Attracting Customers with New Digital Experiences

Miriam McLemore: What is your philosophy about the customer journey and the accelerated need for digital to move companies forward?

Amanda Jobbins: I’m constantly thinking about ways we can offer our customers new kinds of digital experiences so they can engage with our solutions online before meeting us and can make a total cost analysis. They can also look at some of our solution implementations by their peers and be confident that it will be the right solution for them. It’s a challenging time to build digital engagement journeys with our customers, but that’s where we have to focus, especially now with so much of it happening online.

Miriam McLemore: Is this kind of research and analysis something you’re doing more of?

Amanda Jobbins: Omnichannel analytics is critical because it’s how you understand the journey your customers are on when they engage with your brand. We want to understand what they are looking for online: the kind of search terms they are entering, which competitors they are looking at, the reviews they are reading, the kinds of peer communities they’re in – and then how they want to engage with a brand once they’ve decided they need a solution. We need to pull all that data together, ratify it against the optimal targets for our business, and correlate it with our existing customer data to tell us a customer’s propensity to buy. We can use that to develop models that will help us improve conversions.

Miriam McLemore: A recent Gartner study found that CMOs are more optimistic going into 2021 than their C-suite peers and that they’re less likely to take risks. I found that surprising. How do you think about risk-taking at Infor?

Amanda Jobbins: I disagree with that finding. Most of the CMOs I speak to think you won’t stand out if you don’t take some calculated risks. These markets are so busy that we have to be a little daring to cut through the noise. In terms of whether we’re optimistic, I think we’re realistic. Because of COVID-19, it’s been a tough time for many people, but it’s also made us more resilient. That’s a theme I’m seeing with our customers. They’re preparing themselves to be strong for the kinds of transformations they will have to undertake to keep winning in their markets.