Tracey McMullen (Director, Marketing Automation) and Nicole Eggleston (Director, CRM Platform) of Fidelity Investments are the dynamic marketing duo leading a team of Trailblazers at Fidelity. The online trading brokerage of choice, Fidelity offers its clients confidence and assistance on the road to retirement. With Salesforce’s help, this team has broken down silos to connect with business customers, consumers, and advisors in groundbreaking ways.

Tracey and Nicole paved the way for transformative collaboration between service and marketing teams at Fidelity. They compared their teams to the essential pieces of a great performance: backstage efficiency and onstage virtuosity.

“Our audience is everyone receiving our external communication,” Tracey said. “It could be clients, employees, our partners, or advisors.” Backstage, she said, Service Cloud keeps everything in order. Onstage, Marketing Cloud’s running the show. But it wasn’t always that way. This pair of Trailblazers shared their story, making confessions along the way that may be all-too familiar to many financial services marketers.

Confession: “I surrendered to the silos.”

For their first confession, Tracey and Nicole admitted: When Fidelity implemented Marketing Cloud, the first few customer journeys were confined to that platform. Marketing data wasn’t shared across integrated systems, resulting in a manual, print-based process of reporting and analysis that could not scale to meet real-time business requirements.

“We were digitizing the experience externally (for clients and partners), but internally we were still very reliant upon paper,” Nicole said. “We were taking customer data out of Salesforce, asking the back office to validate lists, and waiting up to two weeks for that data to show up in Marketing Cloud so we could send out another communication.” The marketing team had a meticulous 12-week client journey planned, but because of this tedious cycle, they couldn’t get approval to move forward with it. “We had to change the way we were doing it,” she said.

Integrating Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud eliminated complicated, manual marketing cycles like this.

At this point, serendipity struck. “One day, I was walking down the hall,” Tracey said, “and Nicole and I found each other.”

They realized that if they combined Tracey’s knowledge of Marketing Cloud and Nicole’s knowledge of Service Cloud, they could bring it all together for something really special.

“What makes the backstage/onstage experience come together is integrating those two experiences,” Tracey said. “That came to life through integrating Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. It was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz where everything goes from black-and-white to Technicolor.” Connecting marketing and service solutions meant the marketing team could react, in real time, to customer data as it changed — and service reps could better control the timing and relevancy of communications going out to clients (as well as who went into certain batch waves, if any were being used).

After a fast-paced 11 months, Tracey and Nicole’s teams were integrated through the sharing of data in Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. With all customer data stored in Salesforce, those 12 handoffs along the frontline were eliminated. All of a sudden, service reps had a “magic button” to instantly engage clients with Marketing Cloud-triggered emails. This enabled more meaningful conversations.

“When we partnered, we were able to be real-time and on-brand,” Tracey said. The digital process helps service reps and marketers react to the market more efficiently. “If clients give feedback,” she said, “we can make changes in real time.”

That includes changes to client journeys. Using Automation Studio, the service team can add contacts to a journey campaign driven in Marketing Cloud. “It melts away the fear of multitouch campaigns,” Nicole said. “This provides transparency. Now everyone can see what communications the contact has received,” and the team can take someone out of a journey quickly if necessary.

“We’ve simplified the experience for the end user,” said Tracey. “We’ve seen 325% increases in clickthrough rates. A 99% take-action rate. We’re very happy about that.” Adopting a digital process that puts up-to-date client data at the fingertips of the service team has led to significant cost avoidance, she said. “We saved approximately 10 million dollars because we didn’t have to invest the money in a nondigital process and traditional mail” for marketing and service. Eliminating the need to print, fax, and mail documents back and forth also increased team efficiency and saved clients time.

“We’ve seen 325% increases in clickthrough rates. A 99% take-action rate. We’re very happy about that.”

Tracey McMullen, Director of Marketing Automation, Fidelity

Salesforce enabled teams to carry real-time data anywhere with mobile access. They can literally watch the business move at any moment. “I remember when the first client signed up after the implementation,” Nicole said. “There was this celebratory moment. I sent an email, and the senior leader said, ‘Oh, I already know.’ Senior management was watching on their mobile devices.”

As customer satisfaction and meaningful engagement continue to soar, Tracey and Nicole have some thoughts about the lessons learned on their path to success:

1.     Don’t be afraid to blur the “marketing line.” Apply the lens of “customer experience” to anything external-facing. It provides consistency and keeps the focus on the client.

2.     Settle for less. Less, in this case, can be so much more. Make compromises when building a new campaign: “You can’t customize every single touchpoint and segment it by every single market,” Nicole said. “You’ve got to get it out and let your audience react. You’ve got to keep moving.”

3.     Schedule optimization and releases. Think ahead. If you have to change the path of your contacts’ journey for any reason, be prepared.

Wrapping things up, Nicole and Tracey made a few more confessions to the crowd.

Confession: “I don’t know all the answers before I start.”

Optimizing a campaign, redefining a process, and creating new cross-department relationships is an ongoing journey. Observe results to optimize, these Trailblazers say, but don’t assume you’re going to nail it right away.

Confession: “Knowing my destination and my travel companions is all I need to begin a trek — but I might pick up a hitchhiker along the way.”

“I can get further with travel companions,” Tracey said. “When the marketing team rolled out our client onboarding journey, we started asking: ‘What happens to a new client contact in the first 30 days? The first 60, or 90? And we found out, across the organization, these clients were getting four different welcome emails over four months.” They recognized the need to correct this beyond just marketing, so from then on, the support, training, and marketing teams “came together to make all the content for the onboarding journey together.”

Confession: “A documentation process makes me feel in control.”

“I’m a control freak,” Tracey confessed. She’s a big fan of a document for every phase in building Fidelity’s journeys, complete with specific steps to follow for all involved — keeping everyone apprised of where the team is in the process.

For Tracey, Nicole, and team, what is this process? The pair of Trailblazers shared some internal best practices for all four steps they use to build client journeys using Journey Builder. Take a look:

For these two Trailblazers, progress is a continuing adventure. With Salesforce in their corner, Tracey and Nicole can dream big for their marketing and service teams — and deliver.

Want to learn more about the Trailblazers at Fidelity Investments? Watch the full session recording here.

Dreamforce 2017 had more strategic content and Trailblazer use cases for financial services marketers than ever. Couldn’t make it to the conference? Missed that special breakout session? We’ve got you covered.