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Meet our Partner Series: Slalom (U.S.)
Heather Roth: I am a Director in our Global Digital Strategy team at Slalom. If you are not familiar with Slalom, the model has always been to work close to our local communities, so we have 40+ markets globally where most of the consultants work for local clients and contribute to the local community. My team is one of our Global shared services team, focused on digital strategy and analytics, marketing technology, AdTech and marketing transformation. Slalom serves a variety of clients in all key industries, both midmarket and enterprise.
What trends do you see in the customer experience analytics space?
HR: I love this question. I feel like there is a convergence of marketing, product and customer analytics happening in companies right now with third-party cookie deprecation looming next year, because every team will be impacted by the changes. As we start to challenge clients in thinking how to move away from cookies to an “owned data” strategy, we see them teaming up more to think about data strategy, measurement and platform selection. While this collaboration has a ways to go, we get to work across teams to align around the whole customer experience, how data and technology enable that experience, and what to measure and communicate so everyone can do their jobs to deliver that experience.
What do you think makes for a good customer relationship?
HR: Understanding their challenges, their workplace dynamic and how you can make your key stakeholders successful in their organization. Consultants have an “image” in society for building overpriced Powerpoint decks. Powerpoint is a key part of life, but rolling up your sleeves, building relationships, being authentic, working together to solve problems and eventually creating sustainable new processes a company is how to create customer relationships that last. Nothing makes me happier than when a client gets promoted for the work we did together, or a client team comments that we are “just like one of them.”
How do you differentiate yourself from the competition?
HR: On my team we joke that we aim to work ourselves out of a project – in a good way. What gets us excited is the ability to sit with an organization for a while and help them solve big digital, marketing, or customer data challenges that they have, embed ourselves in their business, collaborate on solutions, and enable them to start doing it on their own or help them hire the team. The relationships built in that type of engagement model have much more incremental success than going in and over-customizing their environments or providing something overly standardized. Every year, our executives send a “Customer Love” survey to our clients and have them rate us on how we show up and how we help transform their business, so these are benchmarks that we hold ourselves to.
Tell us about a successful customer engagement you worked on together with ContentSquare?
HR: My favorite project has been a joint Travel & Hospitality client where Slalom came in to build a Voice of Customer program. Contentsquare was one of a handful of platforms this company was using for digital data. By far the strongest, but very underutilized. I remember telling one of the VPs to give us six months to show him what Contentsquare could do in the context of what we were trying to build because I knew the potential. Working with the CS account team, we were able to integrate more of their Adobe Analytics instance and Medallia into Contentsquare. We started leveraging the segments and session replays in our weekly and monthly reporting to highlight trends and issues that the product team needed to see. When we saw some challenging feedback and verbatims in Medallia, we would use the quantification capability to size the issue and push a Jira ticket with a session replay to their business operations team to resolve the issue more quickly. One of the lead engineers actually commented how they find out about issues through this process rather than with some of their traditional tools.
Together, we have helped that client achieve increases in NPS and lower occurrences of site issues over the past 9+ months and Contentsquare is a key part of their ecommerce measurement toolkit.
What advice would you give to those looking to partner with ContentSquare?
HR: Contentsquare is a powerful tool on its own, but Contentsquare is even more powerful for driving transformational insights with the vast integration ecosystem you all have built. From cloud providers, to VoC, A/B testing, APM, the interoperability of Contentsquare within a variety of technology ecosystems is something to take advantage of to drive the best results.
What about your business and the industry keeps you up at night?
HR: There are a lot of companies leaning into advanced analytics and generative AI without fundamentally stopping to think about the foundations of their data and the investment required to actually do the advanced work well. There are so many good intentions, but the rush to compete on these shiny things without focusing on accuracy, governance, accessibility and completeness of data limits the ROI of their investment – which often creates hesitancy to invest again later.
If you had one wish of ContentSquare, what would that be?
HR: I think there is a lot of potential for leaning into marketers more. Marketers are a key segment right now with all of the data changes that they are dealing with, but many feel like they lack data or still have to find multiple platforms to get what they need. There is a lot of valuable data for marketers in Contentsquare, but we are finding that it takes more time for them to see how the data can help them optimize campaigns and understand their audiences better. Core web vitals is a big opportunity, and I am excited to see how the recent retail media release can help here.
Fun question: What’s your favorite vacation destination, and why?
HR: I grew up in Colorado, and my family would always go to Glenwood Springs, a sweet little city nestled in the Rocky Mountains with natural hot springs and really fun parts of the Colorado River. That city has grown up even more as I have, and I can still appreciate the views, activities and the growing food scene as an adult.
