARCUS OWENS: The second piece is technology doesn't solve every problem. We went into this thinking, oh, we're going to give this great list of Amperity things that they can do. But what we found is we started identifying these problems that were more business-related, that were outside of Amperity. Think about a customer that's only capturing maybe 60% of their purchases because they're not capturing data at the point of sale, or a customer that has a whole segment of their business with interaction and ticket data that's not flowing into the data that they see. So some of our recommendations have actually been more focused on: here are some changes you need to make from a foundational business perspective — they're going to supercharge everything that we do from there. And then the last piece — I said these would be surprising, maybe this one isn't that surprising — but the word AI has been the most interesting thing to say in these meetings.

MARCUS OWENS: I don't even have to ask a question. I can usually just say AI and everybody starts talking about it. There's a CEO that says, oh yes, we've got a CEO-down mandate to start using AI. Well, how's it going? It's just like when we went to cloud — use AI, well what should we do with AI? Just use it, use cloud. It's the same sort of situation, but it's been really interesting to see how customers are approaching that. Some are approaching it with enthusiasm and adoption, some are approaching it with more suspicion, and some are somewhere in the middle trying to find their lane. So after this discovery workshop group therapy, we come together — like we've mentioned, internally at Amperity we take that qualitative data from this workshop. And yes, I saw some heads turning — we do record these workshops because I can't write notes for two hours straight.

MARCUS OWENS: But it lets us get all of that conversation, distill it in a way that feeds into those more quantitative tools, and then turns into the sort of recommendations that we then share with the team and build that ROI model around. So similar to what I had mentioned earlier, not everything we're recommending is technology-driven. We've had some customers where we've really endorsed: you really need to make the business case for and adopt that strategy to start capturing that data in more places. I've learned more and more from customers that building the asset itself isn't enough — you need to be proactive and thoughtful about how you're going to enable your internal customers with that data. I said technology doesn't solve everything, but it does solve some things. So we've also found a lot of opportunities to optimize either Amperity or other customer data technology within the customer data stack.

MARCUS OWENS: So in conversations with customers, we may have heard from a stakeholder that uses the data downstream that there's a way that identity resolution is configured, or that profile merging is configured, that's not ideal for them, and we need to create a new asset for them that helps them handle that. In a lot of cases, we found that customers would say, oh, I'd love to be able to manage a journey across multiple channels. And it turns out that we just haven't had a chance to have a conversation about a new functionality that we rolled out. So sometimes the answer is in the platform. And then the last piece is really starting to go beyond fix the business, fix the tech — now find the growth opportunities. Taking that journey tool and turning that into something that's managing those cross-channel journeys, that's managing more dynamic journeys, starting to use more of the predictive assets that are built into Amperity.

MARCUS OWENS: We have predictive CLV, churn, et cetera — working those into those individuals' life cycles. And then a through-line for a lot of our customers too is: how do I better realize the value of my loyalty program and enhance that? In some cases, that's a customer like Books-A-Million that has a longstanding paid loyalty program. In other cases, that's a customer like L.L.Bean that's about to roll out their first non-tender loyalty program. And all of these things — even though we're kind of outside of the pure tech world — are about how they can use that Amperity investment to supercharge that. I talked really quickly there because I wanted to get you to the real fun part of this session, which is the panel discussion, which is where we're going to go from now. I'll be out in the lobby if you have more questions about ROCD — we have a call to action after this — but if you just want to talk to me a little bit more, I'll be over at the demo station later on. Thanks, y'all.

THOMAS KOEP: Lisa, Victoria — I'd love if you came up and gave your experience with the ROCD process. Hold on, I've got to get my daughter's pink note cards up. She's probably wondering where they are. So yeah, Books-A-Million went through this about a month ago, I think. Lisa, Victoria, if you want to give an overview of Books-A-Million and then also your roles, I would love for that to start.

VICTORIA CARTER: Yeah, you can start.

LISA PENNELL: Sure. Hi, I'm Lisa Pennell. I am the VP of Digital and E-commerce at Books-A-Million. We have been partnering with Amperity for about two years now. We have a lot of potential and we're super excited to be here today to talk to you about this ROCD process. We actually just finished this last week, so it's very fresh in our minds and we're still awaiting the formal output. But excited to share our learnings so far.

VICTORIA CARTER: And I'm Victoria. I'm our customer insights and analytics manager. I do everything CRM and customer data related — support, loyalty, and strategic marketing from a data perspective. I consider myself a data translator sitting between marketing and our IT team. So this is right up my alley.

THOMAS KOEP: Awesome. Thanks for the intro and the overview. What got you into ROCD? Like you didn't just wake up one day and say, I love ROI methodologies, let's do it. So yeah, if you want to start.

VICTORIA CARTER: It's actually really funny because I wish we woke up one day and decided to do this. It was presented to us in November, which — if you work in retail, you know — is a black hole where you're just working and trying to get your sales done because it's holiday. So we were like, this is really exciting, we need to revisit this. It was always in the back of our minds. Then once we got through holiday, we were having discussions with our executive team and were really getting pushed to show return on investment within our tech stack. That's when the conversation for ROCD really came back around. The running joke at BAM is we will get asked by our CEO, okay, that's great, but how does it help me sell more books? So when ROCD came around, we were actually having an onsite with Amperity.

VICTORIA CARTER: Our executive team was there and the word "therapy session" came up. That's actually what got everyone really excited about it, because we have our IT team, our merchandising team is huge — you think about how many SKUs and books are out there at any given time. Everyone got really excited to have everyone together. And then the output for the roadmap, I think, is what really made us say, let's get this on the books right now. I think we had it scheduled within about 24 hours. Having the roadmap and knowing that we're going to be able to own that output is what made us immediately say, once we get everyone together, we need to do this.

LISA PENNELL: Yeah, I'll add to that. It really did come from the top down — being asked, what is the ROI of this? After our first year, we started to feel the pressure: we need to educate. It was very important for us to pull together all of the appropriate stakeholders and sit them down and go through this process, not only to understand where we need to be, but also to get an understanding of where we are and where our limitations are. What that allowed us to do was really inform all of the stakeholders that we have this huge opportunity. It brought buy-in from everyone in that group and led to even greater conversations. We're also under a good deal of pressure to show return on all of our digital spending. The ROCD process got those conversations started and really helped kick things off.

THOMAS KOEP: Awesome. Going a step further — what was something insightful that came out of your ROCD session?

VICTORIA CARTER: Kind of like Lisa was saying, I think the alignment of having everyone in the room together, because our IT team is actually undergoing an entire data overhaul. But I'm not sitting with the IT team every single day, so I only know some of what's happening there. Having marketing together, having different parts of marketing together, having the merchandising team together — that was hugely helpful. And not just us having Marcus come in — you really need to add therapist to that LinkedIn profile — but holding up a mirror essentially to say, you need to look at this, have an honest and hard conversation, and challenge the way you're thinking about certain things. I think that was the most insightful piece, because everyone was there and you had buy-in from the get go.

LISA PENNELL: Yeah, I definitely agree. Internal education around Amperity and its capabilities was super helpful. I also think it gave a forum to have those difficult discussions. But for me personally, answering to the CEO, it was about the output — being able to quantify exactly what we can get out of Amperity with a numerical number that makes everyone smile and feel happy was really transformational for our organization.

THOMAS KOEP: Sinking into the next step — the ROCD process is brand new. Did it change how you looked at Amperity? Did it change how you looked at your tech stack? What came out of those discussions?

VICTORIA CARTER: In full transparency, I live in this platform — I have for the better part of the last four years. So I'm a big Amperity proponent. It didn't change the way I thought about it, but what really helped is it changed the way BAM collectively started thinking about it. It's kind of hard to say, here are all of these great things that you can do, unless you're sitting down with someone and showing them everything you're doing inside and out. Everyone viewed Amperity as this great platform that's going to give us a customer 360 journey — we're going to know who's getting an email and an SMS and in our paid media. And that was great, we got there within our first year or two of having Amperity. But we needed to get to that next step. It really helped everyone realize Amperity is not just a database platform — you're a strategic partner. We're saying, hey, here are our goals, this is where we're trying to get to, and we need some help getting there. That was the mindset shift — you're now more of a partner than just a platform.

LISA PENNELL: Yeah, I agree. Definitely an extension of our marketing department. Books-A-Million has a wide range of customers with reading interests varying all over the place, and the way they shop is different. It's really critical for us to be able to speak to those customers on a more one-to-one basis. And ROCD and the Amperity team have really helped us do that. And I'm most excited about what we learned in the last section — that all of that automation is coming our way and those things will become more seamless.

THOMAS KOEP: Tying to that — your original session was about a month ago and you did your readout with Marcus last week. What's come of those discussions?

VICTORIA CARTER: A lot of it was both not a surprise and a surprise, and Marcus kind of prefaced that for us before he read the results. He was like, you're going to be surprised and not surprised. I think it was validating that a lot of it wasn't a surprise, because they were strategic goals we're trying to get to. We are really focused on moving from spamming people with broadcast emails and text messages multiple times a day to having a more personalized, real-time journey. However, we've all probably gotten those messages saying, hey, sales are down right now, we need to send this email in the next five minutes just to hit the target for the day. And it's really hard changing that mindset when you'll see immediate sales — but is it the long-term best-practice solution?

VICTORIA CARTER: Like Lisa was saying, having an ROI number tied to what we're doing allows us to say, hey, if we target our paid loyalty program members who are predicted to churn, is that actually worth it? And not just, oh, you're expected to get X number of dollars — it's X plus Y equals Z. If you were to get just a 5% lift by targeting these people at this time, here is how much more they are going to be worth over the long term. That is easily defendable. That's how I can answer Terry, our CEO's question — here's how many more books they're going to be buying over the next couple of years.

LISA PENNELL: Yeah, I would say we had a couple of quick activation strategies that we were able to implement right out of ROCD. Talking to our spend cohorts in a different way that makes a lot more sense to move them through that journey. We only have about 40% of our total customer base — our loyalty base — in Amperity right now, and we're looking to collect the rest. That kind of came out of the ROCD process: we're missing that piece. Loyalty is super important to us. Understanding the churn of a membership after that first year and why they're dropping off — we have some predictive triggers that we quickly learned about through the ROCD process. But the thing that has been most exciting for me is that Victoria has been training our teams across different departments on how to leverage Amperity, so our merchandising teams can go in and pull insights about things that are selling well, and it extends to our marketing team and even down to operations. The education piece was really strong from the ROCD process.

THOMAS KOEP: Is there one thing we did not cover about the experience? Anything you want to leave everyone with before we open for Q&A?

VICTORIA CARTER: Even if it's presented to you during holiday, don't forget about it. Granted, you're not going to do it in November or December, and then December 26th comes around, everyone resets and you get ready for the new year. But I can't help thinking — if we had started this process earlier, how many of our paid loyalty members would we have reactivated by now? How many customers would we not have lost because we targeted them based on the churn signals that came out of ROCD? I think of those ROIs as goals and benchmarks — how much closer, how much progress would we have made if we had started sooner? Granted, asking people to fill out a 24-question survey and getting all of your executives together in a room for two hours isn't a small ask when you look at everyone's calendars — that happens for a reason. But it is so worth it. Marcus, seriously — the ROI that came out of this, I am forever indebted to you. It is very clear and very defendable. That is the biggest thing that came out of this.

LISA PENNELL: Yeah, I have to take fault there — it was presented to me right before holiday and I said absolutely not, our heads are down focused on sales. If I were to give anyone advice going into this, it would be: definitely educate the participants ahead of time, not just with the survey, but make sure they understand that there will be a tangible output — a roadmap, a way to get from A to Z. I think that part was missing initially for us. I'm kind of kicking myself that we didn't do it a little more quickly, but that would just be the advice I would give.