It’s been a big year for Acquia. Earlier this year, the digital experience company announced two new partnerships (with BigCommerce and Elastic Path) aiming to expand their eCommerce offering for customers. New announcements continued at Engage last week, as Acquia unveiled coming updates to their Acquia Lift, Acquia Lightning, and Acquia Cloud capabilities into Spring 2019.
What was interesting to note is the philosophy behind Acquia’s drive for innovation. Change is deeply rooted in customer feedback, with the Acquia team listening closely to customer needs, and developing solutions that directly address user pain points.
Co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert described Acquia’s approach as a three-prong process:
Build: Making experiences/campaigns easier to create
Manage: Allowing teams to better manage workflow and processes
Optimize: Letting teams innovate and optimize experiences quickly and effectively
Acquia’s process is fueled by one overarching goal: simplicity. As we wrote about last week, the goal for marketing teams is to make processes simpler for customers. But behind the scenes, orchestrating those efforts — and all the factors that go into personalization — can often be difficult to get off the ground efficiently.
“End-user simplicity requires greater system complexity,” Buytaert said of achieving personalization. “…“We have to make it more complex…to make it simpler.”
For marketers, finding the right vendor in a rapidly-growing sea of solutions is no easy feat. For vendors, hooking the best customers comes down to forging partnerships and developing products that fulfill buyer needs.
At Engage 2018, I got to see how several leading brands were leveraging tech to build an easier road to personalization. While their approaches varied, one thing remained consistent — the need for a strong marketing team with a customer-centric outlook, and vendor/agency partnerships that supported them.
Building teams and creating customer-centric culture
According to Linda Albornoz, VP, Charles Schwab Wealth Management Technology, digital transformation meant a complete reorganization of front-to-back and end-to-end processes, while implementing a culture focused on outcomes. Hiring expanded to adding talent from unique backgrounds outside of financial institutions, developing the skills of long-time employees, and encouraging client-facing experiences for all members of the team.
“This transformation is bigger than technology,” Albornoz said.
Technology became a way for Charles Schwab to give employees the freedom to automate or simplify complex tasks, so they could focus on what matters most: the customer.
“Emotion is what often gets overlooked…but when it comes to money, people matter,” Albornoz said.
Forging the right agency partnerships
When you’re embarking on a big project, you often can’t do it alone. Like vendors, agency partners are there to fill in the gaps that you may have to get the job done. So when global energy services company Centrica Business Solutions needed to consolidate their complex website infrastructure, they turned to both Acquia and IBM iX to do it. Working in tandem, Centrica was able to build seven regional websites in less than six months, with full integrations with Salesforce and Pardot.
According to Mike Bossard, digital platforms, global, Centrica Business Solutions, choosing the right agency partner came down to “having a goal in mind, and making decisions on the teams to support that.” For Centrica, it was IBM iX’s “expertise in design and development” that won them over.
Breaking down organizational silos
Wendy’s also made a splash with their personalization efforts this year. On social media, the fast food brand won hearts (and headlines) with its sassy Twitter persona. On the backend, Wendy’s partnered with Acquia, utilizing A/B testing and dynamic templating to create unique, persona-driven user experiences online.
Organizationally, Michael Mancuso, head of digital analytics, Wendy’s, stresses the need to have all members of your team on board, and united under the same goal. Siloed teams are often “all solving the same problem, but they’re all solving it differently,” Mancuso said.
“Focus on the vision,” he said.
