After just a couple months with the Thunderhead ONE team, I am incredibly excited about the ONE Engagement Hub and its capabilities to provide customer journey insights to marketing and business process teams. I have talked to countless customers and partners about the ever-elusive omni-channel insight and actionability problem. At this early stage in my new adventure, I already truly believe in ONE's ability to help solve this problem.
Why? Let's be honest. There is no single system for customer insight within the enterprise, and there shouldn't be. There will always be tools for different organizations that cater to the specific user interface, reporting and functional needs of that organization. Trying to suggest that any single system will completely satisfy all will only lead to frustration, workarounds, skunkworks projects, duplication. With strategic leadership, a business unit should make choices that balance the specific needs of that business unit with the loftier goals of consolidated insights.
The end customer doesn't care about your systems. about your definition of "channels", about your organizational structure. The customer is going to interact with a brand at any available entry point that any business unit within that brand makes available to them. It is then a brand's responsibility to somehow aggregate (then reduce) the data derived at those touch points so that efficient marketing strategies and business outcomes fall out.
In most realities, each business unit is doing OK. Each channel is doing OK. But the higher level insights have lagged, leading to disjointed, ineffective, inconsistent customer experiences as that customer takes advantage of the growing set of access points that have been made available to them (and that they now expect).
That's where ONE Engagement Hub comes in. ONE was built from the very beginning with this realization firmly in place--that insights will be derived across systems, across customer touch points, across online and on premise. Its core tenets hold firmly in place towards this goal--non-invasive, intuitive and usable interfaces (really), awareness of different channels without being beholden to them, rapidly available insights that become a lightweight layer over an incredible depth in power, scale and decisioning intelligence.
I am so excited to be in this zone. I have joined a team that represents a perfect balance of professionals that I have succeeded with before and folks I'm just getting the pleasure to meet that have unbelievable skill sets, backgrounds and experiences.
We are looking for an additional handful of partners to join us in this journey--digital agencies and system integrators who appreciate the vision of omni-channel insights and have struggled to date with systems that have fallen short of that promise. We are ready to be true partners in this, to be there every step of the way as we train and enable your organization around ONE's ability to fulfill the omni-channel customer journey promise that is fundamental to your strategy.
