One on One Interviews

Small Business Trends correspondent Ramon Ray sits down with Rand Leeb-du Toit for the premiere of his series, The Smart Hustle Report.

The theme for Nextiva’s conference this year, NextCon, was customer experience. And Small Business Trends did a great job of covering the event. Do yourself a favor and check out the coverage, as there were a ton of great speakers, including Brian Solis, Les McKeown, and Google’s Lawrence Cole, as well as Nextiva founder and CEO Tomas Gorny.

I had the pleasure of speaking with business television personality and best-selling author Carol Roth, who focused her keynote session on customer loyalty, and idea she calls Customer Experience 3.0. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full conversation click the embedded video or SoundCloud player below.

While there are over 150 million phone devices with digital assistants like Siri and Google Assistant, and quickly growing smart speaker devices with Amazon’s Alexa on board, there’s another device that dwarfs these numbers in comparison. While they are considered voice-first devices, there are over a half billion Windows 10 devices (including Xboxes) with Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, on board listening out for your questions and requests. And throw in pieces like Office 365, Bing and LinkedIn, Cortana has a lot of potential data and interactions to draw on in order to help people get things done in a much more efficient and contextually relevant manner – both for personal and business reasons.

Christi Olson, Microsoft’s Head of Evangelism for Search, discusses how this lineup of services and platforms is coming together using AI and conversational interfaces to transform how people work, as well as how they’ll engage with customers.

I focused a few of the last conversations on the growing importance of voice-first technologies that have us swiping/typing less and talking more to our devices. And as consumer adoption of devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home, among others, takes off, companies need to get serious about how this will impact customer engagement. And next year is the year to start figuring it out, according to Eric Bisceglia, VP of Go-to-Market for Voysis, a voice AI platform that enables voice driven natural language instruction, search, and discovery across mobile, web, and devices.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the whole interview click on the embedded player below.

One of my favorite conferences of the year this week with Oracle Openworld, mainly because Oracle is a company that competes in a variety of business application categories. And they do have apps for the higher end of the SMB space. Unfortunately I was unable to attend this year, but very fortunate to speak with Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s VP of Bots, AI and Mobile Strategy.

With artificial intelligence, bots and voice-first devices being three of the hottest topics today, I was glad Suhas took some time to share his thoughts on how customer engagement is being shaped in realtime by these technologies

It’s been almost four years since I spoke with Adobe’s Kevin Lindsay about how companies focus the overwhelming majority of their marketing resources on customer acquisition activities vs. customer retention. And during this week’s Inbound Conference put on by HubSpot, it appears that this is still the case, according to Des Traynor, cofounder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, a messaging platform that helps businesses connect with customers.

Traynor’s session at Inbound on the importance of focusing marketing efforts more on retention is even more critical today than it was four years ago, as more products and services are bought via subscriptions – where companies have to deliver enough value each month to keep customers on board. And it’s that behavioral switch to subscribing vs outright purchasing which means retention takes on a whole new level of importance in your marketing efforts.

There is so much going on with Amazon these days I find myself watching them constantly and looking for lessons to take away from all the moves they’re making, from a customer engagement perspective. And I not alone in my non-stop watching, as my friend and ecommerce thought leader John Lawson is a big time Amazon watcher as well. So it was only natural for us to take are watching to a new level and do it together, which is what our video podcast Watching Amazon is all about.

According to a recent NPR/Edison Research study of smart speaker owners, 42% of people surveyed say it has become essential to their everyday lives, 47% say they use it more now than they did when they first got it, and 65% say they wouldn’t go back to life without them. And of all the folks who took this survey, 76% own the Amazon Echo.

Although I didn’t take the survey, you can count me in all these numbers, as ever since I bought my first Amazon Echo almost three years ago I’ve been fascinated by how it can do so many things by only asking Alexa. So I was more than excited to speak with Dave Isbitski, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist for Chief Evangelist, Alexa and Echo, to hear more about how the device came about, how the Echo/Alexa combo is impacting customer behaviors and expectations, and where he’s seeing voice-first technologies taking us in the future.

I was really glad that Jon Ferrara, founder of Nimble (and before that GoldMine), was able to join me for this week’s conversation. Because it was Jon who was my very first guest in this series those seven years ago.

We cover a lot of ground as we reminisce about the past, dig into what’s changed over the past seven years in the CRM space, and eventually look at what is coming down the pike. So this is a bit longer than usual. But hey, it’s not every day you hit a pretty cool milestone like this!

Justin shares how ALU is using marketing automation to scale their marketing efforts to reach their goal of creating three million entrepreneurs by 2060 by building 25 campuses throughout the continent. And by doing so changing a narrative of the continent to better represent the innovativeness and talent of the African youth.