Q&A with Philippe Guiheneuc, Marketing Director at Akio

MEDIA 7 | June 11, 2020

Philippe Guiheneuc is the Marketing Director at Akio, a company that provides customer experience software platforms. It proposes cross-channel solutions that help you with customer engagement management, voice of the customer analysis and brand reputation monitoring.

In this Q&A, Philippe speaks about customer satisfaction, CRM, marketing strategies, challenges, branding, and more.

MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into Marketing?
PHILIPPE GUIHENEUC:
Coming from a family of officials, farmers and painters, I discovered the world of business at the ESSEC business school in Paris. I carefully avoided three subjects: Computer Science, with its flashy green dashboards on a black background, Accounting, for its remarkable ability to make me lose patience, and Selling, because I could not bear to be told no. Consequently, my first job was to sell accounting software!

Only fools refuse to change their mind. So I may be half intelligent, because althoughI have discovered a passion for businesswith its three components (communication-marketing-sales) and innovation, to the point of teaching storytelling in business schools, unfortunately I remain insensitive to the poetry of a P&L.

That's why I chose to work at Akio. Respect for customers is no longer just a professional obligation but an extraordinary lever for growth. Thanks to the Akio.Cx platform, I contribute a little bit every day to make life easier for customer agents, and that's what makes me happy.

M7: What core issue does Akio.Cx software aim to address and what sets it apart from the competition?
PG:
Akio is the editor of the omnichannel call centre platform Akio.Cx. Our core mission is to turn complexity into simplicity!

In the context of increased competition, the quality of the response delivered to clients has become a major stake for all companies. However, the job of a customer advisor is becoming increasingly complex as customers use new channels to interact with companies.

With the customer service platform Akio.Cx, the customer service will develop a personalised experience for its clients, regardless of which channel they choose (phone, e-mail, chat, social media, etc.), thanks to unified client knowledge that is reinforced by semantic analysis.

In 20 years, Akio has built a solid base of references among the largest French companies (AxaBanque, Banque de France, MGEN, URSSAF, Air France, Interflora, Engie, GrDF; Sarenza, Kiabi, Arkea, BPI France Cora, LPM Dyneff, Grep, Ircem, Photoweb, Sandoz, MTP, VMmag, MSD, CAFAT, CGSS, OPT, Bruneau, AMDM, etc.)

Initially, the platform was provided ‘on-premise’, then through a ‘hybrid’ model, and since 2017 it’s provided as a ‘SaaS’ tool.

Recently, Akio announced a global partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise that will offer the Akio.Cx platform to all of its 800,000 customers. This alliance is coupled with a project linked to the notion of the "augmented agent", i.e. high-tech tools made available to customer service representatives to facilitate their work and help them gain in efficiency.


"Corporate executives have realised that with the web and social networks, a dissatisfied customer can create a devastating effect by communicating his dissatisfaction to all his contacts."

M7: How are your customer and prospect needs and values changing? How will these changes affect the decision-making of customers and prospects? What are the best methods followed by your marketing team at Akio to capture these shifts and trends quickly and reliably?
PG:
Our decision-makers are the Customer Relationship Managers. They manage platforms for customer agents, their objective being to ensure customer satisfaction, while improving contact centre productivity. This is a balancing act, all the more difficult as the pressure increases every day. In fact, corporate executives have realised that with the web and social networks, a dissatisfied customer can create a devastating effect by communicating his dissatisfaction to all his contacts.

Company value is directly correlated to customer satisfaction, as shown for years by the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index), which is increasingly used by financial analysts to predict a company's short-term stock market value.

As a result, in recent years, customer services have been receiving increasingly large budgets for modernisation. These budgets concern in particular the acquisition of software such as Akio.Cx. According to Gartner, Customer experience (CX) and CRM posted the highest growth among all application software markets, and remained the largest enterprise software market in 2018, with more than $48.2 billion in sales.

At the same time, the customer relationship business is becoming increasingly complex. Customer service agents have to manage extensive catalogues of offers.

Regulations are constantly changing and expanding, forcing them to comply with increasingly cumbersome procedures. Customers are more demanding (an Akio-LSA study has shown that two-thirds of them are ready to change brand if they are not satisfied from the first interaction). Above all, the channels of exchange are multiplying. In addition to the telephone, traditional post and email, chat, Facebook Messenger and Twitter are being added, and soon other channels such as video or instant messaging.

Understanding this evolution is essential for Akio to continue to offer adapted and efficient offers to its customers. To achieve this, we privilege three axes of development:

- Contact with our customers, in the form of monthly meetings and quarterly workshops to discuss business perspectives. Of course, these exchanges are complemented by the daily relations that our Customer Success Managers maintain with our customers.

- Observation of the analyses reported by our ecosystem of partners, in particular the reports and white papers published by analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes, IDC and Markess, along with our competitor’s literature.

- Finally, studies carried out by Akio, most often in partnership with a specialist, to better understand a specific point on which there is no survey or study. In particular, we were the first to identify that the well-being of their teams was more important to the Customer Relationship Managers than the achievement of customer satisfaction objectives.

M7: How do you approach branding your company, its products, and services? What’s your go-to resource – websites, newsletters, any other to stay in touch with the critical changes occurring in the digital space?
PG:
When it comes to branding, the first step is to develop a clear message. This message reflects the company's vision, which is based on our understanding of the needs of the market, as well as the promise of value and the guarantee that this promise will be kept. Akio's core message (see the answer to your 2nd question) is the guiding line of all our communications.

It is declined in several ways depending on the audience we address, the situation and the delivery method used. We use both traditional media such as brochures, emailing campaigns or stands attrade shows, as well as more original formats (infographics, workbooks, forums, demonstration videos...). More generally, although our clients are sensitive to traditional approaches, our marketing is evolving towards more digital. The other major trend is the production of content, for which we strive to maintain a high level of quality. Whether it is an article, a white paper or a study, each new content produced by Akio must bring something never heard, such as a new information or an innovative analysis.


"With an ever-increasing level of customer demand, software editors, like all companies, have an interest in proving that they are selling not just a product but a complete experience."

M7: Can you share some top challenges that contact centres face when transitioning to an omnichannel approach?
PG:
They are of three types: strategic, managerial and technological.

- Strategic: The goals that customer service sets for itself by adding new interaction channels will have an impact on the way they are implemented. For example, our customer DHL implemented the chat channel in addition to phone and email, originally to reach a specific audience of digital natives. But the new channel was quickly adopted by a large part of their audience, so they had to set new productivity targets to compare the effectiveness of the different channels and measure the performance of the omnichannel approach, such as the ability of the agent to process a request more quickly using multiple channels.

- Managerial: The skills for answering a call are not the same as those for writing an email, or responding to a Facebook message. Therefore, the contact centre has the choice between recruiting multi-skilled advisors and training them to use all channels or building teams that are specialised by channel. The second type of organisation does not prevent an omnichannel approach as long as the tool used allows on the one hand to centralise all the information in a customer file, and on the other hand to share it between agents. So far, the choice seems to depend essentially on the existing organisation and the willingness of management to decompartmentalize the channels.

- Technological: Although it seems obvious that an omnichannel approach must be based on omnichannel software, few software programs are actually really omnichannel. Most of them pile up technological bricks that communicate with each other. This is enough for the daily life of customer service agents, but such tools, which are not very agile, quickly become fragile as soon as they need to be upgraded. In addition, they do not offer consolidated statistics across all channels, which limits the measurement of customer service performance.

M7: What lessons have you learnt from your time at Master 2 Marketing that you have applied to the marketing strategies at Akio?
PG:
I teach digital communication and brand content in Master 2 marketing in a business school in Paris. Contrary to Akio, whose activity is 100% B2B, brand content, which I practiced a lot in a previous experience, is B2C oriented. More generally, the notion of "brand" is insufficiently exploited among software publishers. However, with an ever-increasing level of customer demand, software editors, like all companies, have an interest in proving that they are selling not just a product but a complete experience.

At Akio, I helped accelerate this marketing transformation. Our marketing and sales discourse was very technical, very product-oriented; it remains so, but we have added a "customer experience" dimension. For example, instead of listing the product functionalities in the form of concepts and benefits ("Integrates an AI engine", "Workflow management", "Report generator") we now present the functionalities as part of the user journey in the form of a graphic design

At a strategic level, we redefined Akio’s communication guidelines based on the essential message, then redesigned all our marketing supports and campaigns according to those guidelines. This gives consistency to our communication and helps audiences remember Akio.


"When it comes to branding, the first step is to develop a clear message. This message reflects the company's vision, which is based on our understanding of the needs of the market, as well as the promise of value and the guarantee that this promise will be kept."

M7: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work - what day to day processes have you had to re-tool to be able to pull them off remotely? What does your remote tech stack look like?
PG:
As an IT company, Akio is well equipped for teleworking - some of the teams were already doing it long before the coronavirus crisis. Because we work in the field of customer relations, we regularly manage sensitive periods with our customers, for instance when they face a peak inactivity. The period of lockdown and the lifting of lockdown have therefore not caused any major upheaval in our business. For example, Akio has not had to use the administrative unemployment scheme; on the contrary, we seek at all times to increase the production capacity of the teams.

This is particularly true of the teams of IT developers, because they are organised in Agile mode, a work organisation that easily adapts to remote working.

M7: How does Akio manage multiple marketing divisions effectively? What type of storytelling experiences do you produce for social media channels?
PG:
Akio is an SME with a small marketing team, which facilitates a horizontal management where each marketer is responsible for his own scope of activity. Regarding our actions on social networks, we try to respect the spirit of web 2.0, namely "give to get": our contents and stories are intended to bring information or entertainment to the public, with no other counterpart than brand valorisation.

For example, we produced a study on how contact centres were organised to deal with the coronavirus crisis. Following a survey of nearly 60 customer relationship managers, we published an analytical report that provides useful trends on management options and technological choices made to deal with the crisis. This report, in French, has been made freely available to the market and was shared on social networks. 

M7: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Selects Akio to Deliver New CCaaS Hybrid Offering. What is your role in meeting partnership expectations? How do you go about assessing their needs?
PG:
The collaboration of the marketing department in this alliance project focused on the study of needs and the definition of offers.

An important part of the study work was carried out upstream of the discussions by the marketing teams of each partner. It was mainly a question of comparing and aligning our visions of the market. A few meetings were necessary, but in fact the analysis of the two companies was very close and this part of the work was easy.
More complicated was the definition of the offer, since each of our products propose a wide range of features.

As this is a high-tech field, using various engineering techniques (telephony, digital techniques, collaborative tools, cloud...), product marketing was largely driven by the Product Owners of the two partners. Along with the development and infrastructure engineers, they drew the outlines of what the new offer will be. Marketing and communication had an advisory role. It helped to maintain the consistency of the offer with the expression of market needs, and will also contribute, in due course, to making this offer known to the public through a coordinated plan of communication actions.

M7: If I were to say to a bunch of people who know you, ‘Give me three adjectives that best describe you,’ what would I hear?
PG:
Maybe committed, cerebral and enthusiastic.
As with everyone else, none of these adjectives are easy to hold. Keeping on course with the essential line of one's existence is a constant struggle.

ABOUT AKIO

Customers are everywhere and can contact the brand at any time, through any available channel.

The Akio.Cx platform by Akio allows your Customer Relation teams to deliver an omnichannel customer experience: telephone, e-mails, chat, Facebook Messenger and Twitter are natively unified in one user-friendly single tool.

Call centres and outsourcers, worldwide, are using the AI powered Akio.Cx platform and its Analytics module to enhance their agents and transform supervisors & managers into client satisfaction super-heroes!

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Coalesce Launches New Partner Initiatives to Help Automate the Modern Data Stack

GlobeNewswire | May 30, 2023

Coalesce, the data transformation company, today announced a new partner program to expand training options and teamwork, as well as to help Snowflake Data Cloud customers more effectively manage their modern data stack. The Coalesce Partner Program now features three tiers – Select, Premier, and Elite – offering various incentives including training, sales and marketing, and referral commissions. Coalesce partners are equipped with resources to build their Coalesce expertise and bring innovative joint solutions to the data market. “Since day one, our partners have been a valuable extension of our team and critical to the success of the company. We’ve designed our partner program around three core principles: collaboration, automation, and respect,” said Courtney Heithoff, Head of SI Alliances – North America at Coalesce. “We would not be where we are today without our partners, and the expansion of these programs will allow us to better support current and future partners, and most importantly, to ensure the success of our mutual customers.” Coalesce is the only transformation solution built exclusively for the Snowflake Data Cloud. Coalesce revolutionizes the “T” (transformation) in the ELT data management process by combining the flexibility of code and the speed of automation, in an intuitive visual interface. The Coalesce Partner Program puts this next-generation transformation solution in the hands of partners with the following benefits based on their partner tier: Select Partners - Designed for partners who are just getting started with Coalesce, this level includes referral commissions, access to training, and a presence on the Coalesce website. Premier Partners - Designed for partners who have an established track record of onboarding certified team members and delivering solutions to joint customers, this level includes extensive company support and a dedicated partner manager. Elite Partners - Designed for partners who have demonstrated exceptional expertise and success in delivering Coalesce solutions, this level includes instructor-led training, broader marketing support, and dedicated team office hours. “We’ve worked with Coalesce for over a year now and have experienced first hand the impact of their team and technology,” said Erik Duffield, co-founder and CEO at Hakkoda, a Coalesce Elite Partner. “The product alone is powerful and makes data transformations easy, but the biggest selling point is the Coalesce team. They are quick to answer questions and will work to ensure the platform can solve any challenge encountered. They have a truly best-in-class offering.” All partners are empowered with capabilities that are unique to Coalesce, including: Data Team Productivity - Coalesce enables faster, sustainable development by standardizing and governing work across data projects. This allows projects to scale with secure and more predictable DataOps while shortening ramp-up time and boosting the effectiveness of all data team members. Exclusively Built for Snowflake - Coalesce is built by data warehousing industry experts to work specifically for Snowflake, offering full support for Snowflake functionality and automatically generating standardized, Snowflake-native code. Data teams can work more effectively by templatizing, extending, and documenting their work easily. Adaptable Approach to Automation - Data transformations are accelerated by using column-level metadata, a novel approach for the data warehousing and ELT space. This enables users to work more efficiently with full context into data lineage and transformation history. “Coalesce and Resultant have a similar vision – to advance data modernization across industries,” said Michael Tantrum, National Sales Director at Resultant, a Coalesce Elite Partner and Coalesce 2022 System Integrator Partner of the Year. “We have always been committed to getting Coalesce's innovative platform in front of organizations and with the revamped partner program, we have even more tools at our fingertips to continue driving success." The revamped program, which will be rolled out to dozens of partners across the globe, now includes training, exams, and product certifications for experts in building data pipelines with Coalesce. About Coalesce Founded in 2020, Coalesce is the only data transformation tool built for scale. As the first data transformation platform to combine the speed of an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), the flexibility of code, and the efficiency of automation, Coalesce empowers its customers with increased data team productivity and insights. Based in San Francisco, Calif., Coalesce is backed by Emergence Capital, 11.2 Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, and Industry Ventures and supports customers worldwide. Learn more at https://coalesce.io/.

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CHANNEL PARTNERSHIPS

SuperOps.ai Launches Mental Wellness Initiative at Channel Partners Conference & Expo to Support MSPs

PR Newswire | May 30, 2023

Future-ready PSA-RMM platform provider SuperOps.ai launched the #TogetherWeCan initiative at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo aimed at supporting Managed Service Providers (MSPs), many of whom struggle with mental health issues silently. SuperOps.ai, which offers an AI-powered Professional Service Automation (PSA) and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform, set up a 360-degree video booth at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, held between May 1 and May 4, to bring awareness to an important and serious issue in a fun manner. Over 100 attendees took the 360-degree videos to symbolize their support for MSP mental wellness and to spread the message that together MSPs can handle the challenges that come with the stresses and strains of running an MSP business. "Entrepreneurship is a lonely journey and founders do struggle with the pressures they face daily. MSP business owners face specific challenges due to the nature of their jobs as they need to keep their clients up and running and safe 24*7. It can be a very lonely job and can seem thankless at times. We realized that many MSPs struggle with mental health issues and do not seek support and do not know who to reach out to even if they want to get help. The #TogetherWeCan initiative is an attempt on the part of SuperOps.ai to do away with the stigma, educate MSPs on the importance of mental wellness, and to offer them a sense of community and support so they have someone to turn to when they need help," said Arvind Parthiban, Co-founder and CEO of SuperOps.ai. About SuperOps.ai SuperOps.ai is a unified PSA-RMM platform powered by AI and intelligent automation, built for growth-focused MSPs. The company was founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Arvind Parthiban and Jayakumar Karumbasalam. SuperOps.ai is backed by marquee investors, Addition, Tanglin Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, and Elevation Capital.

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