THE HIGHLIGHTS
Data, tech, and teams: The ingredients of a winning campaign
Virgin Media O2 and Monzo reveal how de-siloing data and teams can optimise the customer experience
For brands that want to build customer loyalty, using data to design and orchestrate meaningful conversations can reap dividends. But getting there is not simple. It requires departments to share data and to form cross-functional teams, or ‘squads’, to keep projects focused around solving customer issues.
That was the message from a panel session at the Festival of Marketing entitled ‘Data, tech and teams: The ingredients of a winning campaign’.
Panel moderator Georgia Harrison, VP of customer success at customer engagement platform Braze, set the scene by introducing the challenges brands are currently facing around releasing data from silos and building teams to make the best use of it.
Echoing Harris’s comments, panellist Sarah Buschmann, director of digital capability building at Virgin Media O2, revealed this ambition has been at the heart of her role for the past three years.
“We needed to go from a place where our data in the business was in various pockets,” she said. “Marketing had their data, service had their own information and so did [the network team]. When I started, I said: ‘It's one customer that sits there, right? It's not a marketing customer or service customer. It's one person that would like to be treated in a holistic way.’ So, [the brand’s journey] started with: ‘Let's get all the data into one place and then start to use it intelligently.’”
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Virgin Media O2's Sarah Buschmann on data silos
The silo mentality doesn’t just need to be broken down at the points of data creation and analysis. The way teams are structured internally also has a huge impact on how information can be used to improve customer service and engagement.
“Everybody has their own P&L, but we are now in the midst of moving to a culture where there's clear ownership of customer engagement,” Buschmann added. This means that teams proactively seek data-driven insights across departments, rather than seeing it as another team’s responsibility to provide them.
Fellow panellist Cat Daniel, Monzo’s growth marketing director, agreed that ending data silos and forming cross-functional squads is the way forward. She emphasised that, once the data has been made available to all who need it, the first priority should be to empower those teams to experiment with it and test ideas. “You should be very comfortable and willing to test new ideas and allocate a portion of budget to testing and learning,” Daniel said.
For example, 60% or 70% of budget might be directed towards “channels that we've tried and tested, that we know work, and that we know deliver results for us. But I've also got this portion where I'm going to try new things, new campaigns, new creative ideas that we've never done before.”
She added: “The second-biggest thing is just to remember what problem you are trying to solve with any given campaign, and keep taking whoever works on it back to that. Does this iteration solve that problem? Do we think it is going to work? Do we think that we're saying the right thing at the right time here?”
The message from the panel was clear. Releasing data from silos and putting it into a platform which encourages collaboration is only half the journey. The remainder is getting teams to take responsibility for using it to answer potential customer problems. These teams need to be given the freedom to test out new ideas and experiment because, even if a hunch does not work out, it can still be a positive lesson for the business. ◆
“remember what problem you are trying to solve with any given campaign, and keep taking whoever works on it back to that.”
— Cat Daniel, Monzo