In this episode, host Chad Solomonson welcomes Jonathan Corley, the leader of the experience strategy practice at Sitecore, to discuss the evolving landscape of digital experiences, particularly in the financial services sector. Chad and Jonathan dive deep into the pressing trends shaping the industry, including the increasing demand for enhanced digital capabilities among younger consumers. Jonathan shares insights from the recent Digital Marketing for Financial Services Conference, highlighting that over 70% of Gen Z and Millennials are willing to switch banks for better digital experiences. He emphasizes the critical role of personalization, drawing parallels to successful platforms like Spotify and Amazon that tailor their offerings to individual customer preferences.
Tune in for an insightful discussion that explores the intersection of technology, marketing, and customer experience in the financial services industry, and discover how organizations can leverage these trends to stay competitive.
Resources
This episode was brought to you by Sitecore:
Get the best-selling book The Composable Roadmap by Chad Solomonson and Greg Kihlström at https://amzn.to/3wuN9iR
The Composable Roadmap website:
https://www.thecomposableroadmap.com
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Chad Solomonson:
Very excited to have Jonathan on the show today. Jonathan Corley is the Director of Experience Strategy on Sitecore’s Customer Transformation Team, where he leads a team of innovative value engineers and digital strategists. He advises marketers and some of the world’s largest corporations specializing in the optimization of digital experiences. Jonathan has a decade of experience as a marketing technology consultant with a sharp focus on both strategy and configuration. He draws on his consulting experience at Sycor, where he works closely with partners and top tier customers to deliver a shared vision for Sycor’s digital experience software to create an innovative digital experience that accelerates business success. Jonathan lives with his family in Atlanta, Georgia, and he is passionate about music and emerging technologies. Today, I am very excited to have Jonathan on the show. I’ve known Jonathan now for, gosh, over seven years, and he’s a master of his craft and brings a significant amount of insights to all customers that he works with and partners that he works with. So Jonathan, I couldn’t be more excited to welcome you to the show.
Jonathan Corley: Yeah, Chad, it’s a pleasure to speak with you.
Chad Solomonson: So before we get going and diving into some of our favorite topics, I’d love our listeners to learn a little bit about you and your journey professionally and some of the things that you like to do outside of technology.
Jonathan Corley: Sure thing. So I lead the experience strategy practice at Sitecore on the customer transformation team. And we are a group of industry experts, of value engineers and digital experience strategists. Sitecore is a digital experience platform. We enable marketers or developers to deliver experiences for their customers across digital channels. I started Sitecore in 2017, so I’ve been with the the company for a while in the space. But ahead of that, I was working at a couple of system implementation partners, one based in Atlanta and another that was based in Belgium. And over the years, I’ve delivered, must be more than a hundred transformational customer engagements.
Chad Solomonson: Not surprised at that number.
Jonathan Corley: Many of those in workshop settings.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Jonathan Corley: But I’m based in Atlanta and passionate about music. and emerging technologies. One upcoming highlight, I’m headed down to Florida early next year for My Morning Jackets One Big Holiday, which is a three-day festival that the band puts on. Really looking forward to heading down there with my wife.
Chad Solomonson: That’s fantastic. Are you also going to take in some shows in Nashville at Symposium this year?
Jonathan Corley: It sounds like we’ve got a lot of exciting plans off of Broadway there. And honestly, the, uh, couple of things in Nashville, you’ve got the Ryman auditorium, which is one of my favorite venues in the country. And then Grimey’s there’s, there’s some great, I collect, uh, vinyl. So there’s some great record shops.
Chad Solomonson: Oh, fantastic. So you’re going to be, uh, pretty much a Disneyland for you while you’re out there.
Jonathan Corley: Right. I might ship some, uh, some records back home.
Chad Solomonson: Perfect, perfect. Well, I’m excited to kind of talk to you today, mainly because most of these conversations have been more horizontal in nature, you know, talking about composable across you know, the enterprise in kind of more general terms. And what I was excited to dive in with you is talk more about industry and talk about where certain industries, specifically financial services, are taking steps. And I think this is going to be more of a theme for the show, because we’re just We’re seeing so many use cases emerge across different industries and starting to spotlight those and being able to go deeper, I think is really valuable for our customers and allow us to really help folks and maybe find ways to get started specifically in their unique business model. So with that, I’d love to And I know you’ve been looking at financial services now for a while and have engaged with several companies in supporting their needs there. But what are some of the bigger trends that you’re seeing and where business leaders are actually able to start taking real action?
Jonathan Corley: Sure. So maybe we start here. I was at a DMFS or the Digital Marketing for Financial Services conference. out in San Francisco earlier this year, and I saw a stat that was just staggering. It was a Banking Outlook Trends Report that broke down attitudes by generation toward retail banks. So they asked the same question to Gen Z, to millennials, to Gen X, and to boomers or older generations. But they asked, would you switch financial service organizations for a better mobile banking or digital experience, better mobile app, better digital capabilities. And this same question was asked back in 2020. And again, this year, this year, Gen Z and millennials, both of them more than 70% answered that yes, they would switch banks for better digital capabilities. And the demand for digital capabilities within banking and insurance, customer expectations are just an all time high.
Chad Solomonson: That is amazing. I mean, the fact that I think banks already knew that they had to fight for share, but that type of stat is really interesting and is going to drive a lot of conversation.
Jonathan Corley: I thought it was, and I work a lot with teams on how to get started with their personalization strategy or with experimentation, with A-B testing, with delivering personalization or personalized experiences across channels. And I know you brought up banking, but Uh, when I think of a really good example, day to day of personalization, uh, Spotify comes to mind. Chad, do you listen to Spotify or Apple music?
Chad Solomonson: So we’ve got the, we’ve got the family plan with Apple music, but I still, I still have a little Spotify instance on my phone that I listen to as well.
Jonathan Corley: Nice. I, um, yeah, they have this daily drive playlist that I work remotely. I work from home, so I don’t commute. Um, this playlist it’s designed for commuters, but each morning as I open up Outlook, I, you know, fire up my inbox. I play this daily drive podcast because it’s, it’s a good mix of my favorite podcasts. Uh, my favorite news sources that has information that’s up to date within the half hour. Uh, some of my all time favorite artists or new artists that I’m discovering and. Yeah, it’s, it’s available on any device. I can, I can play it from my phone, my tablet, my laptop and on their end. the marketing, the product team, they’re measuring the effectiveness and optimizing for engagement. And I think within, yeah, within retail banking, or within insurance, their customers are, they’re listening to Apple Music, they’re buying things on Amazon, they’re watching Netflix, and they’re beginning to expect personalized content or personalized recommendations as table stakes, they expect brands to to know them, to remember and acknowledge preferences or interactions, to understand their current needs. Amazon does a really good job of anticipating future needs. I just bought a remote controlled truck for my son and it had an odd battery type. Amazon likely moved that battery to a fulfillment center near me before I realized I even needed to purchase it.
Chad Solomonson: I mean, it really is the amount of data that these companies have on us, specifically in the banking and insurance, you know, they have, they know all the attributes on our behavior. I wouldn’t be surprised if, you know, after this call today, this conversation that I’ll have a number of alerts about starting to think about refinancing. after yesterday’s big news.
Jonathan Corley: That was big news yesterday. Yeah.
Chad Solomonson: Big news is big news. That’s going to spark a lot of engagement in the finance world.
Jonathan Corley: Not sure when you’re listening to this, but yesterday it was interest rates dropped for the first time since 2020.
Chad Solomonson: Yes. Well, thanks for that footnotes in case someone’s listening to this two years from now. There’s a couple of areas within your expertise that fits perfectly into financial services, and I want us to get a little deeper there. I mean, I’ve known you now for really probably when you just started at Secor, and you were doing personalization then. So I want to talk about that, but how, how Gen AI is starting to impact and give a lot more visibility and efficiency on bringing personalization to the forefront for, for banks and for insurance companies. Can you talk a little bit about some of the use cases you’ve been seeing or playing around with or talking about?
Jonathan Corley: Sure. Brands know that they need to personalize. Gartner has a great study, came out in May. Just looking at marketing budget as a percentage of total revenue, and it’s the lowest that it’s been since again, 2020 marketing budget is 7.7% of total revenue, which is, uh, marketers are being asked to do more. With less and a common story that I hear from, uh, from CMOs, from digital leaders is that they know they need to personalize what’s stopping them. It’s not a desire to deploy personalization or it’s. They feel like they’re held back by the lack of content or the amount of contents that they need to generate. And at the same time, it’s kind of an inflection point where suddenly you have the proliferation of these generative systems. And I cannot believe how fast the general public has adopted Chet Claude, Gemini, Chet GPT.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, I know personally, I’m in AI now four or five times a day. Sure. And it’s for lots of different use cases. And as you start thinking about applying AI to an experience and how you can make that more personalized and how content can be quickly adjusted based on a score as a journey is going and happening. Are you seeing that play out inside of some of the content systems that your customers you’re talking to kind of testing and seeing where AI can extend not only the amount of content, but how you start positioning it for more real-time personalized experiences?
Jonathan Corley: Yeah, I think it’s an excellent tool for research and for ideation. When you think about deploying a personalization strategy, I like to create a matrix of four or five high-value or high-traffic customer segments. And then think about what the purchase or conversion journey is on the site. And when you stack those against each other in a matrix, you can fill in the boxes with messaging for each audience segment at each phase of the journey. Imagine putting a specific relevant or personalized message on the homepage hero, but exponentially that just increases the amount of content you need to create. If you have five journey stages and five segments, that’s 25 variants of a homepage hero title. And I think these generative systems are really rising to meet that challenge of pre-populating or at least giving marketers a head start. It’s making marketers more efficient by, in many ways, upstream in the content life cycle as you’re beginning to create content. These systems have the capacity to make recommendations and also to create some variations on themes, variations of existing content that might resonate with a little bit of nuanced language for a specific segment or audience.
Chad Solomonson: It’s incredible, and I think We talked a little bit about this topic a couple of weeks ago. And when we would do workshops and discovery sessions seven years ago, it was flying in and spending a day really digging into the segments and then going back and really trying to prepare a proper report on how to take full advantage of personalization and how to score your segments accordingly. But you were sharing a little bit about kind of how you’re leveraging AI to accelerate that process.
Jonathan Corley: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve worked with a couple of colleagues at Sitecore and we built a tool that leverages Sitecore’s content hub as an asset management repository and Sitecore Connect, which has a ton of pre-built connections. So we connected to GPT-4 Omni and The tool, I use it ahead of any customer or account planning call. But given the name of an account, it cycles through a sequence or a series of engineered and governed approved prompts. And it provides you with a lot of strategic information and insightful information about that account. Anything from firmographic data to customer segments to porters, five forces, or some competitive threat analysis. But some of the research that I would do ahead of a workshop for accounts, it would take me hours. And I can accomplish that now in minutes with a report to scan ahead of a call. I think there are thousands of use cases for marketers that we haven’t scratched the surface yet. We haven’t even started to understand the impact of some of these tools. content creation and experience delivery.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, it seems like it’s just starting. The fact that we can take days and weeks into minutes and have this incredible amount of insight into behaviors and actions that are happening because the data has been there for a while. It’s now putting it all together very quickly so that we can build campaigns real time. And the promise of everything we’ve been talking about that’s typically way late in the maturity model is now accelerating. And so that stage seven or stage eight of maturity marketers and IT leaders and business leaders now have line of sight that, you know, with, with good guidance and good coaching and proper tooling, they’re going to move very quickly to the, to the, to the later stages.
Jonathan Corley: Yeah. The goalposts, the goalposts have moved. I mean, we would, you think about workshop planning, like you, you have phase one and two, like phase three, these AI powered generative answers that That was always on the horizon a few years down the road. Suddenly that’s possible, but I also see, and we were talking about this at a conference a few weeks ago, there’s an analyst, Christopher Penn, that I follow with Trust Insights, who kind of, he called this concept out, but when you look at Bing or Google, if you search for, you mentioned Sitecore Symposium, that’s our flagship, it’s our conference, our annual user conference every year. But if you go to a search engine like Google and search, what is Sitecore Symposium? Google’s Search Labs now takes over. If you have the feature turned on, it takes over the entire screen real estate of a tablet. You don’t see any search results. You just get this Search Labs AI overview answer that tells you it’s in October, it’s in Nashville. tells you it’s at the Gaylord Opryland. It tells you all about the conference and the agenda. I learned that without ever leaving the search engine. And you asked a bit about Gen AI’s impact on marketers. I think I’ve seen some analysts calling that this sort of AI answer within a search engine that keeps you on their web property will reduce organic traffic to marketer sites. by 20 to 50%, which to me, that begs the question, as a marketer, what can AI not summarize? If you’re trying to get people to your brand site, if your organic traffic is disappearing, I guess the answer to that is experiences. Sitecore allows marketers, that’s why I’m really passionate about this space, it allows business leads marketers to create memorable experiences that this is becoming more important that defy summarization. Think of interactive tools or relevant content, personalized content that would draw you as a customer to visit the website.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, it truly is unbelievable where all this is going. And, you know, I, I think as, as table stakes, every company has to make it very easy, very fast to consume the type of action and the type of information that their customers want. And that, that is, there’s delight in that and being able to quickly make a decision. And if it’s, you know, comparing interest rates compared to what, you know, your credit score is to, to being able to, to quickly understand a program and not have to read five pages of material to get to what they’re really trying to accomplish. So to me, I just, that summarization there, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of opportunity for delight there.
Jonathan Corley: There is, and I think you’ll see the decrease of junk food marketing, of high-frequency, low-effort content marketing. You’ll see less and less of marketing leaders asking, I need 50 knowledge-based articles or 50 blogs published on the site next quarter. Because in many ways, these systems can index a lot of knowledge-based articles and deliver that information. Instead, you’ll see the rise of really high effort or low frequency thought leadership pieces or interactive tools, as you mentioned?
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, I mean, certainly in B2C, being able to quickly do that and then B2B for sure has an amazing opportunity. And I keep going to this rise of AI search within your company, within any company, and making your websites much more interesting with AI search as a major component. So that you can give that type of summary experience if someone wants to know why you’re good or what product or what offer you have in market. And quickly get to a path that allows them to take that next step. And I think AI search is gonna have an amazing rise in our space here soon.
Jonathan Corley: ton of opportunity there.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah. Yes. We talked a little bit about the people involved on the client side where we do work with a lot of marketers, we work with a lot of IT teams, finance teams. And you have, with all of these workshops and engagements and discovery sessions that you’ve led, When you have people collaborating together and the team dynamics across different departments, you’ve probably seen it both ways. You’ve probably seen more siloed team discussions and then where you bring in more parties. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamic of that as composability becomes more prevalent in the banks and insurance companies? The team dynamic is really getting a lot more discussion here with composability being so important and who kind of takes ownership and leadership. Can you talk a little bit about where you see teams working effectively and how they stay connected as initiatives get defined and prioritized?
Jonathan Corley: Sure. So if you’re framing it with running workshops, I think it’s You actually talk about this in the Composable Roadmap book, but I think it’s essential to have a well-balanced or diverse group of stakeholders in any workshop aimed at digital experience strategy. You need to balance marketing leadership as well as some of the marketing practitioners with the digital or the IT group. I think it’s essential to ensure that you’ve got a CMO or a CDO, you have an executive sponsor that’s on board. or that has a seat at the table. The most effective workshops I’ve run or the roadmaps we’ve produced that actually went on to change things, they actually have a limited group of stakeholders. So in that capacity, I think less is more. Jeff Bezos at Amazon talks about the two pizza rule where If you get two extra large pizzas and you cannot feed the room with it, it may not be a productive meeting or workshop. You probably have too many people at the table.
Chad Solomonson: That makes a lot of sense. But going back to these workshops, and I definitely want to get a good feel for the specific workshops where you know, you see an increased amount of togetherness and unity, because I feel like that’s the, that is the key and, and, and kind of how those types of engagements are, are supporting action. Because you can talk a lot about all these things that we’re, that we’re been going through, but getting something started and getting getting everyone on board to understand that this aligns well, and this is our vision. What type of workshops do you see really uncover that, or that in your experience has been kind of the aha, this is a winning conversation because everyone got there?
Jonathan Corley: Yeah, so running a one to two day roadmapping workshop focused on defining business or strategic objectives. aligning on capabilities of the tools that you have or the tools that you need, and then planning use cases. Yeah, for delivery, roadmapping those out are highly effective. With many of, if it’s aimed at experimentation, at A-B testing, or maybe at personalization, for marketers, where I see a lot of efforts fail is there’s a hundred different directions to run, and teams often stall because they’re not sure where to get started first. One of my favorite quotes is Yogi Berra. He says, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else. And I think that’s really why many experienced strategy initiatives fail. Again, there’s no concrete plan with a couple of quick wins or easy steps to get started. So at the highest level, most of the workshops I run are aimed to break the ice and silos between teams, to inspire them with what’s possible with the capabilities that they have or they’re considering. I often use an assessment to quantify digital maturity across a few dimensions. So set a baseline of where they’re at today and then take kind of a crawl, walk, run view of here are how others within your space or across industries have really driven business value with similar initiatives. So that gives the team the palette to paint with. when they go to a whiteboard and step through a sequence of design thinking exercises to really ideate or agree around the table. These are the use cases we want to deliver, which creates a leading out of a workshop that creates the foundation for an agile marketing backlog or a set of prioritized experiences that the wider team would like to deliver and they commit to delivering. Big fan of agile marketing, but as you learn from success or failure of those experiences, that in turn informs the prioritization of upcoming experiences for the team to deliver.
Chad Solomonson: That’s fantastic. I want to ask you one more question on the team dynamics, especially as it relates to composable, because you hear terms like mock and headless and cloud and APIs. I think our traditional business users get a little get a little concerned that they’re not well-equipped to have these types of conversations. It’s very technical in nature. Are you seeing the IT leaders step in more now when composability becomes a bigger topic and take some more leadership there? Are they still an active participant, but really need the business to drive?
Jonathan Corley: There’s a balance there. So I see IT leadership involved in the purchasing process and establishing the foundation for the correct composable pieces of the MarTech stack. But on the other side of that, you’ve got the marketers, the business users leveraging these low-code or no-code tools that it’s just getting so much easier and intuitive to deploy personalization or start an A-B test. When I started consulting in this industry, If you wanted to launch an A-B test on your homepage, you needed a data scientist and you needed a homegrown A-B testing system and a way to collect the results. And over time, it shifted to where a highly trained marketing technologist could use the system. I mean, the democratization of technology or these really intuitive systems enable business users or marketers to activate or deploy these to set these scenarios up and publish them on the site, which as that becomes easier, you also see IT and the technical folks, there’s an absolute necessity to put guardrails in place. It’s easy enough for an intern to personalize the homepage. You need to ensure that the right workflow and governance is in place for the correct approval process to make sure that that’s the content that you actually want on your site.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. All right, so last question, and I ask everyone on the show, because we talked to a lot of leaders in the business, a lot of seasoned professionals that have been navigating digital experiences and various technologies over the years. And this industry is fast, and it’s fast moving, and it’s intense at times. How do you stay on top of your game? I mean, you’re a proven leader and you’re award winning. What are some of the techniques that you use to stay grounded, to stay balanced? Are there some tips and tricks you use that you could share with our listeners? Sure.
Jonathan Corley: I mean, longer term, one of the most influential books that I’ve read is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s just behavioral economics. It’s all about human decision making. As marketers, ultimately you’re driving people to convert or changing hearts and minds, changing brand awareness. I think there’s, I’m really fascinated by how people make decisions, the psychology of that. So I guess in that space, more recently, I think it’s Adam Grant, a book called Hidden Potential. He’s from Wharton School of Business. I’ve read that recently. And then tactically, I’ve been using a free well, freemium tool called Notion a lot recently. Have you explored that at all?
Chad Solomonson: I’ve seen it. I have not used it.
Jonathan Corley: I’m not a developer, but with basic markup or just text kind of like editing confluence or something, you can create pages and also tie together relational databases. So I use Notion to, as I’m going about day-to-day life, if I see a post on LinkedIn or a television commercial, or maybe it’s a quote in a book that I snap a picture of, I’ll bookmark that and save it to Notion, tag it with metadata. And then six months later, maybe I return to that specific tag and I’ve got dozens of bookmarked items to help me formulate thoughts around that. I’m investing a lot into that sort of workflow because I think GynArt of AI will help stitch some of those thought fragments together in the near future.
