Ep. 124 | How Not to Treat Customers Like Its 1980, Allison Hartsoe, Ambition Data CEO
This week Allison Hartsoe, CEO of Ambition Data talks about why we should not treat customers like it is the 1980s and how to be more forward thinking. In addition, it is product launch week and she will introduce Rubano’s Customer Core. Based on 100s of podcast interviews, dozens of consulting engagements, the Ambition Data team has put all our learnings into one solution while providing the personal guidance you love to achieve customer-centric change.
Please help us spread the word about building your business’ customer equity through effective customer analytics. Rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play, Alexa’s TuneIn, iHeartRadio or Spotify. And do tell us what you think by writing Allison at info@ambitiondata.com or ambitiondata.com. Thanks for listening! Tell a friend!
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Allison Hartsoe: 00:00 This is the Customer Equity Accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom-line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue-generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of Ambition Data. Every other week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go! Hello everyone. I do not often use my podcast as a personal platform, but today I want to share with you some exciting news along with just a bit of my personal journey. You may not know, but I grew up in the eighties, and I loved watching TV shows like family ties, where Michael J. Fox took his briefcase to high school. And there were movies like working girl and baby boom, and nine to five that showed how women could be part of the workforce.
Allison Hartsoe: 01:04 But these were really limited views to say the vast, and, when I got to Silicon Valley after college, I thought I had found this new world of opportunity. You could not judge who was the CEO because any race or any gender could be the CEO in Silicon Valley. But sometimes those old ways that we grow up with die hard. And when I was the only woman in the boardroom or when I was being compared to somebody else’s daughter, or even when I was told, Hey, Allison, you really don’t want to start a company. You probably just want to go have some more babies. Being a woman in business has always giving me plenty of salty stories to share. And ladies, I know I’m not alone here. So earlier this year, after an unfortunate turn of events, I called at my advisors and said, I’m not sure about this.
Allison Hartsoe: 02:04 And then COVID hit. And in the course of one month, our world just turned upside down. And so I stopped. I inhaled, exhaled and just waited. And I thought a little bit more about what I believed because you see, in the 1980s, the mantra was always greed is good. And in the.com nineties, that theme did not change very much, but in 2020 here I stand. And I can honestly say something has shifted. I founded this company on the belief that we could make powerful customer-centric connections between the data signatures that customers left behind and the way that a company could learn about what people really needed, not excluding profits, but in tandem with them. So from the CEO all the way down to the service rep, customer data is the glue inside every business.
Allison Hartsoe: 03:08 So I took that idea to several powerful companies and I learned what makes a company truly deeply care about its customers so much so that they use all the data they had to understand more and more about how to please them, how to innovate for them, how to inspire them almost as you would, one person to another or one friend to another. This is the deep power that sits unlocked in customer data in most companies. It’s more than marketing it’s meaning. And that brings me to the next big ambition. The last few months have been eyeopening. The brands that seem to be weathering the COVID storm best are the ones that have created trust, building conversations, and correspondingly experiences for those valued customers. And the ones that have struggled are the ones that have lost touch with their customers or chased these very costly, short-term growth strategies at the expense of long-term financial health. Ambition data as a company has always existed to serve brands that want to build healthy, sustainable customer-centric businesses for the long run.
Allison Hartsoe: 04:33 And my podcast, you hear me talk about it as customer love all the time, but now these brands need help more than ever. And that’s why I’m excited to announce that ambition data has evolved after several months of development work. We have officially launched a unique hybrid model that is a source of competitive advantage for our clients. It combines the flexibility and the nuance of consulting with the power and the throughput, and frankly, the scale of software. The new software is a combination of all of our customer analytics expertise, as well as countless hours of design engineering and product management work by my dedicated and talented team and thank you very much guys. And just as important, it distills everything that we’ve learned from you from the myriad of companies and brand leaders and people that we’ve spoken to and worked with over the years, I call this solution the customer core, but if you’re in the know you might call it Rubano, which has the name of all of our dogs melted together.
Allison Hartsoe: 05:51 The dog symbolizes what we want to give to you, which is a friendly, helpful, intelligent guide. Our software comes bundled with your own personal human guide, whose job is to empower your business and smoothly step into your operating processes, not make you spend weeks trying to jam your data or your business into somebody else’s inflexible tool. The rubano customer court is three things that every business needs in order to run high-quality customer analysis. First, it handles the plumbing, and that means ingestion, cleaning and organizing a customer data. Second, it predicts customer behavior clustering and enriching your individual customer profiles with attributes like customer lifetime value, but also product and location and human interests. Third, it generates unparalleled insights by trending where these customers are slipping and where they’re brewing. So you know exactly where to focus and why. So then, with your personal guide, we help you stack up opportunities by the return on investment so that you can wisely choose what to do.
Allison Hartsoe: 07:19 And then just gather and go with that group of customers and measure how well it worked. I am immensely proud of what we’ve built and the potential it represents for companies to become closer to their customers, to know them, to innovate for them, to ultimately be of service to those customers. And we are to be fair in the early days of what I hope will be a period of our own intensive learning and refinement of our software based on feedback from customers, prospects, people like yourself. In that spirit, I want to invite you to tell a business leader or a company you love that you know can do better by data, but perhaps they’ve been struggling to reach out to me personally, to learn more. And I want you to tell them this is not the 1980s. Companies today can do better to balance profits and customer needs through the proper use of data. I’m Allison at ambitiondata.com, that’s two L’s and an I in my email. And I’m so excited to share ambition solution with all of you. And also, I want to thank you for tuning into the podcast, from learning with me, and for this mighty opportunity to change the world. As I always say, it’s not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that gets results. Thanks everyone. See you next time on the customer equity accelerator.