Interview: Darren Guarnaccia, CSO Sitecore, Talks About the Connected Customer

by Barb Mosher Zinck | January 21, 2014 4:35 pm

When you want to get handle on what’s happening in the customer experience industry, reach out to a CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) from a major vendor in the space. That’s what I did by talking to , CSO for Sitecore.

Sitecore is one of the leading vendors (and yes, I said leading) in the customer experience/web content management/digital experience industry. They are consistently ranked at the top of both Gartner’s Magic Quadrants and Forrester’s Wave Research reports. And Sitecore has worked hard to get to this place through the development of a complete platform for customer experience management.

Guarnaccia gave us his views on customer experience successes in 2013 and the challenges and opportunities for 2014. He also gave us a view into how Sitecore will support customers as they meet the challenges ahead.

2013 Was the Year of the Channel

According to Guarnaccia, organizations did make inroads to customer experience in 2013. From his perspective they nailed all the channels – social, email – and they operationalized campaign management with marketing automation or something else. So basically, the building blocks for a great customer experience are in play.

But, he said, they still struggled with connecting all these channels and operationalizing the connected experience. This is partly due to the ever changing technology landscape. Vendors have bought other vendors, and there’s a lot of integration happening/needed to be worked out (integration via PO he called it). What orgs were often ending up with were disconnected services, resulting in a disconnected customer experience.

Guarnaccia added to the technology challenge, with a data challenge. He indicated that Web Analytics Assoc. research shows that marketers spend 50-80% of their time data sanitizing and cleaning. Which is why we hear so much about the need for data scientists who can make sense of all this disconnected and fragmented data. Simply put, it’s a big data is a mess.

The Opportunity – and Challenge – for Orgs in 2014

Understanding it all is still a struggle, but with the channels under control, it’s now about understanding it all in some cohesive way. That, says Guarnaccia, is both the opportunity and the challenge for this year.

Organizations understand this challenge, and so do vendors. Expect to see vendors make a concentrated effort to make it all easier, deeply connected. Guarnaccia says it’s Sitecore’s focus, and he knows it’s the focus of a number of other vendors. They want to help marketers rationalize all these various buckets of customer information and start to understand them in a more cohesive way.

Enter the Connected Customer

The connected customer experience basically means organizations understand their customers across all channels – it’s a deeply connected experience. But it won’t be easy to do, and again it goes back to the technology challenge that will be faced this year. What has happened is that in their desire to offer organizations all the tools to create and manage the customer lifecycle, many vendors have acquired solutions that complement their core, and have integrated them in a loosely coupled way. Unfortunately, this best of breed approach isn’t conducive to deeply connected systems, and it’s something many are going to have to work hard to overcome.

In Guarnaccia’s view, marketers are also spending way too much time on the science (data cleansing, crunching), and less time on the art of marketing, on insights and analysis. He sees 2014 as the year when vendors will make it easier for marketers to be marketers again (taking away some of the complexity).

Letting Marketers be Marketers

There is no one road to better customer experiences, and there’s no one technology approach.

There is the platform approach – which is what Sitecore offers. The more you buy, the more is pre-integrated already, tightly coupled. But Guarnaccia acknowledges that this approach only works to a point. What if the organization does buy something else? What happens when the next big thing comes along and the platform isn’t prepared?

What’s required is a customer data model. The data is not in a CRM, in this case it’s the creation of an operational real time layer that can handle big data, capture it, organize it and connect it together. This is Sitecore’s new model and they want others to be able to connect to it in a cohesive way. Guarnaccia says that similar vendors have similar models.

So for Sitecore, it’s not about the apps, it’s about the customer data. Sitecore wants to make the data start working for marketers and business people. You can do this, he says by pre-integrating capabilities or by building customer repositories in a way that integrates it all together. It sounds simple, but it’s not really.

The truth is the complexity doesn’t go away with this approach. It just shifts to the back end, allowing the business user to focus on the task at hand. The ultimate goal is to simplify the life of the marketer and enable them to make business decisions. Guarnaccia believes that great intelligence is currently just sitting there, unused. He points to the problems with re-targeting campaigns as a great example of disconnected data.

Making things simpler for the marketer doesn’t necessarily mean higher tech costs either. Although you will have to acknowledge that the easier things come to be, the more things you can start to do, which means you can use more technology, which in turn can lead to increased costs.

Guarnaccia also notes that the marketing fund pile isn’t getting bigger, but there is a reallocation happening. Depending on the business (verticals, B2B, B2C) the piles move around slightly different. There’s also a continual shift to digital from print and display (where there is a real lack of results causing a downward trend). We should also expect to see the rise of big data systems that are connecting all the experiences across all channels which will give rise to technologies such as predictive analytics and recommendations.

Vendors Want to Own the Experience

Actually, they want their customers to own the experience. To do that, the technology solution/platform they offer will expand even wider. For Sitecore, Guarnaccia says, the focus is to allow marketing to have all their tools in one central place. It’s a balance, he admits, which is why Sitecore wants a system that is an open platform, flexible and capable, yet still offers a huge amount of value. Sitecore wants to enable marketers to be creative, that was something Guarnaccia focused heavily on.

It’s a view that is likely not unique, but it’s certainly something we don’t hear a lot about – letting marketers get back to what they do – and love – best. And it makes you wonder if this “marketing technologist” role is really going to be necessary. I asked Guarnaccia his views on this role and he acknowledges that there will always be a need for it. Marketing technologists are good at thinking systematically, and although platforms such as Sitecore will offer 80% of a marketers needs, there will always be those outliers that this role will need to focus on. Platforms will become more configurable and adaptable, Guarnaccia says, and they will become simpler, but they will never be completely easy.

The marketing technologist bridges the roles of IT and marketing. The CIO has been about keeping the lights on and risk avoidance, but they need to get back to innovation as well. On the other hand, the CMO is all about risk – they take chances, make bets, fail, and then they change/adapt as required. What is needed are platforms that allow marketers flexibility and versatility, and at the same time, allow IT to be comfortable allowing the marketing technologist/marketing team to work within the bounds of that platform. It’s the end goal, but Guarnaccia says there’s a lot of work to do to bring together all these best of breed systems.

It’s interesting to note that this evolution of customer experience platforms isn’t unique. Guarnaccia says that as the market matures, packages and platforms will form and eventually solidify capabilities, becoming about configuration and adaptation with a small percentage of extensibility. We’ve already seen it happen with ERP and CRM markets, it is a natural technology evolution.

Sitecore Wants to Create Connected Customers

Sitecore is very much focused on the connected customer. Guarnaccia lists four areas where Sitecore is focused:

1. Collect Data – he says everyone is doing this well
2. Connect It – thread all this information against human beings
3. Analyze It – Report, analyze
4. Utilize It – put it to work, make it actionable, usable

Sitecore will do a little of all of these things. It will build a better system to collect data – anywhere your customers are; it is improving connectivity across channels –ramping up the ability to connect data across any channel; it is revamping its analytics, creating the next generation; and it will make data usable and actionable, in-context to where you need to go make the changes.

The ultimate goal for Sitecore is to allow its customers to focus on the “experience” and build relationships, build lifetime customers. It’s a big goal, and it will take time to come to fruition, but it is the right approach for any vendor in this customer experience space. And it’s a story/theme that I am sure we’ll hear much more about this year and beyond.

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