AiThority Interview with Rebecca Biestman, CMO at Reputation

Hi Rebecca, please tell us about your current role and how you arrived at Reputation.

Thanks for having me, Sudipto. I joined Reputation as CMO in March 2020 to scale the business, drive broader brand awareness, and advance the company’s newly cemented mission to tie reputation management to the customer experience (CX).

As CMO, I oversee the company’s overall marketing strategy, including product marketing, demand generation, corporate communications, brand management and customer engagement. Over the past decade, I have held several executive marketing and brand management roles. I was recently the vice president of marketing at Dialpad, where I led global marketing programs. Before Dialpad, I served as head of marketing and social impact for RMS, the world’s leading risk management software company. I have also held marketing and brand management roles at Gap, Inc. and Earth Essentials.

What is Reputation and what are your various services/solutions for marketing technology users?

Reputation is the creator of the Reputation Experience Management (RXM) category. We are hyper-focused on changing how companies gather and act on customer feedback to drive decision-making and enhance their customer experience programs. Our feedback-to-action platform translates vast amounts of solicited and u********** customer feedback into prescriptive insights that companies use to learn from and grow. Thousands of global organizations rely on us and our patented Reputation Score X to provide a reliable index of brand performance to make targeted business improvements. Our investors are some of the best in the business, Bessemer Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. We have built trusted relationships with over 250 integration partners such as Google, Facebook, Salesforce, J.D. Power, Amazon and Web.com.

Reputation addresses a critical need for today’s brands that strive to understand and act on their customers’ feedback to create the ideal customer experience. With the overwhelming amount of customer interaction and feedback data that exists today, it’s challenging for brands to get a solid read on their customers’ overall perception of the company and its relation to the competition. In addition, while various metrics are commonly used to gauge performance, it’s difficult for brands to gather feedback data from disparate listening posts and then know what to do to improve in the eyes of their customers. The Reputation platform incorporates the following to stitch together a wholly comprehensive offering:

– The Reputation platform features Reputation Score X, a new prescriptive analytics tool that shows where a brand stands today, how it got there and what it should do next to improve. Experience Insights consolidates all review and survey data in a centralized location so brands can better understand what their customers are saying by topic or by sentiment. Competitive Reporting (Beta) shows the competition’s Reputation Scores, star ratings, reviews and customer feedback and provides direction on how to come out on top.

– The Reputation platform is built for modern companies that understand their customers’ increased reliance on text and SMS-based communication. Conversational Surveysuse text messages to make responding to customer surveys personalized and accessible. Brands can meet their customers where they are — on their smartphone — and collect and respond to feedback in-the-moment from the Reputation platform.

– The Reputation platform is open, which means it seamlessly integrates with a brand’s other critical data sources to provide centralized access to all the metrics that matter. Feedback Anywheredisplays third-party data streams alongside a brand’s Reputation data to create a holistic view of the customer experience.

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Tell us about your ICP (ideal customer profile) and which markets are you currently targeting?

Today, approximately 1,000 enterprises across 77 industries use the Reputation platform. This includes seven of the top 10 global automotive OEMs and more than 10,000 auto dealerships in the U.S. alone, with a growing base in Europe. Additionally, more than 250 healthcare systems — including 14 of the top 30 — and over 100 leading property management firms use the platform. Reputation is also gaining traction with other industries, including financial services, hospitality and retail services.

That said, our platform effectively serves the largest and most well-known brands in the world, but we are just as relevant and useful for small businesses. Our RXM platform is user-friendly for companies of all sizes because it’s quick to deploy, makes an immediate impact, and users don’t have to be data scientists to drive ROI.

How is the pandemic era shaping up for the customer services solutions industry?

Customers interact with brands online now more than ever, and their expectations for gold-standard engagement are only increasing. Every year since the advent of social media, brands’ reputations have been increasingly influenced by response time to digital feedback and the accuracy of their business information across every channel. (In fact, brand reputations have been created or destroyed based on how well this was executed.) This is why experience management and the technology that enables it (like Reputation’s Reputation Experience Management platform) are so critical. This is also why Reputation has seen significant growth in its own customer base over the years.

But the pandemic introduced a new wrinkle: brands’ ability to communicate and align with cleanliness and health procedures (like mask-wearing). Now — and for the foreseeable future — CX isn’t just about whether a brand responded to a review; CX is linked to personal safety.

Indeed, shaping and influencing the customer experience is a priority for brands now more than ever.

What major changes do you expect to happen once Marketing and Sales teams move past the pandemic restrictions?

If you thought digital marketing was crowded now, just wait. Digital marketing isn’t going anywhere, and for businesses that haven’t figured that out, it’s already likely too late. At the same time, digital is more crowded, flooded by companies that used to rely heavily on other marketing tactics like field events. To stand out, businesses need to understand their prospects or customers better than anyone else. I.e., how well do you know the person you’re selling to? If you know them really well, you should know the channels they’re on, the things they care about, and the words they use. If you’re a B2B business, what are your customers being judged on or measured by? And for B2C, what do your target consumers care about? If you don’t know these answers, your results will show it quickly.

Events are never coming back, at least not like they were pre-COVID. The days of staffing teams of people to work tradeshow exhibition floors are gone. Companies that delude themselves into thinking that virtual events or webinars can make up for that experience are also mistaken. Businesses need to ask themselves, “What is it about the event experience that helped drive results?” Often, there is a particular combination of brand awareness, live interaction, competitive positioning and showmanship that creates positive business outcomes. Marketing and sales teams must get specific about what the business needs and use other marketing tactics or hyper-targeted virtual/in-person event strategies to achieve these goals.

More and more companies will take risks with their messaging. The need to stand out in 2021 is probably more important than ever, and it could be a make-or-break year for many businesses. Many companies got a bit of a pass during COVID-19, but that won’t happen in 2021. Companies will either regroup and grow, or they’ll continue to stagnate and decline, exposing long-term weaknesses they probably had anyway. If 2020 tested businesses’ resilience to drastic change and variability, 2021 will be the year of “show me, don’t tell me.” We will start to see more companies become bolder, edgier, and provocative, pushing the boundaries compared to “play-it-safe 2020.” For many businesses, in 2021, the stakes are higher than ever.

Tell us a little more about your current remote workplace collaboration technology stack? How is it different from the first two months of lockdown?

Like so many companies, when COVID hit we had to figure out how to make it all work in a disparate and “w*************” environment. Our company uses a variety of solutions: from Slack to Asana, all the way to RingCentral, HubSpot and Jira. Workplace collaboration technology is such a crowded market, and like so many companies of our size in hyper-growth mode, we tend to move fast and purchase tools that meet the needs of today. As a result, we had various teams around the company licensing tools that optimized their individual requirements, rather than thinking holistically about how we wanted the company to communicate. We saw first hand that when different teams are utilizing so many different tools, cross functional collaboration becomes difficult and also increases cost/ complexity into the business. As a result, we are undergoing a consolidation for many of our collaboration tools to Google Suite.

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Tell us about your various data science initiatives?

Reputation publishes annual industry reports focused on the state of the customer experience in various sectors. Data from these reports clues in industry leaders in healthcare, auto, property management, and retail as to how their business’ reputations are faring among customers compared with competitors and practical advice on improving performance.

Each report is pulled by Reputation’s Data Science team, which applies machine learning to unstructured text from consumer reviews on Google, Facebook and other sources specific to each industry.

Your predictions on the future of Marketing automation in the era of AI ML / Robotics?

As advanced technologies continue to expand into our daily lives and routines, AI and ML’s adoption in the workplace will continue to increase heavily. Today, many marketing systems already leverage some component of intelligence or machine learning to improve efficiency. I see this trend persisting as technology moves toward user-friendly low-code, or no-code platforms where any marketer can manage their projects or efforts without a technical background.

Any technology in advertising that you are keenly following and expect to become a major disruptor in the coming months?

I think that Demandbase and Criteo are two great AdTech companies to watch. There are two significant problems for marketing teams with large digital ad and display strategies these days. First, companies don’t incorporate ad campaigns into a unified digital targeting strategy, so most Ad campaigns are run in silos and separate from other targeting campaigns. Second, we’re moving more towards a “cookieless” world, meaning cookie (or pixel) retargeting will start to dissolve. Demandbase and Criteo (along with a few other companies) are at the forefront of solving these two critical problems.

Tell us how your interactions play out with your CIO and CISO? As a CMO what are your perennial concerns in data management workflows?

As a data company ourselves, we keenly understand the importance of data integrity and accessibility. For marketing specifically, we use so many forms of data that are incepted from functions across our company: sales conversion data, customer experience data, our own data science team’s product data, and more. Having a unified data collection and collation strategy and technology to support that level of accessibility was a key investment for our company. But accessing and distributing the data is only one piece of what I work on. Ensuring data integrity and broad distribution and understanding of our data is a company priority and one that impacts marketing directly. Without accurate and accessible company data funneling-in across our teams, our marketing organization wouldn’t be able to make good decisions around external corporate positioning, competitor dispositioning, and even campaign investment.

Your message to young female marketing technology professionals – what kind of data science training should they acquire to be successful in your industry?

The best marketers are those who own their businesses, from strategic inception to tactical execution, all the way to data analysis and program optimization. This is especially true in tech marketing, which tends to be very quantitative across all functions. For young females, owning the data around your business can be intimidating and often relegated to functions like marketing operations. Training around defining appropriate campaign KPIs, funnel reporting, forecasting, and analytics implementation are all important from the beginning of one’s career. I was lucky to have that training and expectation set early on, and it has made me better equipped to make agile decisions, inform strategic imperatives for the company and my team, and feel comfortable presenting in front of boards, investors, executives, my peers and those who I manage.

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Thank you, Rebecca! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.