Why We’ve Lost the Ability to Humanize the Customer Experience

Radically Transparent Published: August 11, 2022

A leader in customer advocacy and renowned for his time at Adobe as Global Head of Customer Advocacy, Kevin Lau unpacks the balance between successfully driving revenue and acquiring new customers all while maintaining a happy existing customer base.

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Episode Summary

Marketing comes down to people, math, and a whole lot of processes. But with so many processes in place to measure, have we, as marketers, lost the ability to humanize the customer experience?

In this episode of the Radically Transparent podcast, Kevin Lau, one of the biggest customer marketing influencers in the B2B industry and now serving as the Senior Director of Customer Marketing at F5 spills all from his time as Global Head of Customer Advocacy at Adobe.

He reminds us why the role of Customer Marketing is critical and how the great divide between demand generation and driving revenue growth from existing customers proves the SaaS model to be problematic.

Kevin dives into how marketers get so bogged down with processes that they forget what is the best experience for their customers (and how to stop that from happening!), and some of the greatest challenges he has experienced when balancing acquiring new customers with growing the existing customer base.

This episode is jam-packed with insights into the world of customer marketing from the perspective of a legend who has started from scratch to build world-beating customer experiences at some of the industry’s leading organizations: Google, Marketo, and Adobe.

It’s an episode you most certainly won’t want to miss.

Hot Topics of this Episode Include:

How to bridge the great divide between demand generation, driving revenue, and maintaining the existing customer base in a SaaS model
The success behind Marketo’s Marketing Nation and what brands must remember about their customers
In his own words – Kevin’s story on his acquisition journey from Marketo to Adobe (the one that you won’t find in the 2018 press releases!)

Meet Kevin

Kevin Lau is an award-winning, performance-driven, innovative, and ROI-focused, customer marketing professional and digital/online marketing strategist. With over 12 years of experience as an industry thought leader in customer advocacy, lifecycle marketing, social media/digital advertising, event marketing, digital marketing, and community management. His subject matter expertise encompasses managing the entire customer life cycle, formulating customer retention strategies, leveraging advocate marketing best practices, and data-driven decision making.

Over his career, Kevin has consistently developed high-touch customer engagement programs to drive product adoption, retention, brand loyalty, customer thought leadership, and customer evangelism. His achievements include influencing hundreds of millions from advocacy programs, increasing customer engagements, and maximizing retention rates by over 90%. He is renowned for his time and leadership at Google, Marketo, and Adobe.

As the Sr. Director of Customer Advocacy at F5, Kevin is leading a newly formed organization within Portfolio Marketing responsible for customer marketing, customer advocacy, strategic global events, and executive programs.

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Radically Transparent is a podcast geared towards the modern-day B2B marketer. Host Jennifer Gutman and her guests are a mixture of renowned marketing and sales leaders from B2B marketing organizations around the globe.

Each episode shines a light on the inner workings of B2B leadership– including what keeps successful CEOs, CMOs, VPs, and social media teams up at night, professionally. The conversations are real, raw, and authentic, all while revealing to listeners the unfiltered, not-so-known truths of today’s most interesting marketers.

Quickly becoming one of Oktopost’s most popular original podcast shows on the internet, new episodes air every Thursday on Radically Transparent, a podcast channel, built for marketers, by marketers.

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