#1 Susanna Dunham I value of experimentation I team structure I communication

Welcome to the Inside CRM Podcast. I'm your host Jessica Jansen, bringing you essential CRM insights and discussions live from CRM meetups across Germany. In each episode we converse with CRM experts from a stunning variety of companies, including innovative startups, trailblazing unicorns and established corporates. We delve into their experiences and and know how, bringing you the latest strategies and innovative solutions within the vast field of customer relationship management. Get an inside look at how industry influencers approach CRM all neatly packaged into easily digestible 20 minute segments. Through this podcast you're afforded a unique learning opportunity from the best and brightest minds in the CRM landscape across all stages of business growth. So without any further ado, let's dive in.

I think to get everyone started would be great if you can give a small introduction to yourself.

Yeah, sure. So I'm Susannah. Thanks so much for having me today Jessica. I have been working within the CRM Sphere for around 13 years now and whilst my most recent role has actually been becoming a mother to my wonderful daughter who was born last June, my professional position transition at the moment is with GO Student which is an Austrian born edtech startup. We offer online tutoring to school children and there I'm leading the customer value management team and the customer success enablement team. So yes, I have been off for nine months so I might be a bit rusty so bear with me today. Thanks. Prior to working at Prior to joining Go Student in 2021 I was with HelloFresh for 5 years. I see some alumni here today and this was actually a really formative chapter in my career. It was the first time I'd worked for a product led tech startup business and yeah it was a really amazing experience. During my time there I got to experience the IPO of the company. We also completely restructured the CRM function HelloFresh globally so a really big reorganization and of course I got to experience the kind of company move from a very much kind of hypergrowth focused company to a company that was really focused on profit. So that change in KPIs was incredibly interesting. My role obviously developed during my time there but by the time I left I was the director of CRM Conversion so I was looking after two teams, the CRM activation team whose role was to essentially activate prospect customer via our CRM channels and the reactivation team so to win back churned customers. And whilst the former was one piece of the bigger acquisition pie, should we say, the reactivation topic sat solely with my team at within the CRM department. So it Was really great. To have kind of that full. Yeah. Autonomy and that kind of full kind of power over the strategy was very cool. And prior to that, I was working in London for several years for Estee Lauder companies. I don't know if any of you guys know Estee Lauder companies. They're a big global corporate umbrella for many of the luxury premium beauty brands out there. So the. The type of brands you'd see if you're walking into kind of a beauty hall. So of course, Mac, Bobbi, Brown, et cetera. And of course, this was a very different beast. This is very much a kind of corporate environment, but interesting nonetheless. During my time there, I worked on four brands within the corporate portfolio, always on the CRM or customer engagement topic. And actually it was my first role in Clinique as a very junior member of the team where I, along with my manager at the time, essentially developed and rolled out the first CRM campaigns for Estee Lauder globally. So we were the pilot market and the pilot brand, which was a really great opportunity. And that was my first experience of CRM and I've been wedded to it ever since.

It's great. And if we look at this. So you worked in quite different industries, right? So you made a journey around different fields and also like different company faces. So what's your experience on where does CM sit and what have you also experienced there? From my experience, there's never this one answer where it should fit. But what has worked well in your experience?

Yeah, I love this question. I find it really fascinating when I speak to my CRM, when I speak to my CRM network, in every company I've worked in, where CRM sits has differed. But actually the kind of scope and the responsibility of CRM and even the team structure has also differed widely. And actually I think it's this, along with the company's kind of size and maturity that actually really probably dictates where the CRM team is meant to sit. So very briefly at Go Student, CRM is very much part of customer value management. So it's handled by my global customer value management team. These are the guys who are pretty much managing everything when it comes to existing customer strategy. And actually given the company and the phase the company is in, their roles are incredibly broad. So they're looking after topics like retention, like monetization, but also things like loyalty programs or referral programs, voice of customer as we've heard about today, even price migration. This kind of all sits within customer value management. So it's a Kind of a very broad topic and a big remit, shall we say? The guys in the team really handle the end to end of all the projects that we're working on. That might be the initial exploratory data analysis where we hopefully come up with some sort of hypothesis and then conceiving a strategy to dig into that hypothesis and then coming up with a kind of a test design, hopefully including some experimentation, actually launching and executing the campaigns themselves within the tool, the analysis and the retrospectives thereafter. They're really managing the end to end. And this is great because it means that we are very agile. We have low interdependence, right? So we have low dependence, but high collaboration with other teams and this leads to a really fast output. But this works for the company where I am, based on where we are as a company, we're still at the scale where we can afford to have this kind of team. I think depending on the business you work in, this might change. One quick thing to mention, if we zoom out a little bit, CVM actually sits within customer success. And I think this is probably quite interesting for most of you, I imagine CRM in your businesses sits within product or marketing. And the reason why it sits in customer success is because historically customer success has managed the customer after they have been acquired. And actually a fun fact for you, until quite recently, we actually had a large team of customer success managers, physical people, agents, who were basically the one to one point of contact with our customer. They were the ones nurturing them through their customer journey. It has actually been the role of my team in the last few years to of course digitalise a lot of that because as you can imagine, that's not the most cost effective and efficient way to go about the business. And so we've been doing a lot of work to digitalize those comms. If I think about my time at HelloFresh, for example, the landscape looks completely different. I mentioned that we had a big global restructuring during my time there was in 2018, I think it was, we decided to completely centralize the CRM function here in Berlin. Prior to that, we had teams in our offices across the globe, London, Sydney, et cetera, in our local markets. And we decided to actually centralize, like I say, here in Berlin, for a few key reasons. Namely, why have 16 strategies going on across the globe when you could have one that still adheres to the nuances of your local market? It meant that we could take a more structured and scientific approach to our experimentation and our testing. And it meant that we could achieve better branding consistency. I know Katerina's here today, so she'll be flying the flag for that. And also, of course, we could leverage the partnership with the other core global central teams, such as data, science, product, etc. Etc. And so the new team structure that we launched, I won't go into too much detail, but essentially we had sub teams, vertical sub teams, looking after the different stages of the customer lifecycle. So prospect active and cancelled customers. And then we had vertical sub teams. So we had audience management who were focused on strategy, campaign management focused on the execution of campaigns, and then automation who were focused on the tech piece. So I think this setup worked really well given the kind of the output that was expected from the team. We were very established business, we were launching very sophisticated, complex CRM campaigning at this point. It didn't come without its challenges, of course. So, for example, even prioritization between the sub teams wasn't always aligned and that can be quite challenging. And I mentioned that we split the teams based on stages of the customer lifecycle. Of course, we need to be very careful then that there's not this kind of siloed approach to our marketing. We need to make sure that it's still a very smooth and not too disjointed experience for our customers if different teams are looking after the different stages of the customer lifecycle. But like I say, I think it worked really well. And then maybe very briefly lastly, Estee Lauder, of course a very different beast, more of a kind of corporate fmcg. But CRM and consumer engagement always sat within the, within the marketing department. As mentioned, we were very much pioneering CRM for the company at that point. Back in 2010, CRM was the height of innovation, can you believe it? But, so we had quite a lot of like, again, autonomy and flexibility. But of course the red tape was around things like creative and what have you. So to wrap up and skip back to your initial question, I think the different companies I've worked for have all seen CRM as a different thing and it's been placed in different teams or departments or what have you. And now I'm going to go on a slight tangent, but I think it is linked. I think what's the one common thread in all companies is that CRM is not just sending marketing emails and I see a lot of you nodding. Good. If I had a dollar a pound for every time someone said, oh, you are the email guys, I'd be a very rich woman. And actually for me, CRM is so much more than that it's such a rich topic. And so for me, customer relationship management is exactly that. It's managing the relationship with our customers. And thus we need to ensure that we really understand our customer base. And then we start to build a strategy and think about the treatment of those customers so that we achieve two things, a satisfied and happy customer and of course the business objective, whatever that may be. I think that's really important. And we as the CRM experts, in my opinion, the guys who are having that single customer view, we're seeing what the business like, all the touch points that we're having as a business with our customer. I sometimes refer to this as being the guardians of the seamless customer experience. But bringing back to the question, depending on where CRM sits, I think if that is your objective to have this overarching understanding of what CRM is, then it's really important that we also have really strong collaboration with other departments across the business. So to conclude, I think to understand where CRM should sit in your company, I think we've got to really understand what is CRM for your business, what's the scope of CRM and what the team structure is. And also as mentioned before, I think the size and maturity of your business probably plays a role here as well.

Yeah, totally agree. And I think what is super interesting, I think it's the first time that I heard it sits under customer success. I think I've heard product, I've heard marketing, I've heard bi, but customer success is special to me at least. Yeah. So you explains the, you explained the background there and of course makes sense that it comes historically from customer success. Nurturing before and now you're taking care of digitalizing, automating everything and of course proving it.

Exactly, yeah.

Yep, super interesting. Any questions before I move on here?

How is your team structured? Because you are doing a lot of optimization. I can imagine that like your team is quite technical.

Yes, yes. So as I mentioned, we the team are really managing the full breadth, the A to Z of all of our strategic projects at the moment. Their skill set is quite unique. They're indeed very data driven. They have ample experience in kind of campaigning and building strategy. They're also really quite technically savvy, et cetera. Like I said, we really are a jack of all trades within the team. This profile is quite hard to find and quite hard to keep. And I think that right now our company can offer these wonderful unicorns is that we're a really fast paced, fast growing company. So there's Just a lot of opportunity to get your hands stuck into too many pies and to really work on. On. On really cool and interesting projects. Yeah. That I will mention though that whilst we are trying to be as much of a kind of a world mind show as possible, we of course have dep dependencies on other departments. If you think about your tech stack or your data pipelines or what have you, of course there is a little bit of dependency there. Yeah.

As a follow up I'm curious to learn your opinion on like how to best optimize the team structure and if you need to make it, would you hire a specialist with some specific knowledge like campaign management or something technical background or you would hire someone who would be more diverse?

Yeah, I think as mentioned before, I think it very much depends on a few things. The company, I think in terms of the size of the company, the maturity of the company, what the expectations are in terms of what CRM are doing. Also what is CRM to the company? It could be that in a company sending best market emails is their role. That is just the wrong. That's. That's super. It could be in a. In another company that CRM is handling every element of the customer strategy like is the case with my Go Student team at the moment. So I think it's hard to give prescribe a one size fits all answer. I think it's very much dependent on these things but as I explained before, I think the two models that I've experienced have worked quite well in the context of those companies. So at HelloFresh where we had that kind of really granular approach to the team setup worked particularly well. And at Go Student right now having that kind of one size, that kind of jack of all trades role works really well. I think it really depends on the business.

Would be interesting to hear the personal success story within CRM.

Yes, sure.

I think I'll talk to again my time at HelloFresh we're really proud. We were really proud of using data science models for the purpose purpose of reactivation campaigns and I think we really pioneered using machine learning models for the purpose of marketing. I know that now the marketing teams have very much adopted this in using machine learning models but I really felt that we were on the forefront of innovation at that point. So maybe to give you a bit of background in terms of what we did at the time, the kind of the success metric of the business was profit. Right. So we were at a stage where we were really thinking about profit and thus we were thinking about our marketing marketing costs, even in CRM, because yes, we do have some costs at times. I'm going with this direct mail, the most expensive channel. Direct mail was very much part of our channel mix. And historically we'd been targeting pretty much the entire customer base with direct mail campaigns. And we really wanted to refine this approach, the targeting approach, because we wanted to maximize our roi, of course. And of course, targeting all customers is not the way to do this. So we tasked our data science team to build a model for us which would identify the customers with the highest propensity to bring value as a result of our reactivation campaign. And we'd sent many campaigns targeting the entire base historically. So we had ample, what's the word I'm looking for data to utilize. And what was really key for this project was to be really crystal clear in our objective to our data science team and to really highlight the many kind of caveats that need to be taken. Taken into consideration. I'm sure you can all this all will really resonate with all of you. There's so much that goes on and we really need to be transparent about this when working with teams that are external to our team and understand all this information. So, for example, when it came to the brief, we didn't want a model that would identify customers based on their propensity to reactivate. We wanted a model that would identify customers based on their propensity to bring value as a result of our reactivation campaign. They're very different things. I might have one customer who has a high propensity to reactivate, but he comes back for one 50% discounted box. I might have another customer who has a low propensity to reactivate, but comes back for five full price boxes. So the value was the KPI here really ensuring that we had this crystal clear, like they had a crystal clear understanding of exactly what we wanted to achieve. It was a big part of the kind of project and definitely we learned some lessons there, shall we say. Another kind of interesting point that I want to highlight is really thinking about what you're going to do with said model. And I think genuinely often sometimes how you're going to practically utilize something is actually overlooked in the kind of planning phase. And then when you're conceiving the strategy, for example, we have a score for every one of our customers and our customer base, which scores customers based on their propensity to bring value as a result of our reactivation campaign. But what do we do with it? Now? There were two kind of things that in this case, we need to consider, first of all, we also sent customers emails. So we're not just using the direct channel, we're using the email channel. And email is free. So actually, how do we ensure that we're targeting the customers with a direct mail campaign who aren't going to be reactivated or bring value as a result of the reactivation campaign through our email channel. Another thing was that we have this list of, we have our entire customer base, and I can see, ranked 1 to 0, the propensity, the value propensity score. That's what I call it. But at what point do I cut that off? Is it the top 20%, the top 30%? We don't know. And so this really is why the next phase of the project was so important and is so important. Interesting. And that's the experimentation part, right? In this example, we set up a very simple campaign. We had a holdout group that received nothing. We had a control group that received just email, and we had a test group that received both email and direct mail. And of course, we ensure that the kind of the touch points and the cadency and frequency of the touch points pretty much like, so that we're not creating any sort of biases, like a very clean test setup. And so this, running this experimentation was really important. We basically targeted a cross section of our entire customer base. And it meant that we could see for which segments the customer was actually bringing. Uplift versus email. And we could also see at what point we should stop targeting customers. Let's say we break our base down into segments, let's say 10 deciles. I can say, okay, I'm going to target my top three deciles, the top 30%, because I see that from decile four. Actually, it's not bringing value anymore. But we really had to run that kind of experiment after the model was provided to us to really validate this and to learn how to use it. And I know this seems really obvious, but you'd be really shocked the amount of times the datasat team produced this model and someone would just say, cool, let's target the top 20%. So where does that 20% come from? It just feels about right. No, take it to the next level. Take the integrity with you. You need to go the extra mile to ensure that you're doing the right thing. And actually you're meeting your objective of the campaign and the project. So after a lot of iteration and testing and working with data science and experimentation, we got to a model that was then the bread and Butter. We used it for every single direct mail campaign that we launched thereafter. It became. Yeah. Part of the targeting process to use this model.

It's super interesting and I think what is often underestimated by also ventures that I see is this experimentation testing part that you really need to put some extra effort into it to make it work. So totally agree that this is an essential part that's often missing. Yeah. One last thing. What recommendation would you give to the.

Crowd when it comes to CRM?

Okay, so very much in keeping with maybe what I've just said and in keeping with the theme of experimentation and where CRM sits. The first one, I think experimentation is absolutely key. I think it's quite hard in a very fast moving hypergrowth company to breed a culture of proper experimentation. And when I say proper, taking the scientific approach, making sure that the insights that you're garnering are actually valid and make sense. Right. When everything has to be done yesterday and the founders just want to move and develop and get things rolled out, I think we need to remind them sometimes that actually unless we can really understand the incremental value of something or the potentially detrimental impact of something, then we. It's pointless to a degree. I think experimentation is key and really I really urge you to challenge any superior you have. You have. Who says that's not a valuable step to take? I hope that's. Yeah, really what I'm trying to put across. Experimentation is key. Experimentation done well is paramount and this will infinitely add value to the work that you're doing. If you can show the incremental value of your work, then that's great. Yep. And then maybe lastly, I think I would urge everyone to ensure that CRM in their company is actually really well understood. Going back to the whole point of you're the email guys, I think that a siloed workforce is really dangerous and I think that ensuring that the company has an understanding of what you're doing in CRM is not coming from a place of ego. On the contrary, I think it's really helping create a kind of collaboration and even cohesion across the various departments. When I mentioned before being the kind of the guardians of the seamless customer journey experience, if indeed that is what CRM is to you in your companies, it's of course super important that people know that's your role because they need to share with you what they're working on. They need to ensure that it is very valuable for them to know that you are the ones having this kind of bird's eye view. Of what's going on. And yeah, how can you do this? I guess ask the product manager for a coffee. Initiate a creative workshop with your branding and creative team. Proactively ask if you can speak at the next all hands. Get yourself on the map. I think that genuinely there's a lot of value that comes from that, and in too many companies I've worked for, CRM is this very much kind of unknown topic. I think it's really important that people understand what you're doing and the value in what you're doing.

Totally agree. Thank you so much, Susanna. Thanks.

And that's a wrap for this episode of the Inside CRM podcast. Our journey into the dynamic world of CRM continues, and I hope you gained valuable insights. If you're keen to dive even deeper into CRM, visit the Inside CRM website. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter and stay in the loop for new articles, podcast episodes and more. Don't miss out on any nuggets of wisdom, from startups to unicorns to corporates. More details can be found in the show Notes. This is your host, Jessica Jansen, saying thank you for tuning in.