John Nash has spent his career helping businesses grow revenue through the application of advanced technologies, analytics, and business model innovations. As Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at RedPoint Global, John is responsible for developing new markets, launching new solutions, building brand awareness, generating pipeline growth, and advancing thought leadership.

As the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at RedPoint Global, John Nash leads marketing and product strategy initiatives with the primary goal of driving growth. A cross-functional leader, he collaborates with Sales to achieve revenue plans, Development to drive leading products, and the CEO and Executive team to develop, communicate and execute strategic market development initiatives.

He began his career at Accenture in 1986, where he helped found the CRM practice and ramped up that line of business from zero revenue to $1 billion over a seven-year period. Since then, he has spent his career helping businesses grow revenue through the application of analytics, advanced technologies and business model innovations. He is now applying those learnings to his role at RedPoint Global, an organization which helps its customers optimize customer engagement through a Customer Engagement Hub that connects all data to deliver in-line analytics that intelligently orchestrate interactions across all enterprise touchpoints.

“The biggest evolution I have seen in CRM is that customers are increasingly in control of the relationship,” he says. “Therefore, brands are shifting their focus to differentiate on customer experience rather than on products alone. This means that marketers are starting to take the lead as a revenue-generating function of the business rather than a support function.”

This shift increases the pressure on marketers, who realize that if their CX strategies don’t produce returns, their jobs could be on the line. At the same time, marketers lack confidence in their CX technology stack, as a revolving door of technologies have been introduced and integrated over the last several years without clear alignment.

“CMOs are now accountable for revenue and have to go across the enterprise to create a seamless customer experience, but historically have not had control over the technology stack,” he says. “We’re now seeing that evolve, especially as it comes to customer experience. Marketers are shifting their investments from chasing the next last-mile to the customer, such as email or social, to getting the foundational elements right: having a single point of control over data, decisions and interactions.”

Marketers have long known that understanding customers is the key to great marketing. And now, they can actually understand consumers at an individual level, operationalize it at an individual level, and really get down to segments of one.

“Customers expect consistency across all channels, and that is what marketers today are investing in,” he says. “The technology exists now where you can create a virtual organization around the customer without having to reorganize your physical structure. Even with siloed systems in place, you can create that single view by ingesting the data from those systems into an always-updating, real-time, golden record of who that consumer is and make that accessible to any enterprise application in real-time.”

Being able to access data in real-time is key for today’s customer, who is increasingly online and therefore expects real-time online experiences. The ability to feed any engagement system without needing to replace existing systems is a fantastic way to future-proof an organization. That way, if a new, innovative IoT device comes along, marketers can simply plug it in as another engagement channel, while still having a central point of control over their data.

To understand what consumers want in their brand experiences, RedPoint Global recently conducted  consumer research with Harris Poll and found three key customer requirements:

1. Highly personalized engagement based on a deep understanding of who they are
2. A consistent omni-channel experience
3. Privacy

“Customers are more willing to share data if it is used in ways that create value for them, either through reducing the friction or reducing the fatigue in the relationship,” he says. “What brands need to think about is, ‘how do I use data in a way that creates relevance?’ By creating more relevancy, customers share more, and it becomes a virtuous cycle. They also need to ensure that for those customers that don’t want certain types of communications, or want to be forgotten entirely, they have the technical mechanisms in place to do that.”

But despite a lot of talk about effective personalization, he said in their poll most (73 percent) consumers felt brands were not succeeding in effectively achieving that goal. So, what do CMOs need to do to bridge the gap?

“Marketers need to move beyond a basic understanding of customers in terms of demographic information to really tracking behavioral information along with their attitudes and experiences,” he says. “There's a lot of web streaming data and behavioral data across devices that is not being properly utilized. And if you don't have that deep understanding of the consumer, you can't hope to personalize the experience.”

To help marketers achieve the highest level of personalization, RedPoint has a Customer Engagement Hub that has three layers that can either be accessed together as a single hub platform or individually. Those three layers are: connected data, inline analytics and intelligent orchestration.

“Our connected data layer provides a customer data platform to create that golden record around each individual consumer,” he says. “That then feeds the inline analytics, which delivers tailored next-best actions in real time to consumers. Then there is the intelligent orchestration, which allows you to manage customer journeys across devices and touchpoints so that the consumer gets a consistent experience across channels.”

Consumers very easily pick up on fragmentation and are bothered by shifts in how different functions communicate or when they have to repeat themselves across channels.  Having a single customer view across the enterprise that is accessible in real-time helps to eliminate friction and fragmentation in the experience.

“Crafting a seamless customer experience is a marketer’s most important mandate today,” he says. “They key aspects that define a superior customer experience are that it be highly personalized, highly relevant, privacy-compliant, consistent across omni-channel devices and in the customer’s cadence. Marketers that can achieve that will not only be secure in their position, but will quickly turn into a growth-driver for the organization.”