Acoustic Gets to the ‘Why’ of the Customer Journey

Acoustic Gets to the ‘Why’ of the Customer Journey

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Acoustic is a global SaaS subscription company that provides customer-engagement tools for B2C brands. It has worked with brands including Pura, PayPal, Scientific American, and Ticketmaster. In 2022, Acoustic helped clients manage over 120 billion personalized interactions by focusing on the customer journey.

John Riewerts, SVP of Engineering at Acoustic, explains the company’s newest offering , Acoustic Connect. Connect which was launched on May 24, and the “secret sauce” that distinguishes it from other technology in the space.

1. What “problem” does Acoustic Connect solve?

Customers have higher expectations for personalized experiences, which makes loyalty harder to achieve. Messages are buried under all this noise, prompting many brands to take a “more is better” approach to marketing, which often has the reverse effect of spamming the audience. More messages are being sent out, and when traffic is driven to a website or mobile app, customers don’t convert, and brands don’t understand why.

Marketers rely on disparate tech stacks where data is siloed, making it more difficult to understand the individual customer experience and tailor communications based on the interactions they’ve had with the brand. Disconnected tools lead to brands lacking real-time visibility into campaign activity, which prevents them from optimizing campaigns based on behavior or intent.

By providing deeper and broader visibility into the digital experience, we enable marketers to optimize campaigns in real-time – instead of reacting after a campaign is completed and analyzed – using combinations of zero-, first-, second-, and third-party data. We’re focused on helping marketers manage the complete customer lifecycle and create a seamless customer experience rather than managing one-off campaigns.

2. What distinguishes Acoustic Connect from the many other tech companies that do the same thing?

Acoustic Connect is the first solution that fully integrates multichannel marketing automation with behavioral experience insights and journey orchestration in a single platform, enabling marketers to connect the dots from campaign to conversion.

Our “secret sauce” is that we’ve enhanced the insights marketers receive by providing the reasons behind visitors’ actions taken across digital properties. Until this point, marketers have had limited visibility into campaign engagement and performance other than metrics like opens and clicks, which tell an incomplete story.

With Acoustic Connect, marketers can understand the intent behind these interactions using behavioral experience insights, which reveal why customers convert, abandon, or take other actions across digital properties. Signals such as intent, frustration, and content and channel preferences are revealed based on users’ interactions with a brand’s website or mobile app.

For example, marketers can see that products were clicked, added to a cart, purchased, or abandoned within the cart. But with Acoustic Connect, you can see that the customer read reviews, decided to add the product to their cart, and then had to abandon the cart because the credit card field in the purchase form was broken. It’s a much deeper understanding of the customer journey, which enables the marketer to create a more personalized remarketing campaign to win the customer back.

3. What are the repetitive tasks that Acoustic has automated to free up marketers’ time?

Rather than taking a siloed channel approach, the Multichannel Composer embedded within Acoustic Connect enables marketers to create high-quality, personalized messages once and seamlessly reuse them across email, SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and more without involving coder or developer support. From simple rules-based “if-then” scenarios like an email reward triggered by a birthday to more complex data-driven campaigns such as adding the customer to a welcome sequence based on a specific form, they’ve filled out. Marketers can quickly and independently create automated, personalized customer journeys, freeing them up to efficiently compose messages that capture consumer attention in the moments that matter on the channels they use most.

4. Is AI, or more specifically ChatGPT, its next iteration or Bard or some other AI tech? Is that how you determine “intent” from consumers?

Acoustic Connect does not use OpenAI (or similar services in the market). It has proprietary models to determine intent driven by classifications of events and sequences to suggest or imply intent. Marketers can utilize these insights to improve personalized communications and determine the next best action for customers to take based on their individual customer journey. Artificial intelligence also refines the analytics and benchmarking within the platform, improving how marketers measure, report, and optimize ROI.

5. Provide an example of Acoustic Connect working down to the hyperlocal behavioral targeting level.

Acoustic Connect enables marketers to have granular visibility of the digital customer experience. From a hyperlocal behavioral targeting level, this could come to fruition in a number of ways, such as identifying that a customer typically shops for apparel once every other month, prefers men’s clothing, and ships items to Florida during the winter months and Massachusetts during the summer.

Marketers can use these insights to begin marketing to the customer in a more targeted way: they may send emails promoting gear for “snowbirds” leading up to the winter months, prompt customers to sign up for text messages by receiving a 20% discount on bathing suits, or catch the customer’s attention with a pop-up window on the website that highlights apparel they had previously viewed.

The retailer could even take it a step further by sending a text to the customer when they’re around a local store, encouraging them to continue their digital shopping journey in person. Because this is a multichannel engagement with the customer, the marketer can interact with them on the right channel at the right time.

6. How is Acoustic Connect privacy compliant?

Acoustic Connect complies with modern privacy regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, ISO 27001/27017/27018, SSAE-18 SOC 2 Type 1, Right of Erasure, and Right of Access. We also employ a Chief Data Ethics Officer as well as a Privacy/Security/Data Protection Officer. In addition, we help our customers manage consent and compliance directly through the Acoustic Connect platform.

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Kathleen Sampey