Putting the focus heavily on its end to end customer journey management, CHE Proximity has added 17 new people to the Experience team.

CHE Proximity CEO, Chris Howatson, said the new hires support both new business wins and an ongoing focus on connecting owned and bought media into a single experience.

Image: head of experience Catherine Hooson, director, experience (media) Elizabeth Geor, director of knowledge Susan Lyons, CEO Chris Howatson, director, experience (CRM) Sonya Bennett, director of data, James Greaney

“Influencing customer behaviour has always required the right message delivered at the right moment (time and place),” he said. “But only now does the technology and data fluidity exist to really identify a person in different channels and enable a truly connected experience.

“So when we think about how to influence a customer, there should be no breaks in how we plan and orchestrate owned and bought media.”

Howatson said this capability has been in plan since the agency was formed in August 2012.

“We’ve been readying the agency structurally, culturally and intellectually to truly manage a single customer experience across all addressable channels.  Over the last six months we’ve implemented the final pieces of the puzzle – most significantly in technology agreements with Adobe and Google.”

Elizabeth Geor, director of experience at CHE Proximity added that while significant, technology is only one piece of the puzzle.

“How an agency is remunerated is very important in determining customer experience. We can truly deliver margin optimised journeys because we are impartial to how budget is allocated,” she said.

“We are paid for our time and the incremental commercial performance of our clients, not the format of media we select. Be it search, email, phone, display or video, the customer will consume the best channel to influence their behaviour at the lowest cost of delivery.”

Susan Lyons, director of knowledge at CHE Proximity said, “We’re creating a new breed of marketing professionals – most recently cited in trade press as the journey managers. They make unbiased decisions on how to get, keep, grow and win-back customers.

“And so must balance the skills of brand management, customer value and loyalty with channel and publisher management. They are almost impossible to find, but we’ve overcome this by carefully selecting our team from a diversity of backgrounds – loyalty, service design, media planning and buying, statistics and publishers – as well as promoted from within the agency. This provides us the invention of thought required.”

Amongst all the hires, Sonya Bennett, a top loyalty marketer in Australia, has joined CHEP as director of experience (CRM) after establishing and maintaining world class loyalty programs at Mecca Brands and previously Country Road.

Elizabeth Geor has also been promoted to the position of director of experience (media) from within the agency having run the Foxtel, GE and AGL businesses over the last four years.

Catherine Hooson joins as head of experience from Sky and Accenture UK, with Olivia Scott as senior experience planner, after 10 years with Dentsu Aegis.

Stuart Dennon joins James Greaney’s data sciences team as principal data scientist with Peter Jensen as senior data scientist.

Howatson said, “We’re having very exciting conversations with clients.  Everyone needs to deliver more with less.

“Data enabled journey management is providing our clients confidence our commercial forecasts are more than instinctual, but underpinned by mathematics”.