ANDREW JOINER CEO OF INMOMENT - INTERVIEW WITH BUSINESSWORLD MAGAZINE

Andrew Joiner brings extensive expertise in building global, market-leading, high-growth SaaS organizations. Prior to joining InMoment, Joiner served as worldwide head of the HP Software’s customer experience business, an ~$250 million independent software business of Hewlett Packard. Before that, he led the high-growth business unit within HP Autonomy, an ~$1.1 billion market leader in providing unstructured data applications and solutions, focused on customer experience and marketing technology. Joiner was acquired into Autonomy via ZANTAZ in 2006 having served as founder and CEO of Singlecast Technologies, a pioneer in unstructured data classification.

I don’t have a traditional software background by any stretch. I was a pre-med student who worked on Wall Street then started a software company one afternoon. (That should be comforting for anyone struggling to determine their major.) But I was fortunate enough to see a fundamental trend – technology (at that time email) was disrupting the cozy way of Wall Street business. Emails were finding their way to the cover of the Wall Street Journal and the leaders of those firms wanted to it stop. My brother and I founded Singlecast Technologies, to solve this problem and we became a pioneer in unstructured data classification. As the world went bigger digitally with instant messaging, rich media and document management, we were fortunate enough to not only see that startup acquired but stick around to steer the ship through several more acquisitions in this space. I eventually led a high-growth business unit within HP Autonomy, a $1.1 billion market leader in providing unstructured Data Applications and solutions focused on Customer Experience and Marketing Technology.

What drew me to InMoment specifically was its combination of unique technology that was related to my past and a culture that is people and customer-centric. It also didn’t hurt that it is headquartered in the Silicon Slopes (Utah’s tech center), which is an ideal place to economically scale a business. There’s always a certain amount of rolling-the-dice when stepping in as CEO of any organization, but I’m happy to say InMoment leverages the best of what I’ve learned and was exactly the right choice in a very exciting industry.

InMoment is a Customer Experience software company that helps leading brands fundamentally improve their businesses by listening to their customers. We uniquely distill signals of what’s happening in business despite the vast noise that exists in customer data. Ultimately, we’re helping them focus on the actions that will deliver a positive impact to the bottom line, while also improving the relationships with customers and employees alike.

For years, traditional sources of marketing data have been limited to static data that tells businesses the “how,” “what,” and “where” customers were buying. By bringing together these other powerful sources of data into InMoment, brands can understand the “why,” ensuring they can create and nurture more profitable relationships with the key human stakeholders. Our platform brings together intelligence about brands, customers, employees, and the market to help businesses understand and identify the critical intersection of what creates meaningful experiences that will drive revenue and increase business performance.

InMoment is an ambitious company and our strategy and performance to date attracted a wide range of interested parties. We’re not here to be another player in the industry—we deliberately shared that we aim to be a true disruptor. What has driven InMoment to this point, and what will continue to drive it, is our vision of the future of feedback. The CX market has been underserved by both metric-heavy and market-research-led approaches, but it’s time to think beyond traditional surveys and metrics as a way of understanding human beings.

MDP invested in InMoment because of our forward-thinking vision—in addition to our strong management team and accelerating financial performance—aligns with their ability to add value. I couldn’t be more excited about this new partnership and have no doubt the investment and support will help us achieve our disruptive ambition.

The origins of InMoment are unique in that it’s been both profitable and a high-growth company for years. We haven’t lost the discipline that’s brought us to this point, but now we have the flexibility to make choice investments that will differentiate us even more among other platforms and expand our offering. We’re on the bleeding edge of technology, which offers incredibly exciting professional experiences for the entire team at InMoment.

For our clients, the investment allows us to accelerate our plan to double down on our strategic services. The customers of do-it-yourself and tech-only vendors are struggling. Customer Experience isn’t just a tactical job to be done. It requires significant subject matter expertise and strategic best practices in order to really succeed. We never want to be in a position where we are selling clients technology without ensuring it’s adding real value to the business.

Experience data contains a wealth of information CMOs can use to drive marketing efforts, including brand perception, product insights, competitor intel, segmentation detail, and nonbuyers. Our solution enables marketers to search data for answers in a matter of seconds, create and execute market studies to segmented consumer groups to understand specific issues, or perform benchmarking in near real-time to see how they compare with competitors in the marketplace. We also enable targeted micro surveys to help marketers get feedback on customers’ journeys throughout the website. All of these solutions combine to provide value for CMOs by enabling them to optimize their marketing spend through deeper contextual intelligence.

It would be easy to talk about improving response rates or boosting satisfaction or NPS scores, but that’s the kind of mindset we’re trying to break in the industry. When businesses invest in InMoment they’re investing in a technology partner that sits down and maps out a blueprint for using customer experience to improve the larger objectives of the business, whether that’s increasing retention, identifying operational improvements, or creating truly personalized experiences for their customers. And then there’s the employee side of the equation. By understanding and even anticipating human expectations, brands can optimize their businesses, making them both more efficient, and creating unique and meaningful value for both customers and employees. The ROI on that kind of investment comes from multiple places across the business both in the form of cost savings and in increased revenues – think lower people attrition, more loyalty (and all the financial benefits), and more efficiencies. The customer intelligence we provide our clients is like a secret shortcut to much smarter business decisions.

The InMoment platform provides data from an insight into the three most critical lines of intelligence about the customer: intelligence from customers themselves, from employees, and from the market. We’re able to do this because we built our platform specifically to ingest any customer or contextual data, no matter the format or origin. Instead of forcing our customers to fit their needs into our technology solution, we offer flexible technology that provides customer, employee, and market intelligence and actionability for all areas of the business.

We enable clients to view existing partnerships all within our Experience Intelligence (XI) platform and then choose to connect to plug-and-play integrations like Adobe Launch, Slack, and Clicktale. While many customers still respond to traditional surveys, response rates are at historic lows. There’s a treasure trove of feedback that can be found in other sources, and we make it possible for companies to do that seamlessly.

To ensure our clients are hearing from as many customers as possible, our solution integrates with social and review sites, telephony systems, contact center chat and call records, and much more. We have also integrated with a number of solutions to help disseminate intelligence and integrate into the business’s native workflow. Experience data and its associated insights can be accessed in ways that are most natural to users. Our integrations empower everyone to get involved, share ideas, and ultimately take action.

The first generation of AI was all about going from brick-and-mortar to digital, or “bricks-to-clicks.” Now we’re seeing the customer journey evolving into a machine-led, human-assisted hybrid. Many of the advances we see in improving experiences are focused on improving human-to-human connections, whether that’s in the contact center, online chat, social media, or a mobile app.

One reason AI hasn’t historically worked well in CX is that everyone dumbed it down to a metric. Now that we understand the complex nature of customer relationships, we can better use customer data to make personalization and empowering humans much more effective.

Certainly, as customer feedback has gotten richer, the ability to discern contextual clues from rich media like videos, audio, etc. is becoming more important. Startups with the infrastructure in their technology to combine diverse data sets in a more cohesive and comprehensive way to improve the customer experience will be ones to watch. I think Banjo is doing some interesting things with how they are using AI, location and event-based data to curate content to make it more relevant, and disrupting the journalistic community in the process.

AI is not going to replace humans—it will make our lives much, much easier. And faster. As a Business Leader, I would find ways and places where AI works really well and helps people work smarter. Look for areas of big impact with little disruption to the business. For example, with Salesforce, AI can save a lot of manual effort trying to decode a successful sales process and give you the blueprints to make Sales Leaders better.

The brand associated with InMoment’s internal culture is something we call Leave Your Mark. InMoment has always hired positive, dedicated people—industry analysts and many of our customers have recognized that defining the character of our culture specifically. Leave Your Mark permeates every good thing throughout the organization, from employee rewards and recognition to community service efforts to the way we treat our clients.

I love the concept that there are many who can light up a room, but far fewer who, after they leave the room, leave the light behind. We live and work around amazing, creative people.

ABOUT

We believe experiences shape the world we live in. Experiences are a culmination of moments filled with emotions, judgments, learnings, and much, much more. Therefore, every moment presents an opportunity to make a positive impact; to leave a mark. With good data, the right technology, and human expertise, businesses today can solve hard problems and change the world for the better. Our goal is to deliver technology and use our years of expertise to unlock a comprehensive understanding of not only the actions people are taking, but also the emotion driving what they do and why.

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