RR Donnelley & Sons VP of CX solutions foresees transcending personas to ‘segments of one’
The bad news is that Dennis Wakabayashi’s grandmother did not get the birthday gift she was expecting.
The good news is that the incident put him on the path to becoming the customer experience leader he is today.
Before he began serving as the vice-president of CX solutions at RR Donnelley & Sons Co. (RRD), Wakabayashi had been in charge of customer relationship management (CRM) at a national food chain whose offerings included rotisserie chickens. On her birthday, his grandmother received an e-mail with a coupon to get a free one.
When she showed up, however, the store near her was sold out.
“There rotisserie chickens were all natural, never frozen, and it takes them about hour and a half to cook. You aren’t going to get them while you wait,” Wakabayashi recalled during a podcast and video interview with CX consultant Dan Gingiss last week. “So all of the sudden my grandmother was upset about it, my wife was upset about it, my CEO was upset about it.
“It was right at that moment I was thinking if I don’t personally figure out what went wrong in this scenario and how to balance supply and demand, I’d be perplexed for the rest of my life — and I might not have stopped hearing about it.”
Wakabayashi said he spent the next two years working with teams in finance and supply chain/logistics to figure out how to use e-mail messages like the one sent to his grandmother to forecast customer need at the store. He also learned how to be more efficient in terms of less waste and better cost efficiencies for marketing budget.
Today at RRD, Wakabayashi said he spends his time working with the team and its agencies and brand customers on providing quality execution on communicating across a wide variety of touchpoints.
While the company may be well known for printing phone books, for instance, Wakabayashi said RRD has spent the past 150-plus years expanding into a range of direct marketing, data and analytics services. In May, it launched what it simply called Onsite Marketing Services, a set of tools to help retailers to seamlessly manage the design, ideation, procurement, and installation of store signage and fixtures.
This followed the rollout a few months ago of applications to offer customers 3D printing. RRD suggested retailers could use 3D printing to simulate in-store shopping experiences, decrease time to market by rapidly prototyping new products and enhancing the way employees are trained.
As its product and service offerings continue to diversify, however, Wakabayashi suggested RRD has an advantage stemming from its early days in the sense it has always been handling lots of first-party data.
“All along the way they’ve maintained strong data hygiene and compliance,” he said. “That means we’re now in a position to work with enterprise clients to help them safely use that data and deliver personalized marketing.”
To Wakabayashi, personalization doesn’t simply refer to grouping a large set of customers into a particular segment based on a broad persona. He predicted more firms will be using technologies and data to effectively create an audience segment of one.
Otherwise, they risk leaning on personas too heavily. Wakabayashi used one of the best known characters in the Star Wars series as an example.
“You can get Annakin Skywalker saving the galaxy, and on the other he’s Darth Vader ruling the galaxy. And that’s the exact same person,” he said. “Yes, you need to pay attention to the right person but our personalities change throughout the day or throughout our lifetime. We need to look at behavioural tarring and understanding where people are in the moment.”
Beyond his work at RRD, Gingess pointed out that Wakabayashi is increasingly well known as a CX speaker and influencer. Right now, though, he said his focus was going to be on conducting workshops and teaching universities about CX journey mapping and modern marketing.
“I think we’ve come to the point in the evolution of CX where we’re ready to really have the conversations about development,” he said. “We need to stop broadcasting so much about the promise of CX and educating a new generation of executives who can deliver it.”
