Transforming Marketing through Trigger-Based Journeys: A Talk with Vinay Deo

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Power 365 show. We're an interview staff at Microsoft across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technology Stack. I hope you'll find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Redmond Washington in the United States. He works at Microsoft as a principle group product manager. He's accomplished technical leader with rich experience at all stages of product development, from vision to execution to market launch, including leading high stakes execution focus projects involving C-level executives from large companies around the globe. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, vinay. Thank you, mark. Glad to be here. Good to have you on the show. I'm excited to be talking to you because your area has gone through some massive changes based on announcements earlier this year. Before we unpack those, I always like to get to know my guests. So tell me food, family, fun what do they mean for you?

Vinay Deo: 1:42
Great. Yeah, let me introduce myself on those privates To start with. As you just noted, I live in Redmond, washington. I actually live quite close to the Microsoft campus headquarters. When the COVID lockdown happened, there was no better place than to just take a walk in the campus because it's pretty beautiful park like setting, with lots of trees and numerous walking trails. As for family, I have two grown up sons. One is in finance and, having done his tent in Wall Street firms, he's currently what a small business for himself and is busy running and growing it. My other son is in software, happens to be in Microsoft as well. My wife is a physical therapist, or physiotherapy as you would call it, in Australia, new Zealand, where you are For fun. I'm a news junkie. When I'm not watching, reading or following news, I love to be a handyman around the home and fix things, even when they're not broken. I love to travel and enjoy different cuisine. Over the years, as the Redmond and the Seattle area has grown to become a tech hub, it has brought a huge amount of diversity in people and, my extension, in food. So that's pretty good food seen here, with good Thai and Japanese food that I love. Of course, vancouver, canada is just about two and a half hours away, and that's a great place to get some real authentic Indian and Chinese food. So that's another trip I make time to time. Nice, do you like salmon? I do, actually, I grown to like salmon. It wasn't something that I actually tested before coming here, to be honest, but I love it.

Mark Smith: 3:21
Yeah as in, I would say the same. And then after eating salmon in Seattle, particularly at the fish market, I was a convert and my wife often calls on me now to make a salmon dish which I use smoked paprika and cumin and I use a garb syrup around it and I roast it and it's just, it takes me back to as close as I can get to what I worked out that they used in the markets there and, yeah, it's definitely a crowd pleaser whenever I make that dish and it definitely comes for me from the salmon eating Sorry, the yeah in Seattle.

Vinay Deo: 4:01
And it's not really. Yeah, no, I think what amazed me about salmon is how few ingredients it takes to make such a delightful dish.

Mark Smith: 4:09
Yes, yeah, so true, so true. What was your journey into Microsoft? How did your career? Where did you kind of start? And now you're in Microsoft. What was that journey for you?

Vinay Deo: 4:20
So I was born and I grew up in India, and I completed my college studies there, getting a master's in computer science. I started my career in New Delhi, india, as a software engineer, designing telephone exchange software. A few years later I moved to Sydney, australia, to try a new place to live and experience there. I worked for Alcatel, another telecom company developing pay phone management software. But I always had a dream the software was my passion and no better company than Microsoft for software. So I tried and got called with Microsoft and moved to US just when Windows 95 was being launched. So that kind of tells you my age here. That was a while ago, obviously. Initially I worked on early versions of personal devices and gadgets such as I mixed data, link watch, smart pagers or smart cards. I then joined systems management server, which was the precursor for system center and in-tune line of products. I later spent almost 10 years in Bing ads, working through all the highs and lows of search advertising, including the deal with Yahoo and all the reputation of that. And about three and a half years ago I joined my current team, which is customer insights and orchestration within the business application platform group here in Redmond. All through I've been in Redmond with Microsoft, enjoying work and life here.

Mark Smith: 5:51
Wow, what a journey. What a journey. I always find it when people talk about creating pay phone software and phone system software. It's such a journey and it's like areas that if you've been in the tech space, you generally would have come across or touched this type of technology across your career as well. So it's so cool to see that journey and that path that you've taken. But of course, that brings us up to some exciting announcements that were made earlier this year around Dynamics 365 customer insights and Dynamics 365 marketing, and I'm gonna get you to explain those, and I find it interesting that the two have joined together. I've spent a lot of time working actually for Microsoft in their CDP space, training a heap of staff across as an internal Microsoft staff on that technology, and I just saw when I delved into it deeply, that there was so much opportunity for customers if they really understood, if they got their data play right, and how it could really affect and create unique experiences for customers that were highly tailored, that, rather than just being segment based, which is a lot of the way people have been marketed to in the past, you could create the experience for one individual right, totally tailored to them, based on engagements, parameters that trigger, and then a lot of people when they think of marketing as back to email launches or SMS campaigns or things like that, where it was always a one to very broad many. But now we've kind of got this audience of one right that you can create these tailored experiences for individual people. So, as that as a bed for our conversation today, tell me about the recent announcements around customer insights in Dynamics 365 marketing.

Vinay Deo: 7:47
Sure glad to. And, Mark, I think you made quite a few statements that are so on point that I'm really amazed that you spent so much time thinking about all these things. So great to have brought it to you. So let me take a step back and pick up where you left on about the CDP and how these kinds of products or marketing has evolved. So significant challenge most businesses face today is around how to engage their customers and present their brand and product in the right way so customers will actually engage and react and take action that they want them to do. Customers on their side, their expectations have evolved these days and businesses are really struggling to keep up, let alone meet those expectations. For example, as a customer, there's nothing more annoying and off-putting to me than receiving an email talking about how great a product is when I actually have that product and I have a service ticket open about an issue with the product with the same company. This happens a lot actually. As a smart businesses, you want to wait until the customer issue has been resolved and the resolution has customer in a satisfied state. That is the moment to deliver such a message, not while they are unhappy with your product, If turned out to be unhappy even after the resolution. You want to deliver a different message, probably something that will win them back. However, businesses today are unable to deliver such experiences because they lack two things. They have two challenges. The first challenge that earlier talked about is absence of a 360-degree view of their customer. Most companies have a lot of data about their customers, such as what products they have bought, how much they have spent, when did they buy, what issues they may have faced, but getting all this together in a one unified profile so you know what each customer what Mark is going through today or what Vinay is going through today is pretty complicated. That's the first problem that we call data in silo, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insight is the product that's aimed and designed to solve that exact problem. The second challenge comes around the fact that, even if you have all this data, how do you act on it? Most marketing tools, as you rightly saying, were designed for sending one generic message to a large audience, literally bombarding millions of people with the same email about how great your product is or what offer you have. People are tired of such blast emails. They want messages that are personalized with their needs and their interest and they address them as who the individual they are. In today's world, reaction time is also critical. Everything needs to happen quickly. When a customer makes a purchase, they visit a specific web page, redeem a coupon or do something like that, they expect the company to know about that and respond immediately, not in weeks and months later. So Dynamics 365 Marketing, with the real-time journey capabilities, focuses on this second problem, about how to deliver experiences in real-time based on what the customers are doing, and the announcement was really about bringing this together so that a business can have an end-to-end solution. The first one gets their data together and organizes it so it's usable, and the second one lets you actually create these experiences easily and quickly to deliver personalized messages, personalized experiences, to the customers as you need them.

Mark Smith: 11:31
This is amazing and I want to unpack the joining together but also a bit of your thinking behind the scenes here, because it's interesting and I know before the school we discussed James Phillips. James Phillips back in might have been 2017, 2016, 2017, 2017, I think 2017 to 2018, I can't even remember but what he did is that we're no longer going to have Dynamics 365 Customer Service or CE, customer Engagement and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. What we're going to do is we're going to have Dynamics 365, we're going to bring them together the ERP and the CREPs. Do you know that I'm a slow learner and it's only taken me to this year to really understand the actual impact, the positive impact of that change that I saw that that insight, that vision created massive positive impact in our industry and growth by knocking down those siloed barriers or the way we thought of what was front of office, what was back of office. When this announcement was made around Dynamics 3.6, marketing and Customer Insights coming together, I heard rumors, murmurs out in the market from the community that you know this is a crazy thing to do, right, to bring these products together. It will confuse the customer, that type of thing. But once again, one thing I've noticed about how Microsoft runs is that you do your research, you think about how these impacts you're playing. I've always thought Microsoft plays the long game, not the short game, but always the long game for the win. What was your thinking behind the scenes of impact? To name change to products, to you know, dynamics 3.6.5 Marketing always was really kind of two products. They were there the real time and then they're traditional and there's some nuances or duplications that are in there. Then you've got this Customer Insights. What was your thinking around that? Obviously it's driven by customer and what we just talked about creating a better customer experience. Any other insight you can share around what your thinking was, why this was the right time to do it and what your vision, I suppose, is going forward.

Vinay Deo: 13:43
Certainly and yes, you're quite right, we take pride in being very customer focused and always listening to them, talking to them to understand the challenges and making sure our products evolve and our strategies evolve to meet them. As we were developing the real time capabilities in marketing product, what we heard time and often was the problem of data silo, which is, yes, we have a lot of data about our customers, but we just can't seem to bring them together to make sense out of it or even generate insight, which is the next level to step up. Really Collecting data in one place is one thing, but how do you use it to generate insights? And the third problem was that, even after doing all that, how do we act on that data really? So customer insights really is about that creating unified customer profile in one place from all of the data sources that you might have in your companies different business apps, that you have different databases. You have some, maybe externally one and collect that all together and then activate on it using the marketing product. What we noticed is typically, many times there are two parts of the same problem. You're trying to understand your customer and deliver a personalized experience, and these two are really part of the same end-to-end problem solution and these two will run independently and separately and they will not connect often together. So this announcement was about basically coming to that vision, saying why don't we put them together? Because both are really two half of the same solution and by putting them together in one skew or one license we make it easy for our customer to acquire them. We're not forcing them to deploy and use both product at the same time. It's just a licensing. You get access to both. You may be ahead in the marketing side of your house and take that product alone and not use customer insight, and that's OK. Or you may want to be starting saying I want to revamp my business data platform and let me get the data right before I activate on it. You could start with customer insight. Either or trying to do both are possible. So that's what we are enabling here. You acquire both the products together and you implement them as you go, based on your own timetable. You don't need to again run a new project like a purchase order and try to get another license set up license. They come together, they act together and it allows you the flexibility of timeline. And the vision obviously is what you mentioned earlier, mark, which is In Dynamics 365 family of products. We don't want each app to act like an island. It is all going to the dataverse or customer insights data, a kind of a database. There's one product that generates any kind of information about a customer. Once it is in dataverse, it's available for use in marketing product or other sales product. They all talk to each other through this dataverse layer. That's what gives you this tremendous power of knowing what your customer is doing or experiencing, no matter which surface they're connecting, which app they're connecting through a service app or a sales app or what have you. You can activate on it using your marketing app, which is also no longer just the classical one to many, but one to one. Really. I hope that gives you a little bit more insight on why they're coming together and how we are positioning them.

Mark Smith: 17:27
I like it. One thing, let's just unpack slightly there the SKU and how people can acquire this. Both customer insights and Dynamics 365 marketing always had a different licensing model than the other Dynamics type products. So correct me if I'm wrong CDP or customer insights specifically had a volume. It was based on number of unified profiles. If I'm correct, then the marketing was sold based on what? Was it? Number of contact records, or yeah it?

Vinay Deo: 18:01
was a combination of number of contacts and how many times can you communicate with them or interact with them, yeah, so tell me a bit about one.

Mark Smith: 18:09

What's the name of the new product and what's the SKU? We don't need to talk about pricing, because this is an international audience and it will be different in each location, but just tell us about the SKU and the thinking there.

Vinay Deo: 18:21
Certainly so. The new name of the combined SKU is we retain the name customer insights, because that's really the core. You're getting the insights from your customer. What used to be called customer insight is now called customer insight data, because it's focused on data. What was called marketing Dynamics 365 marketing is now called customer insight journey, because it's the journey side of the customer equation here that we're doing so. The SKU is single. You get licenses to both the products, but both products still remain separate apps.

Mark Smith: 18:54
They're not a single app. There's not a single installation.

Vinay Deo: 18:57
You can choose which one or both you want to use the licensing. I can't discuss the price, as you said, because it depends on the international market and whatnot, but the combined pricing actually gives you a better deal, so to speak, because you're getting the price, is not double up, those two individually bought, yes, yes, and you're getting a lot more installations, free installation, so sandbox, test and all those things then comes, for you have bigger entitlements in one SKU now or one licensing. So that's a pretty good deal and it simplifies it. You don't need to keep buying a lot of different kinds of licenses to do you set up your sandbox versus production, versus what have you, and we are moving towards the licensing. The terms are also changing. So, rather than talking in terms of contacts or unified profiles, just say people how many people you have in your system, really Right and interactions, because, again, messages is just one way of interacting. There could be other ways. You can send them texts. We have a lot more to communicate or interact. So it's people and interaction, and that's how the licensing has been simplified for them.

Mark Smith: 20:07
Excellent. So will I be able to buy add-ons like I need X number of interactions or I need an additional amount of people in CDP landscape? Customer insights was always sold as a block. You could buy our block per month, added to your account. How the add-ons working?

Vinay Deo: 20:27
Yeah, the concept is somewhat similar, but again much simpler, with each by the tiers of how many people and interactions you really need. So and we have multiple tiers of those so that you just buy add-ons that way. But it's much simpler math and equation than it used to be before.

Mark Smith: 20:45
Yes, I like it. Tell me about real-time journeys and how you see that going forward.

Vinay Deo: 20:51
Glad you asked. That's my passion, that's where I spend most of my time, so and that's actually a second announcement we did also that I want to bring in here. So real-time journeys. It's not a new product. It's been around for a while now. It's a set of capabilities that we released almost two and a half years ago now. At that time, the Dynamics 365 Marketing App was well-established product and supported the classical model of marketing that we talked about earlier segment-based campaigns, in which you basically created a segment of customers and send them messages millions of them. Basically, we call that outbound marketing because the model was more suited for this one-way communication, for doing your outbound marketing. But marketing as we talked recently, just before, has evolved from this one-way model. Today, engagements and experiences are personalized and they are about engaging the customer at the right moment. So we developed this new way of doing marketing campaigns and called it real-time marketing because, at the core, it enables businesses to connect with their customers at the right moment when they are the most likely to engage. An adoption of real-time, ever since we announced it has been really great. It has outpaced outbound marketing since it is introduction, has now reached a point where we feel comfortable and confident telling our customers to make it their primary way of working or doing so. That was a second announcement explaining to customer that they should start transitioning to the real-time.

Mark Smith: 22:30
I like it. And I like it that, once again, it's been led by the data that you're seeing. It's been led by the customer engages that you're seeing, and there's going to be customers that haven't thought about modern marketing, as opposed to what marketing was done when we first got the means to bulk send email. That's right, and I think that what they're getting is that, hey, when the licensing what you've got, you actually can now adopt these best practices. When it comes to engagement, one thing I know there's competitors out there and I know Adobe is a strong competitor to the suite SFcom. They've got tooling in the space and they've acquired over time. And then there's the a couple of point solutions that exist out in the market. More on that CDP side of the equation, how does customer insight journey differentiate from the other offerings that you're seeing in the market?

Vinay Deo: 23:23
Great question. So let me pick up where I left about what modern marketing is all about today. It's about experiences and responding at the moment when the customers are doing something meaningful. It's not about one way broadcasting anymore, and that was the thinking behind changing the name as well. It's now called customer insight journey. So it's about journey. It's not just about simple marketing really. So today the customers expect their experiences are personalized and their individual needs and interests are accounted for and acknowledged. So the new way of doing things, what we added as part of real time, is what we call trigger based journey. So we had segment based journeys, the classical way of doing things, and now there's a trigger based journey. A trigger is basically a specific customer action that you want to react to, for example, when they make a purchase, or when they open a service ticket or attain a certain spend level, and so on. Let me give a concrete example. Imagine a grocery chain that has a loyalty program, sort of the frequent buyer program. As part of that program, the company is able to basically collect information from their program members what they're buying, what is their spend level and which stores they go to when one of the member moves to a new city and updates their address with the program, that change in address can now be a trigger that one can respond to with a message welcoming them to their new city, including information about their nearest store, and may even include a discount coupon for them to use when they visit that store for the first time. Such a message is not only immediate as soon as the change was recorded, but is also very personalized. It includes information that's relevant and directly addressing the customer's new city and location information. And why stop there? Imagine that customer walks into that store and connects to the store Wi-Fi. That action of logging into the store Wi-Fi can also be a trigger and can immediately send them a text message reminding them or a push message If they have app reminding them they have a store coupon available or if they have tracked their previous purchases maybe a list of possible things you may be interested in with their IELIN information in this store. All of this is essentially not just messages. They are about experience now, and you are evolving, reacting to the user's current state of mind, current state of location and all the information that you have in real time. This is what differentiates real time from our competitors. Really, they may be able to deliver some of this experience, but it requires an army of consultants and IT professionals to be able to do this, whereas our focus and I take quite a pride in that is that it is designed for marketers. We don't require you scripting and a lot of deep knowledge about databases and a relationship to be able to do any of this. That is how we are trying to differentiate.

Mark Smith: 26:34
I like it. You talked about personalization there and how to use a case where a major insurance company, what they were looking for was when somebody went over an age threshold on their personal insurance, there would be different policies available to them. And so, once again, you didn't say everybody in the last. If you were segment based, they would be like everybody in this 12-month period, as an example, and your birthday might be three months into the future or three months in the past, where this whole real time now, on the day to your birthday, happy birthday, great. Just want to make you aware there's a different type of policy that you don't qualify for based on the age, banding and stuff, and so I like I mean that's a powerful story, right, because that is an audience of one and it allows you to really tailor. You know people don't like really being like, they consider it spam, right, if it's not personalized.

Vinay Deo: 27:27
You are an individual, important individual you should acknowledge as one.

Mark Smith: 27:30
Yes, yes, yes. Before I let you go, is there any closing remarks you'd like to make around this area?

Vinay Deo: 27:38
I could talk all day about personalization. If that's the stuff, yeah, Because that's my passion and that's my focus. But so let me just give you a few examples of personalization because that's really what sets things apart from a spam versus a real, effective marketing. It amazes me when today I get so many messages which has no name or any inclination that they know me as an individual. It is such a simple thing to do to just include your first or last name in the message, and I can only imagine people don't do it because it's probably hard for them to do, and that's one of the things our product makes it so easy. It's a pick list of predefined such placeholders. Just pick them whatever you want and insert them. Someone can even define this list for you, so you don't need to even think about how to get this kind of information. Other ways to personalize messages and experiences For example, you could change entire set of content. If you are bringing up this example of insurance absolutely Like different insurance product for different age brackets, the same email you don't need to create 10 different campaigns for 10 products. It could be the same one campaign, just based on your age group or your prior experiences or other information. You may have Different products. Information can be included in the same campaign, in the same message. So you feel I'm not getting general spam about anything and everything. I'm only getting information about the product. That's really, really relevant for me. Finally, there could be preferences. You react. You may prefer email, but some other people just like to respond to text or maybe push messages. We in our product can actually learn from these behaviors of engagement and automatically select the right channel to deliver the message, so the engagement will be higher. And, of course, there are personalizations with the branching of using the customer insight data. If you have attained certain spend level, you get different discount versus if you haven't. This kind of personalization is really endless. And this just goes on. I can talk all day, but of course we have a limited time here, so I'll stop there.

Mark Smith: 29:51
Vinay. Thank you so much. This has been such an interesting show. It's definitely clarified a lot of the thoughts I had about those announcements. Hopefully it's made it clearer to the community that separation of what a SKU as opposed to the products are still their individual products but they are available to everybody on those SKUs. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Vinay Deo: 30:11
Thank you Mark, I really appreciated this opportunity to talk about this area.

Mark Smith: 30:17
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show from Microsoft, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. How will you create on the Power Platform today? Ciao?