How Contentsquare Uses Data to Optimize the Customer Experience | Connections Ep. 26 | Salesforce

You know, in the physical world, you can see the people, you can feel them. Online, you are blind. But it does not mean that the customer is invisible because they gave a lot of information regarding their behavior with the touch, the tap. And our job is to understand this behavior, to provide the best experience for the people.

Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin and welcome to Connections, where we hear from some of the most innovative leaders in marketing. All of us want to understand our customers, and that's hard when most of our interactions happen online. That's why Jonathan Cherkee founded Content Square, to analyze billions of customer interactions every day and help brands understand how and why people use their website. So as you can see, I am here in beautiful Paris to hear straight from Jonathan himself. Have you ever done anything like this sitting on a boat going down the river of Paris on an interview, Interview.

In the river Seine.

First one, Sarah, your family ran a food export business here in France. Is that where your entrepreneurial spirit comes from?

I grew up in a family where my grandfather run a dry vegetable company. My father is working with them, my brother is working with them. I should have worked with the family business. And so every weekend it was kind of a business meeting. Maybe without knowing, I was learning a lot from this family background.

Content Square started out as a project when you were in business school. Where did the idea come from?

So I was beginning in an incubator at business school in Paris and I began in a student project based on trying to understand the performance of advertising. If the ad is fantastic, but the website is so bad, people will leave.

Because you don't want people to leave the website.

Exactly. And I try to understand why are they leaving, why are they leaving, why are they leaving and what can make them stay. So to really capture and understand that, we try to go beyond clicks because the current analytics technology help you to understand step by step where you were losing customers. But they didn't really understand why someone is leaving. What happened before the click? What is the efficiency of content, what you can optimize and to do so. That's why we try to develop a technology that is really capturing every user interaction, every touch, swipe, zoom on mobile to really understand what makes them click.

As marketers, we have tons of analytics. What makes Content Square so special Today.

If you would like to analyze something, you need the IT team to put pieces of code everywhere at Content Square. No tagging. We train our machine to recognize every area of the website, every mouse movement, touch, swipe, zoom, every 15 milliseconds. So we collect all this data and after we provide insight and recommendation about the content, the ergonomics, the ui, the errors. So for example, you take a content On a website, 70% of the content are never viewed. What? And the question is, when they view this content, will they click on it? Will they convert? Will they buy? What is the engagement of the content? So the way Content Square is working is to provide insight and recommendation about all the assets of the web and mobile properties to all the digital and marketing team.

And how important is it for marketers to pay attention to the performance of their content.

On 100 people coming on the website, only 3 people are buying. On 100 people coming physical store, 30 are buying. So the topic of improving the online experience, improving the conversion rate more and more important, for a long time, the best way to improve online sales was acquisition. Make more people come to the website.

You add Google, bigger funnel.

Exactly. Google with a search, or for example, Salesforce with CRM. But now the cost of acquisition is high, so traffic is on mobile and the conversion rate is low.

And so you said that conversion for in person is better than online. How important is it to create a connection with your customers and prospects in that online digital world?

You know, in the physical world, you can see the people, you can feel them online, you are blind. But it does not mean that the customer is invisible because they gave a lot of information regarding their behavior with the touch, the tap. And our job is to understand this behavior, to provide the best experience for the people. And it means you have to understand everyone, personalize the experience without compromising privacy. Because I believe that privacy is one of the key pillars of the future digital society.

And how important is it that you own your data as a customer? In building trust with a brand, the.

Question is less and less a question of ownership of the data, but more about how you can leverage information without storing information regarding the user. Providing a good experience and personalized experience. And the way we think about it is we don't care who you are, we don't care where you are coming from, we care about your behavior. And based on that, we are analyzing it to provide insight, recommendation, or to help to personalize the experience. So you do not need to choose between privacy or a good experience.

So Content Square was founded in an incubator. What are you doing to help that next generation of innovators and disruptors?

It's important for me to not forget where I come from and to give back. So we created our own incubator to give access to technology data. But most importantly, to help all this fantastic startup to bring more innovation and believe in their dream.

And so how many companies now are in this incubator?

So we have something like 16 startups.

Right here in Paris.

In Paris. Innovation come from everywhere and from everyone. So it's a very fantastic way to inspire also ourselves on the way to disrupt the market.

How does that content experience play out on a global scale?

There are a lot of differences from one country to another. Let me give you some example. A French person is going to a website. Usually they are looking at three pictures of a specific product. Pictures, three pictures, that's all. In China, it's 20. So there are a lot of differences from nationalities and it means that you have to adapt your experience. Think global, but act local.

And what do you think the future is going to be for digital?

Couple of insights. One, I think the world will be more and more real time oriented. So you really need to capture the emotion of the people in real time when they are browsing because you don't have a lot of opportunity. Two, we spoke about privacy. Very important topic to take into account in every decision. There is a third topic that really matters. Digital accessibility. We saw a lot of improvements in the physical world, but not enough in the digital world. One billion people have difficulties to access to online content. Blind people, old people, people with impairments. 70% of the content online are not accessible today. So I think that accessibility will be a very important topic for the future of the world. I love to think that where there is a will, there is a way. And our way is to have a strong impact.

For content marketers. How do you think they feel when 70% of the content you're saying is not being looked at?

They have to work more, first of all, and I think more and more the market is maturing about the importance of the experience. You know, we began almost 10 years ago in an incubator and today we are something like 1,500 people. We raised $800 million. And our job is also to educate all the marketers of the world to try really to improve the experience, to measure the efficiency of their decision, to really, I would say, give the power to everyone to take better decision. Because of course you can make a lot of improvement on your online experience. But the best way to improve a company is to give easy data to everyone that will make a better digital world for all.

Well, I'll tell you something that's awesome. Turn around right there. Oh my God.

Wow. Hello, Eiffel Tower.

That is pretty incredible.

From Paris with love.

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