In this digital present, unlimited datasets are available. The data that powers the retail revolution and a working knowledge of how to leverage it properly becomes non-negotiable for all companies. As the Global Director of Product Data and Insights at Anheuser-Busch InBev, Krystal Lau is navigating this new world in real time as she and her team work to make it easier for ABI’s B2B clients to seamlessly order and receive product. Because personalized information is the fuel that powers the digital marketplace, it’s essential to establish a source of truth that helps every member of the team grasp where the data comes from, what triggers its collection, and how to analyze and apply those insights for the highest possible ROI. In this episode, she shares how they pull off such a tall order.

This is Segment’s Data Council series, where members share stories about using Segment to work with customer data within Enterprise companies. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. You can also read a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below.

Takeaways: 

• Understand the ultimate business goals behind any team’s interest in customer data.
• The same data point can have multiple use cases, and that brings robustness and efficiency to your stack as you support the business holistically.
• Give a five-minute overview of your data stack to build a relationship with different teams.

Audio highlights:

• “[Digital customer data has] become such a large part of the conversation, because for so long, everyone has been looking at invoice data or very analog offline data. To have the ability to see user actions in real-time has been game-changing.” 
• “It was nice to be able to look at data and come up with strategic decisions around it, but it's way more powerful to know exactly where your data is coming from, to know what triggers what, what means what. Because if you know all of that, then you brought your toolkit into what you can possibly do with that data — and not just in terms of analysis, but in terms of the applications of those analyses or the applications of that data itself.”

Links:

• Docs: Segment’s e-commerce spec
• Docs: Personas technical guide
• Catalog: Messaging Tools
• Analytics Academy: Take your product usability to the next level [Advanced]
• Blog: Growing an e-commerce business in the time of COVID-19
• Segment for B2B: Build better customer relationships with good data 
• Segment for Media: Boost engagement across your media properties
• Case Study: Meredith powers unified customer analytics across the enterprise

Vishal Rana, Director of Product and former VP of Customer Success at Segment, has observed firsthand how good data leads to organizational success. With over a decade of helping enterprises grow, Vishal Rana shares customer insights from that first "aha" moment to when retention experiences get tuned just right. 

Before his time in product, Vishal led Customer Success at Segment for three years and Professional Services at Medallia for five years. To see the journey from vision to reality and all the prioritization in between, tune into this episode about how to succeed with customer data—especially with those last-mile activities.

This is Segment’s Data Council series, where members share stories about using Segment to work with customer data within Enterprise companies. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. You can also read a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below.

Takeaways

1. Keep using your favorite tools, and push to get to see all the data that everybody else has collected in a trusted, centralized core of customer data.
2. Define customer success metrics using very rational observations about your customers’ usage behaviors or brand engagements.
3. Engagement data without purpose doesn’t serve anyone. Early in the product's lifecycle, define a particular business problem you want to solve with engagement data and collect accordingly.

Audio Highlights

• “Everybody's trying to transform other people's data into their format so that it can live through the lens of their core.”
• “Those systems, in their own siloed way, have a treasure trove of information about what a customer is trying to accomplish that isn't in the [event] clickstream. What's great is that with Segment, you can take all of that data and put it into a data warehouse, which—is agnostic to the type of information we're pulling in—and then marry it with that event-stream data. And now, for the first time in most companies' digital maturation, they're able to see everything in one place. Then they can start to marry the information they knew about the customer before they showed up (maybe in their CRM) and add that context to engagement that [the customers] are having with someone else [at the company].”

Links

• Guide: How do I migrate code from other analytics tools?
• Catalog: Advertising Tools, Adwords, Analytics Tools, Data Warehouses, Facebook, Google Analytics, Messaging Tools, Segment Personas, Segment Protocols
• Customer Case Studies
• Recipes: Get users to your Aha moment faster with Customer.io, Use Drift messages and email to nudge users to the Aha moment, A/B test CTAs to boost signup conversion
• Webinar: Segment Roadmap

Over the years as a product manager, Kurt championed hundreds of business case discussions for vendor tools and internal projects—including a few Segment business cases at two different companies. Tune in to this episode for an insider perspective on what it took for a Segment business case to excite stakeholders across an organization.

Takeaways

1. Understand where the organizational influence lies.
2. Create visibility around the gap between where you are today and where you want to go. Use that context to ground your business case and translate requirements for different audiences.
3. Build a team understands the value of having a tool like Segment not only just for your team or adjacent teams, but also the rest of the organization.

Audio Highlights

• “Sometimes the [business case] ROI is just moving the business in a new direction or a new way of operating as opposed to solely lifting revenue.” 
• “We were fighting against not necessarily other tools in the organization, but how people thought about the landscape of technology.” 
• “Showing the [Segment] debugger was actually a miracle type of a case for [stakeholders]. And so it sold a lot of people right then and there on the value of having a tool like that.”

Links

• Kurt speaking at Synapse 2018: Digital distribution 2.0: How Anheuser-Busch InBev delivers beer all over the world
• Blog: Growth of Stacks of 2019
• Catalog: Business Intelligence Tools, Google Analytics, Segment Connections
• Segment University: Debugging and Troubleshooting
• Docs: How do I test my connections (using the debugger)?