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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a Conversation Intelligence Hero!
Invoca’s new “Conversation Intelligence Heroes” program gives our customers a platform to highlight their successes with conversation intelligence technology. It also has perks like personal branding opportunities, VIP invites to regional events, access to private beta programs, and more.
As part of the program, we’re putting a spotlight on our most inspiring heroes. Today’s featured hero is Kellyanne Perez-Vera. She’s a Marketing Activations Manager at Verizon. Headquartered in New York City and with a presence around the world, Verizon's mobile network is the second-largest wireless carrier in the United States, with over 120 million subscribers.
Check out our Q&A with Kellyanne below, where she shares career highlights, predictions for future marketing trends, and how Invoca helped her transform buying experiences.
Being an Invoca advocate has helped advance my career. It’s allowed me to understand different user journeys through the analytics gathered and optimize digital experiences. I can use the data to tell compelling stories to my leadership team.
As Verizon’s Invoca expert, I also manage relationships with internal teams and bring together stakeholders from across the company. It’s really helped me develop my project management skills.
Finally, Invoca has helped me improve my critical thinking and strategic skills. I can say, "Hey, this is what the data says but let's dig deeper and find a diagnosis. Why is this happening? And what are we looking to solve?" Then I can provide the right recommendations.
Our marketing team uses Invoca to capture conversation insights and connect the full buying journey. It gives us the data we need to improve personalization and create a seamless path to purchase.
Want to hear more of Kellyanne’s story? Read the full Verizon case study here.
Growing up, my mother either wanted me to be a nurse or an accountant. I knew I would be the world’s worst nurse because I can’t stand the sight of blood. And my personality was too animated to be an accountant. Then I saw the movie Boomerang with Eddie Murphy, where he dated a VP of Marketing. This woman had so much pizazz and energy, while being so eloquent and professional. I started to research what a VP of Marketing did and it intrigued me. In college, I took some marketing classes and realized right away that was what I wanted to do.
When I graduated from college, I got into the agency world doing national media buying. I loved it. It helped me learn about relationship building, understanding target audiences, engagement, measurement, and more.
From there, I worked at American Express as part of their customer marketing enablement team. That role helped me understand operations and the importance of process efficiencies.
After that, I had a quarter-life crisis and moved from New York to Colorado. I got a role with DISH and that’s where I first started using Invoca. I loved being a part of DISH because I’m a first generation Latina and I was able to do marketing for their Latino and Puerto Rican audience.
Finally, I ended up finding Verizon. When I was interviewing, I told them I had used Invoca before and that helped me stand out. My job here has consisted of helping provide insights from Invoca, creating dashboards, acting as a consultant for what our customers are doing with IVR, chat, email, and social. I was recently promoted to my new role of Marketing Activations Manager and I’m very excited to get started!
I’m passionate about self development and growth. I wake up every day and do morning meditations and Bible study. I'm really big on my faith. I believe everything happens for a reason and I’ve learned to see blessings in disguise.
I’m also very into fitness. In the past three years, I've lost 60 pounds and I've kept it off. It’s taught me a lot about discipline and goal setting. It showed me that I could transform myself if I put in the effort and stayed consistent. I’ve applied that same mentality to my career as well.
I love cooking, too. Learning to be healthy has taught me how to create healthy alternatives to absolutely everything. I can make you a sesame chicken that you wouldn't believe had no sugar in it.
And, of course, I love my dogs. I work hard and make money so they can have a great life.
Personalization is going to become more important than ever. Customers will expect personalization in every interaction and companies will need to find a way to provide it. That’s why Invoca is so powerful — because you can use it personalize experiences at scale.
I also think that marketers and companies will become more data-driven. Companies are collecting more data than ever before, which they can use to guide campaign messaging, paid search bidding, and high-level marketing strategy.
Another trend is that in the aftermath of COVID, consumers expect better experience from brands. Companies humanized online and phone call interactions to make purchasing easier when social distancing measures were in place. People have become accustomed to this and expect brands to have more of a personality now. I think we’re going to see more marketers shift into, if our brand was a person, who would it be? Would it be Ryan Reynolds? Would it be a Tom Hanks?
A common mistake marketers make is ignoring the data. A lot of marketers are scared to look at data as the source of truth. If the data doesn’t make them look good, they’ll misrepresent it and cherrypick numbers from it. This causes problems down the line, when their future strategies fail.
I’ve also seen a lot of marketers who are scared to take risks. Taking risks is a really important part of growing — as long as those risks are calculated and informed by data. If you don’t take risks, you’ll get stuck in the same patterns and ways of doing things. This is a huge problem because technology and customer expectations are always changing. What worked four or five, three years ago, two years ago doesn’t work today. To adapt, you need to be comfortable with taking risks and failing.
Another mistake I see is that marketers want to present so many messages and they forget about focusing on the brand’s core identity. It’s important to have a slogan people instantly think of when they see your brand, so they know who you are, what you sell, and what differentiates you from the competition. Without a strong brand identity, you can easily confuse your customers and complicate the path to purchase.
A lot of young people reach out to me on LinkedIn and I admire them so much because they're like, "Hey Kellyanne, I graduate in a couple years. What’s the marketing world like? Give me some advice." The thing I always tell them is to continue to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and reach out to people that you don't know because they remember that.
I also tell young marketers to have patience. We live in a world of instant gratification and that can lead us to forget the importance of hard work and consistency. Some young people say, “Hey, I’m doing my job really well. I want a promotion.” But the company hired you to do your job. What are you doing to go above and beyond? What stretch projects are you taking on? How are you pushing yourself to grow your skills?
My last piece of advice is that it's okay not have everything figured out. In my career, I've had so many different marketing roles. Each time I switched roles, I made sure that the move would help push me toward doing more of what I enjoyed. So, find what you’re passionate about and do everything you can to turn that into a career. Just know that it might take a few tries to figure it out.
Are you interested in becoming a hero? Turns out you don’t need to get bit by a radioactive spider. You just need to be an active Invoca customer and participate with the community in some of the following ways:
What do you get out of it? Below are some of the perks that Conversation Intelligence heroes enjoy:
You can register to become a Conversation Intelligence Hero here or scan the QR code below. Just remember: with great power comes great responsibility.
