Ep 38 - Enhancing Customer Journeys through Data & Analytics Ben Taylor, Huijuan (Sunny) Zhu, and Neerav Vyas

We sat down with three data-driven industry leaders and discussed best practices, how to pinpoint insights into customer behavior, and reflect on the ways we leverage data to enhance customer experiences. 

Here’s What We Discussed: 

• [00:17] Our experts introduce themselves and share their background 
• [03:05] How data can be leveraged for good and with more user transparency
• [10:00] Neerav explains why there is no one-size-fits-all tech stack and how to choose the right tools for you and where your company is at 
• [14:20] Sunny shares her recommendations for a CDP and analytics tech stack depending on the size of your company 
• [20:22] Ben shares his advice for analytics layers for companies that hit a million users and are running into attribution issues  
• [23:25] Best practices for customer segmentation 
• [30:52] Neerave shares 2 tactics marketers will use to enhance customer journeys after 3rd party cookies will no longer be accessible 
• [37:15] Our panel shares their recommendations for open source tools 
• [42:53] The difference between data science and data analytics and how data scientists can have a more product-centric approach when building solutions

About Our Speakers

Ben Taylor, Chief AI Evangelist, DataRobot, Ben is passionate about machine learning. His life’s mission is to further the boundaries of what is possible with data science. He spends as much time as he can working with deep learning, NLP, and all forms of data science. He currently has a passion project of combining the power of genetic programming with deep learning to automate network design.

He is most well known for his work in machine learning with the data science community and with HireVue. He enjoys speaking and presenting to all types of audiences.

Huijuan (Sunny) Zhu, Director Data & Analytics, Maisonette, Sunny is a data-lover who cares about the business value it can bring. She’s a time-manager and willing to grab every opportunity to enhance her career and personal growth. She’s organized, creative, and strongly motivated to do outstanding work! Analytics is her passion and always open to mentoring new graduates/ early career starters.

Neerav Vyas, Principal CDA, AI, ML, Data & Analytics, Amazon Web Services, Neerav helps organizations to accelerate innovation, drive growth, increase operational efficiencies, facilitate large-scale transformations, and turn around ailing business units/ brands. He’s an award-winning leader, using a combination of Human Centered Design and Advanced Analytics to help ensure these transformations and product launches are more likely to succeed and have a meaningful impact. Finally, he’s served as an advisor to a number of Fortune 500 CMOs. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CTOs, and several of their boards. He’s also served on the Executive Team of a Fortune 500 company and a successful series B (now series C) venture back startup.

About Our Host
Anish Shah is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Bring Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.

Quotes

“There's something so good about allowing a human expert to be unlocked and out of a process.” –  Ben Taylor

 

“Do qualitative research seriously. Put the thing that you're building in front of people. Because you can have the best intentions in the world, but until a human reacts to it and gives you feedback on it, you're not gonna understand the unintended consequences.” – Neerav Vyas 

 

“Most of the AI that you see for harm was not intentional, it was accidental.” – Ben Taylor

 

“What is the right way to evaluate the efficiency of AI? I think it's ROI; What benefits does this AI strategy bring?” –  Huijuan (Sunny) Zhu

 

“For customer segmentation, I think about not just segmenting the customers you've acquired, but also trying to decide what are the new personas you wanna go after? Because as a product evolves, you'd add new personas and new customer segments that you haven't gone into yet.” –  Ben Taylor

 

“The biggest challenge when you're doing journeys, besides defining what the customer journey is and which journeys are important is connecting the data.” – Neerav Vyas

 

“Data scientists need to adopt more of that, they need to start taking that domain-centric approach rather than coming in and saying, ‘I'm gonna make a neural net out of everything.’ Because that's the quickest way to lead to projects that don't result in ROI.” – Neerav Vyas 

 

“One domain of a data analyst is you need to be really familiarized with business application modeling. You need to be able to form descriptive analysis and explorative analysis to be predictive and prescriptive.” – Huijuan (Sunny) Zhu

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

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