SalesTech Interview with Jean-Marc Bellaiche, Chief Strategy & Partnership Officer at Contentsquare

Tell us about journey into Marketing and Sales Technology

I am an engineer and have always been passionate about technology. In my last role as a member of the executive committee of Tiffany & Co, I made digital a key priority for the brand, and introduced a few high-performance new technologies. Contentsquare was one of them, and Tiffany became a client in 2017. When I left Tiffany, I decided to change career paths and joined Contentsquare to help the executive team further accelerate the company’s impressive growth trajectory.

What inspired you to start in this tech-heavy ecosystem?

It’s an exciting space and a fast-growing market, and the pace of innovation in our field is dizzying. We’re also a truly international company, with offices in four countries. I think I bring something special with my C-suite background.

What is Contentsquare and how does it work for retailers and CPG manufacturers?

Contentsquare is a digital insights platform that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and websites.

We compute billions of touch and mouse movements and transform this knowledge into profitable actions that increase engagement, reduce operational costs and maximize conversion rates. We capture 100 percent of digital behavior without a tagging plan and give brands actionable insights that increase conversions.

Using behavioral data, artificial intelligence and big data to provide automatic recommendations, Contentsquare empowers every member of the digital team to easily measure the impact of their actions and make fast and productive data-driven decisions to optimize the customer journey. Our clients include GoPro, AccorHotels, Avon, Clarks, Sam Edelman and many others.

How is Contentsquare driving transformation for businesses?

Contentsquare’s mission is to empower every member of the digital team to improve their day-to-day performance. We sometimes talk about the ROI of people. We are able to support teams from various departments, and not only analysts, thanks to our extremely visual, actionable data so that everyone can base their actions on behavioral insights. We capture 100 percent of visitor interactions, so everyone has all the info they need to make the right data-driven improvements and measure their impact on the digital customer experience. We don’t think anyone should have to optimize in the dark, and we want to enable all brands to have the same data culture as some of the new generation of pure players (retailers that only sell online), who understand better than anyone the power of leveraging behavioral data.

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Tell us more about Digital Happiness Index (DHI) and what it means to Customer Experience managers?

The Digital Happiness Index is a new holistic KPI that tells you how your customers really feel. You can ask customers how they feel about the experience you provide, but the feedback can be misleading—there’s sometimes a gap between what people communicate and how they actually behave online. Also, it can be hard for a customer to put their finger on exactly what in the experience they find frustrating. The DHI aggregates customer behaviors to provide an objective evaluation of their experience on your site. And of course, knowing if your customers are happy is the first step to improving the experience.

Could you elaborate on how retailers can better leverage Artificial Intelligence-enabled decision platforms, solutions and customer-centric insights?

Analyzing how visitors journey through a site and how they interact with every single element of content (be that a button, an image, a text description of a product, etc.) is the only way to truly understand what they are trying to achieve on a platform and what is standing in their way. Are they looking to see if a pair of shoes is in stock at their local branch? Do they want to renew their standing weekly grocery order in just a few clicks? Are they here to compare loans? The key to providing a good experience is understanding the intent and expectations of your audience. Visitors are essentially talking to you with every interaction on your site — being able to decipher their feedback helps focus optimizations and remove the roadblocks to engagement and conversion.

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Which business groups are using your product? Which geographies have been the fastest to adopt your product offering?

Our solution is really unique because it can be used across verticals—from banking to ecommerce via travel, luxury, gaming, etc.—and even more importantly, across teams from web and ecommerce teams to branding and marketing, product and merchandising, and even creative. Basically, anyone who has digital customers and wants to learn what is keeping these customers engaged or what is frustrating them can benefit from our behavioral insights. Our customers are brands that understand the transformative power of a data culture—not just in terms of conversions, but also in terms of team empowerment. We’ve had particular success in the luxury, fashion, and beauty sectors as the digital properties of those brands have a double objective that Contentsquare can help support and balance—improving ecommerce sales, but also making sure the website helps to influence customers and create desirability of the brands. With Contentsquare, our clients can measure this influence for each specific piece of content and decide to optimize the best ones.

What are the key trends in AI platform for retailers, manufacturers, and wholesalers?

Innovations like 5G, Voice, AR and VR are transforming the way people connect with brands — both physically and digitally. In the last few years we’ve already seen the traditional concept of the brick-and-mortar store evolve to embrace technical advances, and today, with the proliferation of digital touchpoints, we’re seeing that devices—and even channels—are becoming superseded by experience. Customer journeys today are inherently omnichannel, and successful experiences are those that remain relevant and meaningful at every touchpoint. This hyperconnected reality is going to generate an increasing amount of data, and with it, a far more sophisticated knowledge and understanding of the customer experience online and offline.

How do you differentiate—Customer Success vs. Customer Service?

We’re not just a service provider, we’re a strategic business partner to our clients, invested in their business goals. Our customer success team is not just there to fix issues but to make sure clients get the most value from our platform. We help our client brands increase adoption and implement the solution in a way that elevates the entire team’s workflow. Each of our clients gets a dedicated Customer Success Manager backed by a team of data experts, who together tailor solutions to address a brand’s unique needs. After a few weeks of training, most of our clients become independent and can use our platform by themselves to optimize the digital experience they provide to their end consumers.

How have these changed in the past 5 years with the arrival of Sales Intelligence and E-commerce automation platforms?

Convenience is not just a goal for consumers—it’s also valued by experience builders and digital leaders. Thanks to AI, it’s possible to track the ongoing performance of your digital assets and be notified of anomalies as they occur so they can reduce their time to action. Teams today can access a highly visual performance review of their websites in just a few clicks and see at a glance what ROI each element of content drives. This is a game-changer for brands in the age of hyper-personalization—if it’s possible to measure customer happiness (which it is—see our Digital Happiness Index), then it’s possible to make the UX fixes that will keep customers engaged and interested in your brand.

Which start-ups in the technology industry are you currently following?

We have built an impressive ecosystem of technology partners with whom our solutions integrate seamlessly. From personalization solutions such as Monetate or Dynamic Yield, to Voice of the Customer solutions like Usabilla or Medallia and of course traditional web analytics such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics 360. We are also following various startups in adjacent spaces that could become new partners to enhance our solution.

Which Marketing and Sales Technology platforms/tools do you use in your current role?

We are happy customers of Salesforce and Hubspot.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Technology leader?

We listen to our clients and anticipate their needs as they are the ones integrating AI into their customer experience. We invest heavily in research and development to always be one step ahead, and we encourage our team to push the envelope when it comes to articulating our product and company vision. For example, we hold an annual Hackathon where anyone on the team can suggest a project—the most innovative projects eventually make their way into our roadmap.

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Thank You, Jean-Marc, for answering all our questions. We hope to see you again, soon.