Masters of Customer Experience

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When companies find customer engagement to be a tough climb, they turn to RedPoint Global.

As novel tech solutions continue to disrupt B2C approaches to customer engagement, businesses are seeking faster, more effective, integrated, and highly personalized ways to reach their target audiences. Digital transformation holds the promise to accelerate this change, through perfect synchronization of messages at exactly the right time, irrespective of channel. Is getting there just a pipe dream or will it really result in increased revenue? That is still the point isn’t it?

The road to those prime connections is strewn with disappointment, from software systems that promise ease and speed but deliver gut-wrenching and costly failures, to out-of-the-box consumer data platforms (CDPs) whose one size fits most approach falls short of most brands’ aspirations. Many offerings are essentially marketing toys, which would not make it through the door of any self-respecting large enterprise.

George Corugedo feels that entrepreneurial pain deeply. As co-founder and CTO of RedPoint Global, he’s spent 14 years creating leading edge customer engagement technology that’s shattering the limits of what data management, machine learning, and engagement software can accomplish.

“While I am passionate about the technology, we measure our client’s success by their business results,” he says.  “We have numerous clients who have declared we are their primary revenue generation platform for the organization. That takes us straight out of the marketing toy category and into the mission-critical enterprise platform. If readers take only one thing away from this article, it’s this: RedPoint is about building your business, increasing your sales, moving the needle in a material way.”

“Our clients typically have an ambitious strategy that they're failing to execute,” he explained. “People who come to us have fragmented data across silos and they can't get it under control, and therefore can't make the best use out of it. Or they are looking for real-time personalization across their sites or devices potentially around the world and they're not finding the technologies that can perform at that scale.”

“Brands are also looking for more automated analytics so they can take advantage of predictive modeling and machine learning at all points in their marketing strategy.  Lots of vendors are happy to show prospects the punch list of functionalities, but to us, these are just the technical entry points.  While the initial focus is the mechanics, what we can show customers quickly is that the mechanics are strictly a means to an end … increased revenue,” says George.

He continues, “Many vendors in the new wave of CDP technology have built companies based on a parts list, throwing together components that they can acquire as inexpensively as possible.  What they are missing, is that these vendors don’t really understand how complex the problems they are trying to solve nor how complex the use cases and their solutions need to be. Therefore, their ability to discuss the expected outcomes is not possible.”

Clients seek out the Wellesley, Mass.-based firm with the goal of presenting coherent and consistent consumer experiences across all channels. “Today, the problem is that execution channels have the data trapped, or recommendations are being made independently of the other channels. That's where you get a tremendous level of omnichannel inconsistency and friction. RedPoint is able to bring all of the relevant data together and do it at a level, scale, and speed that no one else can.”

The RedPoint platform couples machine learning with optimization to automate the process of driving customer insights. An orchestration layer manages omnichannel strategies, allowing clients to define and engineer the customer experience they’re reaching for at every touch point.

“These three capabilities perform an exquisite dance that enables a client to perform and execute extraordinarily complex and targeted campaigns that are scientifically driven and measured – allowing them to bring a level of science to the practice of marketing and to the practice of creating that customer experience that you can't get with any other application out there. To achieve the most relevant customer experience for individual consumers across all channels requires an almost perfect synchronization and integration of the data, the machine learning, and the orchestration.

“That's why I really emphasize the idea of ambitious marketers,” he says. “Those are the folks we love to work with. It's not a matter of size, it's not a matter of how many clients you have or how many billions in revenue you have, it's a matter of ambition. If they have a vision they want to achieve, we can enable almost anything they have in mind.”

The underlying principle is providing the fastest path between data and revenue, through a platform that covers data to insight to action.

“Data is the raw material and insights are where you develop the opportunities, and action is the execution and monetization. That cycle is what we support with our platform,” shares George. “It starts with the data and we have a technology that allows us to build a customer data platform and do it at a pace that is faster than anybody out in the market. What's really special is that the latency with which we process databases is in milliseconds.”

One millisecond is one thousandth of one second.

“Some of our competition will say, ‘You send us your customer data and we'll send it back to you all cleaned up and matched in 36 hours,’” says George. “But if you're a modern brand, your customer moment may have come and gone in 36 hours. For example, what a casino customer did is never going to be captured and utilized while they're on premise. We’re able to gather that data from all of those sources and channels and interactions, whether it's IoT, the website, or mobile phone — whatever they need.”

That data is collected and processed in real time, and put in what the company calls a “golden record” that contains all the proxy identities for a customer — from social handles and multiple e-mail addresses to IoT data — as well as the behaviors, transactions, and aggregates that represent the customers relationship with the brand. Linked together in real time, the platform enables the kind of customer profiles that contemporary marketers dream about.

“There are a lot of companies that claim to build CDPs and build some level of aggregation, but no one can get to the real time, on demand, low-latency processing that we get to,” he contends. Technology and database agnostic, RedPoint features a master data management layer that connects all of a company’s relevant data to a single point of reference. Another groundbreaker: automated machine learning.

“We’ve built a set of technologies that are designed to work operationally as your data is processing. It trains itself in a fully automated way. You don't have to have manual intervention; thus the analytics are inline to your marketing operations and customer journeys. We brought together two very powerful technologies that we haven't seen brought together anywhere else in the market and our clients are usually amazed at the power that they get out of the analytics with so little effort.

“We brought machine learning together with true algorithmic optimization. That allows us to have the machine learning running constantly, 24/7, training new models and retraining existing models,” George says. The optimizer serves as a form of quality assurance, only allowing models to proceed when they produce a better result than a previous model.

George explains further that, “The optimizer works based on simulation at a very high-speed, capturing what's happening in the market and helping you predict which one of your models is going to be the best out of your group of models. That combination lets you build very powerful models with very little skill required.”

RedPoint enables clients to connect all the channels at one central point of operational control.

“That’s what customers envision as nirvana. They work in a world of fragmentation and we bring it all into one cohesive platform,” he said.

“RedPoint is a rock-climbing term for perfect execution of a route. No hangs, no falls, nailed it,” George noted. “Our name represents the desire and daily struggle at being perfect. There is no such thing as perfection, but we strive for it. We never get complacent … we obsess about our customers and our business.

“Our software works as advertised and we deliver that way every time. Sadly, it's not common, but for us it is the norm. We deliver on time, on scope, and on budget, our software does exactly what we say it will. You always get that clear-headed truth from us and that's something that's very important,” George concludes.