You’ve seen marketing evolve from several angles. What has shaped your perspective most, and what are you bringing into your CMO role at Quantum Metric?
The customer doesn’t care how your company is organized. Brand, product, operations and sales may sit on different teams internally, but to the customer, it’s all one experience. That’s shaped how I think about marketing and what I aim to bring to Quantum Metric: a bias toward proof over polish and a much closer connection between what we say and what customers are actually experiencing. If we’re making a claim, I want us to be able to point to the customer signal or outcome behind it.
What’s the biggest customer-experience blind spot you see companies struggling with today?
Companies have more customer data than they know what to do with, and contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t necessarily mean they understand their customers better. A dashboard can tell you that conversion dropped or customers abandoned a journey, but it often can’t tell you what happened in the experience that caused it. That gap between having the data and actually understanding the customer is where companies can quietly lose revenue. The real opportunity is getting closer to the “why” behind customer behavior so teams know what to do about it.
When a digital journey starts going wrong, how does Quantum Metric help teams get from “what happened?” to “what do we do now?”
A lot of technology is very good at giving you the autopsy: here’s the error, here’s where customers dropped off, here’s what happened. Quantum Metric is focused on helping teams understand the friction behind those signals and determine what action to take next. With Felix, our AI agent that brings together behavioral and voice-of-customer insights, we’re taking that a step further by giving teams and AI systems richer context around what customers are actually experiencing. Ultimately, we want to shorten the distance between a customer encountering a problem and the business being able to respond to it.
As CMO, what do you want Quantum Metric’s marketing function to change, create, or unlock for the business?
I want our marketing to be grounded in proof of the value our customers are seeing. Whether it’s a campaign, a social post or a landing page, there should be something behind it that demonstrates why the message matters to businesses we serve. A big part of marketing’s job is earning trust and credibility, and our customers can tell that story far better than we ever could on our own.
AI is changing both customer behavior and marketing itself. Where do you see the biggest opportunity and the biggest overhype?
The biggest opportunity is AI collapsing the old chain of analysis to action. The process has historically required time-consuming steps: looking at a dashboard, reviewing the data, presenting it, debating its priority, gaining cross-team alignment, making a decision and finally taking action. There’s enormous potential in shrinking that cycle so businesses can respond in real time, while the customer’s experience is happening. Where I think we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves is assuming that putting a chat interface on top of data automatically makes the output valuable. If the underlying data is incomplete, poorly structured or missing context, AI will give you an answer quickly and confidently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right answer.
What’s one thing marketers and product teams need to get better at when it comes to acting on customer insights?
We need to get better at acting before the insight goes stale. Too often, customer data gets reviewed in a meeting days or weeks after the experience happened, and by that time the opportunity to help the customer may already be gone. Teams need a much tighter loop between understanding what’s happening, acting on it and then measuring whether that action actually improved the outcome. Insight has limited value if it never changes what you do.
Forget the usual marketing playbook for a moment: what’s one belief about customers and digital experiences that you think the industry needs to unlearn?
We need to unlearn the assumption that customers will tell you when something’s wrong. Quantum Metric’s latest research found that half of consumers haven’t given direct feedback to a brand in the past six months, despite 45% of digital brands increasing their investments in feedback channels. Even if these feedback channels are there, the customer won’t always complain, and oftentimes they’ll just leave to pursue an easier experience. If you’re waiting for explicit feedback to know something’s broken, you may have already lost the customer who mattered most: the one who didn’t bother complaining.
