Acoustic is probably best known to most Australian marketers as the business spun out of IBM’s Watson Group in 2019. But its CEO Mark Cattini, now a little over a year into his tenure, believes its real secret sauce is an ability to integrate very granular insights from behavioural insights and customer experience data into a customer's journeys in real time.

Much of the focus for martech over the last five years has been on the large marketing cloud vendors. But Cattini believes his company’s decision to pull together its behavioural experience platform Tealeaf with its customer experience platform Acoustic is set to pay dividends for its clients, and ultimately for Acoustic itself. 

Cattini is a relative newcomer to the world of martech, having taken over Acoustic in January last year. But he has a strong pedigree in the application and SaaS world, with stints at Salesforce, Autotask and MapInfo stretching back two decades.

“I'm a software guy, and I’ve recently joined the martech world. The difference between the martech world and everywhere else I've been is the answer is never ‘No, you can't do it’. It's always, ‘It depends’," he comments. “And it depends on how much integration you want to do. That may mean simple API integration or there may be some code that needs to be developed.

“But for us, our differentiation is we're essentially creating this unique first-party data. Or rather our customers are creating it using our platform and our tool. This gives them the ability to orchestrate it in real time, and at the most relevant time.”

Cattini acknowledges other martech vendors can rightly say they get some or even many of those signals. However, it's what happens next that matters more - and it's where he believes Acoustic will excel.

“Other organisations say ‘We can get those signals.’ And it's true. “But is it integrated into the journey? Is it in real-time? Can the marketing team just build it on demand, or do they have to go and bring stacks together? If you want to spend a ton of money, you can integrate any software. But let us do that for you.”

It’s not an insignificant point. Integration of one of the great bugbears in martech, where the answer to every conundrum is often "more martech". Just last month Mi3 reported on a Forrester study which revealed integration had overtaken functionality as a key solution selling point. The researchers found while marketers can choose from countless martech solutions, successful implementation requires proper integration with existing martech stacks.

Yet 22 per cent of global B2C marketing decision-makers indicate process inconsistency due to poor integration of technology is one of the biggest challenges they face to achieving their marketing goals.

Cattini believes Acoustic’s new Connect platform, which brings together Tealeaf and Acoustic Campaign, will help ease the pain for multi-channel marketers. “What we want to provide is an all in one platform for one to one personalisation.”

The combination of behavioural and customer experience data is important since granularity involves very precise measurements down to the level of things mouse movements and key strokes.

Rage clicks

Acoustic senior director APAC and Japan Aidan Lynch tells Mi3, “You can create tags for behaviour but you can’t create tags for experience, which is why you need visibility into the full experience to ensure you help customers avoid unexpected errors or getting caught in loops, and then rage clicking.”

Cattini meanwhile, says all of this will become even more important as the world becomes more cookie-less. “It's about customer engagement. You've interacted with us before when you clicked on an email, or you went to the website, or you abandoned the cart.

“Abandoned cart is table stakes but while many vendors can identify that a customer abandoned the cart, we can tell you why," Cattini adds by way of example. "What specifically was happening on the page when you abandoned it, for instance maybe they just saw a 14-day delivery policy and that was enough for them to leave.”