Loyalty Lessons: Future-Proofing Technology Investments
In this episode, Tuhin, Head of Product Development at Annex Cloud, joins the show to shed light on the power of innovation provided by cloud-based solutions. Tuhin dives deep into the concept of future-proofing projects, a critical strategy for businesses aiming to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving MarTech landscape. The episode offers valuable insights for listeners looking to leverage innovation to ensure the long-term success of their loyalty program management projects.
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>> Welcome back to CX Anonymous,
the series where we provide tactical advice on
successfully executing customer experience.
We don't care who you were before,
just how it got done.
I'm your host, Amber Collins,
Senior Marketing Manager,
with Scott Schurzen, Product Solutions Director,
and a host of guests in the second season.
Today, we're joined by Tuan,
Head of Product Management here at Annex Cloud.
Welcome Tuan, we're so happy to have you.
Tell us a little bit about your role,
when you get involved and how you're involved in the Annex Cloud.
>> Great to be here and thank you for inviting me to this series.
As Head of Product Management at Annex Cloud,
my role is really multifaceted,
right where I'm doing some work with our existing customers,
I'm working with prospects in terms of
the issues and problems and the solutions that are important to them,
and how do we bring that to life?
At the same time,
working with our product management team,
as well as our engineering and quality assurance team,
to make sure how do we provide value to our customers on a consistent basis,
and at the same time,
how do we innovate and keep the product up to date?
So those are kind of like on a very high level.
Some of the work I do,
I do a fair amount of work with our product marketing team,
as well as our go-to-market team,
to make sure that we are telling the right story
about the capabilities of our product,
learning from the market to see which innovations areas may be important,
essentially making sure getting to the right folks and people are working on
right priorities.
Yep, I've worked with you closely on our marketing messages around the product,
around our monthly releases,
and you're always so helpful and knowledgeable about why we are doing what we
're doing here at Annex Cloud,
and I think it's really important to have you on the show today.
With all of that great oversight that you do,
this big role that you've got here,
can you tell us a little bit about the structure of your team,
what that looks like,
and what it really means to have a robust product development team?
Yeah, so I'll answer that in a couple of different streams.
So my first immediate team,
I have a team of nine product managers and two product operations manager.
The product managers are distributed all over the world.
I have a couple of folks in North America,
as well as a majority of my team located in Pune, India.
So they're essentially executing the roadmap and the strategic item that we're
building.
And the product operations team is really focused on enabling our larger
internal team,
use case validation,
or really solutioning through any customer problem.
So the product management team defining and creating new solution,
and the product operation teams doing more of the enablement.
And in terms of the day-to-day work,
the majority of the work is essentially focused with our engineering team
and our QA team to make sure that we're providing,
we're working on the right priorities,
we're building the right things,
we're focusing on the right bug,
and making sure that customer operations are successful,
and they're getting the right value from the system as much as possible.
So that's that stream of work,
but also at the same time, on the other hand,
making sure we are talking to customer,
we are doing continuous discovery in terms of not where they are today,
but where they would like to be,
and making sure our platform is staying up to date to meet them there.
So we're like, how does the loyalty program for our customer
looks like 24 months from now, 36 months from now,
and not that they are successful today,
and they can continue to be successful,
and how our platform needs to grow in order to support those aspirational use
cases.
So execution as well as planning based on customers business objective.
So if you think about the whole process, like the development process,
there's a conceptual idea.
In a product organization like ours,
we try to solve problems with existing tools first,
before we start to develop.
So I have kind of a two-part question here first.
How does your team first kind of push back?
And say there is a tool, there is a way,
how do you handle those situations,
so that we are not just continually evolving a singular item
for a singular customer based approach?
How do you approach that?
Yeah, and I think there's a couple of different ways we think about it, right?
And usually, like let me just begin by saying, right,
the customer's longer-term success is always in our mind
when we say no to a request.
It's not because that we don't want to develop a piece of functionality
in a particular way, or because if we do something very narrow and custom,
that we don't think that is going to get widespread adoption in the platform.
At the end of the day, I believe that we are doing the service to the customer,
because that may not get as much focus in future innovation,
or that feature, although we will fully support it,
it will be supported in a narrow use case, right?
So how do we enable and solve, as you're mentioning,
customer use cases using the toolset that we think is going to improve over
time,
so they get those added benefits, right?
So that's consideration, the first consideration.
Another thing that I always want to refocus the discussion with our customers
and with our internal team, it's not so much of that I want a particular thing
solved in a particular way, but going back and really asking,
working with the customers, what are you trying to achieve?
And maybe hypothetical example, maybe they want to run a promotion
and based on what they have seen about our platform,
they think if they had this green button, that promotion would be better.
But instead of talking about focusing on that green button,
what's your strategy?
Are you trying to run a new promo on a channel that you haven't picked, right?
Because what I think happens often time,
that we see a better robust solution presents itself,
maybe we introduce to them to a product module,
they might not have considered that we can offer to them,
or at the same time, right, if an idea is really good,
like we'll work with the customer and we'll give them a temporary solution,
but we'll put that holistic idea as part of the core solution,
rather than giving them such a narrow path
which doesn't get added benefit from additional innovation.
So those are the discussion I think I like to have with customers.
And my experience has been like once we phrase the discussion that way,
rather than saying like, no, you cannot have that,
but when we reframe that discussion saying,
okay, what's your business outcome?
What are you trying to achieve?
My general experience has been nine out of ten times,
the customer is very willing to go with that longer-term approach,
because they don't necessarily want to just get a single thing done today
and not get the additional benefit down the road.
So I think reframing those discussion and having an honest discussion with the
customer,
showing that we are there for them in the long run is the right way to go.
And that's kind of how I personally communicate with the customers.
And that's also what my product managers do.
Those kind of scenarios comes up.
I love that, because I think that what you've just explained is,
I think most people think the art of the possible comes in
before they've made this election,
when they're talking to Scott and Scott is solutioning out
what their strategy will look like.
But it doesn't end.
It doesn't end.
Your team is totally part of this art of the possible
and the evolution of our clients' programs,
the evolution of the platform so that it benefits the greater good,
the greatest good, and therefore everybody benefits from some of these requests
that are coming from clients that you wouldn't necessarily get that innovation
if you were using a homegrown or a very customized and singular instance
of a different type of technology.
So why do we talk a little bit about the benefit,
the advantage of us with this robust product development process team,
solutioning, the art of the possible?
What is the advantage of working with somebody like AnnexCloud,
us, a platform like this that has this type of process and development going on
built into it, just automatically happening all the time?
Yeah, I think this is an analogy of going outside of AnnexCloud,
that what I like to tell people and when I choose product for my day-to-day use
or when I'm buying a tool for my team, right?
This is kind of the heuristic that I look into, right?
And the story goes like this, if you go back in 2000 and even in early 2010s,
every software company is to have a data center.
They used to put their cloud there, there was maintenance cost around it
and that's a piece of infrastructure that they needed to support.
Now you fast forward late 2010s or even early 2010s,
when the adoption of this hyper-scalers becomes really important, right?
And why do almost all the technical companies,
who's their solution on a hyper-scaler?
Because that's their subject matter expertise, right?
They are going to invest in the latest and greatest tools.
AWS is going to and as a software company,
you may not buy the latest piece of infrastructure because you're a loyalty
platform, right?
Or you are a retailer, right?
You don't, that's not what your day-to-day focus is on, right?
If you're a retailer, you're trying to innovate in that spot.
If you're a grocer, you're working on your customer satisfaction,
you're looking at the selection of the produce that you have and how do you
bring a good experience.
So like really specializing and like, you know, that's why, you know, going
back to that story,
that's why it makes sense for companies to go to Azure or AWS or Google Cloud
to get
the infrastructure solution, right? Because they're the expert in that, right?
A home-grown solution for loyalty or for any product in general, it's possible
to do.
And in some cases, it may make sense for an organization, but I think what
happens a lot of
the time, people underestimate how much overhead and work it is to maintain a
solution like that.
Because it's not when we're scoping for a project of any type of solution,
it's not just building and deploying and testing that, right? There's this
ongoing
maintenance that has to be there. So if I bring in an outside team to build a
custom and the perfect
loyalty solution that I want today or any solution for that matter, we could
probably get it done
and we could probably get it done in a reasonable expenditure amount too. But
one of the things that
we often do not consider, okay, what does the maintenance look like, right?
What happens when I
want to increase my loyalty offering because my loyalty solution that I have
built custom
is work so great. Now I need to expand my promotion offering or I have to
expand to different
channels, right? Then going back and doing those work in a piecemeal manner,
whether through an
internal IT team or on a contractual basis, bringing in, you're losing a lot of
the knowledge. No
one's really thinking about how this feature will have to expand over time. So
I think those are
some of the pitfalls people need to think about, right? And in a loyalty
setting, right, our entire
organization is focused on solving those use cases around loyalty and the
trends in loyalty we are
from the GoToMarket team, from our customer success team, right? Everyone's
living and
breathing loyalty, so that's our focus and that's what we want to enhance and
our customers
rightfully so like needs to work on that what their core competency is, right?
And usually juggling
those two things, it's possible, but I think people just need to realize it's
not just the
initial deployment, right? You really need to think about two, three years down
the road and
and take those costs into consideration or just in a monetary manner, right? Do
you want your
loyalty program managers to run the loyalty program and work on the tactics
that's going to be helpful
or do you also want them to build a solution constantly and meet the need of
whatever use case
that you may have to do? And I think that has to be considered and you know,
that's why SaaS
solution, often time, is a better solution for most of our customers, but you
know, in some cases,
it may be that a niche solution is better. You know, I haven't seen a lot of
like use cases in
loyalty, loyalty arena, but if I kind of look at other market, like I really do
think, right? You
know, if you're looking into a solution that way, you may not want to use
managed service or like
a take a software from someone else, especially if it's something very
proprietary, right? You
know, your IP depends on it and you know, it's an ancillary piece of solution
that you need to have
in place might make sense to build it in house, right? But if your goal is to
evolve with the market
and evolve with that trend and how loyalty is evolving from just a coupon based
system to an
experiential system and how consumers thinks about it, right? It's quite a big
of a big lift
for the customers to maintain it. Let's talk a little bit about that. Maybe it
's a little bit
of a scare for anybody looking to build custom. What would a stand up zero to
system to get going?
So they would need to consider an infrastructure. So they would need to need an
infrastructure that
can, you know, scale to their transactional volume, right? So they would need
to select the hyper
scaler of their own potentially to at least host the sounds. Now we've got a
foundation, right?
So build on top of that. What are other skills and roles would they need
internally or through
a system integrator and SI? Yeah, so the system integrator and SI, right? So
you also have to take
care of all of the integration touchpoint that you have, right? Even if you're
building it, like,
you know, is it talking to your point of sale? Is it talking to your talking to
your, you know,
e-commerce side or your mobile app, right? So all of those things comes into
your
market. To your ERP, to your PIM. Yeah. And those things like, you know, we
provide, we build
native integration and other loyalty software is due to. That's why you get
that scale.
But one of the things that I also wanted to mention, right? So you need the
right skill set,
right? You need to make sure that you built it right and it's scalable, right?
That's the
other big piece. If you built a solution and you had in mind that, you know,
you're going to have
100,000 members in your loyalty program and, you know, and that's what
successful looks like.
And we, what if your loyalty program is so successful? You got millions of
members, right?
Is the product that you build in is going to scale? Let's not talk about any
other features or
function, right? Can your software scale and provide that delightful experience
? So there's
a lot of things from a technical point of view, product design point of view
that would have to
be considered as well as the integration and maintaining those integrations. I
think that's a
good call out. So then, so now we need a base developer set based on whatever
framework is
typically selected by them. So, you know, two to eight, just base developers to
build that out.
And that's just basic functionality, right? Processing a transaction and
getting a reward.
Then we start to layer in front and back end development because you'll need
some sort of
interface for them to interact with. So you need front end developers who kind
of build out the
interface, potentially UX personnel to make sure that it's usable across the
business.
You probably need architects to work with the developers, right? So you need
tech
collector techs. You probably need a project management team to keep all of
these people on
fact, right? The list can grow scary big, right? Really quickly. Right. And all
of these people
are not always going to be involved in the care and feeding of it, like you
mentioned as well,
right? But a lot of them are. So are you pulling resources off of another
project to build this,
or are you, you know, all of these things that, you know, why we consider SaaS
to be important.
But, you know, if you are going custom, things to consider, right? Who are
these people? How
many of them are we inviting to the company picnic? You know, and what are we
doing with them when
the project's done? Are we going to the next version of this? Are we growing
this project? Or
we just going to hold on to it for the next five years? I think there's an
element of time there,
too, that you have to consider as a cost. The cost of getting those people to
build that
and up to speed. And then I don't have statistics on hand, but I have a feeling
that it's
longer than it takes for SaaS. Yeah, because first of all, let's assume you
hired them all
day one, right? And all at the exact same time. Now they got to figure out how
to work together.
Now they have to figure out, you know, how to, you know, what is the loyalty
project and all of that
stuff? So they're just getting people ready for that project is a significant
time investment as
well. So to and with that, take me through when you are gathering requirements,
if a customer could
come to you with a perfect set of requirements, what does it include? What are
the basic features
of that requirement? Because I know that there's a time component, there's a
priority component,
there's a requirement. But what would a perfect customer like handover look
like to you?
Yeah, I think for if we are building anything new, and again, I'll just kind of
go back like
the framework that I kind of want to work with, it may sound like from the
playbook of like
management consulting, right? But you know, I really want to focus on the
situation, right?
And based on that situation, what problems do we have, right? What is the
solution we are going to
propose against those problems and what outcome or you want to achieve, right?
And that's why I
think working on the business outcome and the problems that is being faced
rather than
or it relates to campaign or it relates to segmentation, it relates to group
account. I think those things
will fall in naturally. I think focusing on that business, why is important,
right? Then obviously
everything that you just have defined, right? If I have tens of use cases,
right, what is the level
of priority? Is it a business blocker and things of that nature? And we'll
prioritize that with
the customer and with our internal teams as well and we'll look at against our
backlog. But again,
right? You know, I would like, you know, what we noticed, right, when we frame
it that way,
the solution becomes a little bit more holistic. And it also puts the customer
in a frame of
a frame of mind, right? Well, they might think use case number nine is super
high priority, but
once we frame the discussion in terms of, okay, what outcome are you trying to
achieve with that?
Well, a lot of the time we see that the two priority emerges rather than
starting off with a list of
use case, which may be very well thought out. But you know, when we frame that
and once we
ask them, start to ask them those kind of questions, they usually come back and
, you know, they tell
us like what's important to them. And from there, we just have to take a look
at like, you know,
what's the timeline of that delivery looks like if we have to build something
new, right? Is there
one piece of integration that has to go out to one log another team dependency?
Right? So that,
all of that things comes into play. But as always, with any use case, I think,
you know, it's very
important for us to understand the why with the customer and do that discovery
so that, you know,
we are solving the most problem that's going to bring the biggest value,
essentially, if we kind of
think about the ROI of a particular future. Well, thank you so much. I think
with that,
it's a perfect time to wrap up this conversation. And as always, we take do our
three, two to three
takeaways, this doesn't have to be three. But today, I would love to just call
back that the
art of the possible does not stop. Just because you have built a strategy and
selected a vendor,
it does not stop. There's a constant evolution of our clients program that we
are here for the
entire step through from our customer success team all the way through to
product development.
So that art of the possible does not stop. I also wanted to call back in grad
school. It was sort of
like, you know, do what your core business functions are and outsource the rest
of it. So I want to
call back that loyalty is our core. That's our core business function and
retail or manufacturing
or distribution or any of those other things that our clients are doing. That's
your core business.
Loyalty is our core. So this type of relationship that you would have with
Ants Cloud allows us to hyper focus on making sure that your loyalty program is
as performing its best,
is evolving, is constantly leading the business need. And then that brings me
to my third one of
understanding the why and just circling back to the art of the possible, start
with the why and
working backwards from that, I think is is how amazing things get built rather
than trying to
prescribe before you diagnose. So those are my top those are my top three. I'll
pass it over to Scott.
I think I've only got one today. It was a big and really good reminder of the
scale of the
overhead of like a custom or from zero solution. You know, you always think
about, you know, feature
set in what's available when you build it towards an MVP for custom, but just
some of that infrastructure
that goes into that development is a good reminder to me to think more broadly
about, you know,
hosting and data requirements and all of the just foundation of a software
solution that
has to be built. So thank you. To it, your turn. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say
only one takeaway or
recap for listeners. Essentially, I think the when we are evaluating any
solution, it doesn't
have to be a loyalty solution. It could be a project management tool or
anything like that.
The checkbox of our requirement or what we think is important for a success of
that project
is is absolutely required and everyone should pay attention to that. But at the
same time, I
think also choose a team choose event that's going to work with you. That's
going to grow
with your business and that's going to solve your future need. And that's the
way you can
come successful because if you pick a vendor that checks all of the checkboxes
today,
but they're pivoting in a different direction where your business is not going
and, you know,
asking those questions and making sure that you are aligned with them is going
to ensure
longer term success. So we don't run into a situation like 40 years down the
road. And if you like
that your use cases are no longer getting innovated on. So I think that's very
important in picking
any vendor. Make sure that they are part of your success journey and not
necessarily they're
going to just make you successful today, but are they going to make you
successful three years from now?
Absolutely. Wholeheartedly agreed. Thank you so much for joining us today, too.
And to our listeners,
look out for the next CX Anonymous. Take care.