RBC's AI Blueprint for Enterprise Marketing Ops

Afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Marquis Murray. I am the founder and CEO of Surface and Asana Platinum Solutions Partner. At Surface, we help organizations improve the way that their teams work by helping them improve the way that their systems, their people, technology all come together in a more connected way.

I'm super excited for this conversation today because the transformation that took place at RBC went far beyond just simply replacing a tool or slapping AI on top of it. It really took a reimagining and reshaping of how work flows through a large and complex organization. But before we get into that, I wanna introduce my counterpart today, Liz Hopkins, the marketing director of process reengineering at Royal Bank of Canada, to share just some more context on what the transformation actually looked like. So welcome, Liz.

Thank you.

I'd love for you to, yeah, I'm excited for the conversation. I'd love for you to introduce yourself, talk more about your role maybe, and what your marketing organization and environment looks like that you oversee.

Absolutely. So thanks for that intro. So the role that I have at RBC is following a career of a few decades in marketing. I'm not a tech person. I don't get deep into the tool. I have a team that does that, but I have a very strong marketing background and all types of marketing and have a history of working on with teams that are either operating in a very inefficient way or they're going through a huge transformation, which often comes or always comes with a healthy dose of chaos.

And I bring structure and order to those teams in order to help them to deliver their goals. And so the organization asked me to step into this role about eighteen months ago to deliver that kind of solution of organization and structure to create a well oiled machine all across the marketing department at RBC. And RBC is a very large or complex organization, 100,000 employees, 19,000,000 clients, all sorts of different lines of businesses.

My team is responsible for the personal and commercial bank marketing team which is that part of the business accounts for about 70% of the bank's results overall. It's a very big and significant part of the organization. The team that I work with and that I'm responsible for changing and creating this more effective environment is about two fifty people.

That's our core users. We have about 500 or 600 more partners. So we're talking about 8,000, 9,000 people overall that we're trying to implement change management to.

And within that group, so of the two fifty users, they're spread across about 15 different sub line of business teams. So there's a lot of different teams who are working in different ways and different human beings who bring different experience to their roles, business demands that are required. And so there was a real challenge to try and find something that was going to give everyone some guardrails and some consistency without handcuffing them.

Helpful context. Yeah, just to draw a picture to the scale and complexity. I want to take the audience back to when we first started working together at RBC.

You knew that you had a problem. You knew that, you know, change had to happen, and you knew that you couldn't just change the tool because, you know, we had to make sure that we were thinking about what a future forward, you know, system looked like. So I'd love you to just paint a picture on what model you were using and following at the time and what wasn't working about it.

We were following a very compliance driven process previously. And in the financial industry, if anybody's in that space, it is a highly regulated industry. There's a lot of oversight from various governing bodies and there are a lot of requirements that we need to have in terms of approvals at different levels, different fact checks, different notifications that need to go to our clients, etc. And on and on it goes.

And we are audited a lot, all the time. And so making sure that we have the right things in place, the right approvals in place was really critical. And our previous system that we used was very compliance driven. It was essentially an electronic filing system to make sure the approvals and various things were housed in a central place and when auditors came we could find them and show them where they were and we didn't get called out for being offside from a regulatory perspective.

But nobody likes doing that kind of filing. Know, the word governance and auditing just kind of sends shivers up the backs of certainly of marketers.

And so it was really becoming a very burdensome situation where teams really, really hated it and their employee engagement scores were going down. Sometimes they did it, sometimes they didn't. Things were missed. It really it just was not working and teams were not happy.

And I would say on top of that, there was a lot of pressure and changes from an external environment perspective to generate more, to do more, to be more agile, to get things out into the world. Our competitors were changing, the competitive landscape was demanding it. And having this governance driven process behind the scenes was just really working in conflict to that. So so we we really knew something had to change in order for us to continue to deliver what we needed to from a business perspective.

Yeah. And when you finally figured out what that thing was that needed to change, how did you think about and brainstorm with your team what the ideal future state would actually look like? Because it's one thing to think about it, and it's one thing to actually roll it out and start executing.

Yes, absolutely. And it may surprise you, but we've we followed a very scientific, methodical approach, which is, you know, my brand.

And it started with doing a very extensive deep dive into how teams were currently working, Understanding what processes were they all following, talking to all 15 different teams and even more, probably hundreds of people that we interviewed, hundreds of documents that were reviewed.

And it took about six months. It was a really, really extensive and long term investigation that we did to understand current state and then also identify what the changes were that were needed.

From there, there were three key pillars that were identified. So we needed to change our planning process and get more structured and disciplined about that.

We needed to change our processes from the perspective of creating clarifying what needed to be done and also removing duplication from the system. So teams were feeling very, very slowed down by the fact that they had to repeat a lot of the things that they were doing over and over again for the different teams they needed to engage. And then lastly, it was identified that we needed new technology. We needed something that was going to guide marketers, that was going to be a lot more user friendly, that had a lot of the more modern features to it.

And way back then, which was nine months ago, like forever ago, AI was just a new part of the workflow tools. And so we identified Asana as one of the things to move forward. And then from there, we built the templates within the system. So we gathered requirements from teams around, okay, all 15 teams, what do you need in this workflow template that works for your particular team?

Who are the partners that you work with? And we built all of these templates up front so that it took the guesswork away from Teams, having to really think through who is it that they're supposed to engage. We built that, and then we rolled out the tool to Teams a few months later. That took a while to get it all approved and built and ready to go, and then we rolled it out to Teams.

Amazing. And it was no small feat. I mean, had hundreds of marketers. You had all these processes that need to be rethought and reimagined. How did you think about standardization? Because you have all these different teams that make up the marketing org, and they all work very differently. So how did you, as a team, really decide what could be standardized, what would have to be templated, and then what would need to be more flexible, or what remained flexible?

Yeah, one of the key learnings I would say we took from the previous approach was that the process was very rigid and it was very, like I said, compliance driven and it drove teams crazy because they had no flexibility.

They were not able to work outside of the margins at all, and so they somewhat rebelled against that. Because everybody's human, everybody brings their own experience to the role, they bring their own, you know, how long they've been in the industry, what other organizations they've worked with, how it's worked there. All of that comes into the picture. We deal with humans.

We are humans. Everybody has something different. We also have with all these different lines of businesses, very specific and different business needs. Some businesses have additional approvals and requirements that are required from a governance perspective, a regulatory perspective.

We have no choice, we have to do them.

And so it was really trying to find the balance of how do we build out something that has a core truth to it that is going to keep us compliant and keeping teams focused on the right things and making sure they know these are the things that are not flexible. You absolutely have to do them.

And that was our core process. And there's a universal truth in this. So delivering a marketing campaign is very similar to delivering any kind of project, whether it's a new IT build or you're building a car or whatever it is, shooting a movie, whatever it is. You identify whether or not you're going to do the work.

That's the onboarding stage. Then you gather the details on, Okay, what is it that we're going to build here? Get all your approvals along the way. And then you execute.

You have those three stages. That's true within a marketing campaign in the financial industry as well. So that became our core. And within that core, the key approval requirements were built in.

And then we leveraged AI to build in that layer of flexibility. So by gathering those requirements from teams and understanding, oh, in this case, when it comes to investments, as an example, we need to get these additional teams involved because they also have to approve the material, and we need to have that on record. But rather than asking teams to remember that, because again, it could be somebody who just joined the team two months ago, or it could be a very seasoned marketer who has come from another part of organization and they just don't know what it is. We built that in using AI.

So we had that's really where AI became incredibly important to us, was taking that requirement to think about what it is that needs to happen for each of those individual campaigns out of the minds and hands of the marketers and guiding them through that process so they don't miss something or they're not over twerking on something and getting everybody to approve it, which really slows things down.

And then we'd see the last step of the customization and that flexibility is just within the foundational ability of the tool of Asana. You can add tasks, you can take tasks away. So we've built out the framework. We've put in as much of that guidance in terms of those nuances. But teams, when they're in there, they can absolutely go in and add tasks, add subtasks, take things away, add additional collaborators. All of those things are flexible. So between all those three layers, we're in a very good spot in terms of what can be customized.

You did it so well, right? It seemed effortless when I saw it actually rolled out.

It was effortless because we had great implementation partners at Surface.

Thank you for that. So you mentioned, you know, regulation. And earlier you said that, you know, marketers, when they hear governance or regulation, you know, it can be a really scary word. But in your industry, you can't, you know, look past it.

It can't be an afterthought. And so I'd love to know how you layered in governance to your existing workflows or at least the future state workflows without adding like another layer or more process for the marketers to work through? Because, you know, as we know, there's already enough red tape in a lot of these industries. So what did that look like?

Yeah, well, our intent is that the all the governance and approval requirements that need to be on record and when an auditor comes and does their audit, that it's all sitting in one central place. That's the intent. That's the ideal state.

What happens often and we're still in the adoption phase, so there's still some corrections that we need to do here is that teams will get the approvals they need, fingers crossed. They get the approvals they need, but they might get them outside of the tool. And then they feel like, Oh, I got to take it from, you know, my Outlook or my Teams chat or wherever it is that they got it, and I've got to port it in to Asana. So it feels like extra work.

But because Asana has the collaboration function within it, the ability to gather those approvals is very slick and can and should be done right in the tool, which means that the marketer is getting those audit requirements and things that need to be filed and kept on record organically. They're not doing it out of the workflow and then having to bring it back in. It doesn't feel like an extra step. It's not a step that they can miss because it's right there and it's 100% tracked through the tool because all of those chats are kept, the approvals are right there, an auditor comes in and you haven't even thought about it because it's like, oh, I did whatever I needed to do, I executed the campaign.

No one ever wants to go back and check and make sure they've got everything in there that they need.

So they don't until an auditor comes and then they scramble. But when it happens organically like that, you don't have to do that. And it removes that burden of needing to have those compliance records in place completely because it's just organically happening. Right.

It's an important distinction because you hear governance and you think, oh, we have to do more and really add more. Right? But if you do it properly, it actually removes the ambiguity. Right? It removes the guessing and it allows you to move faster. Right?

Exactly.

And I'm sure you experienced that as well. Yep. Let's talk about adoption for a little bit. Right?

Like you spent all this time designing this process. Right? You had all these different folks involved, know, you came along and what did it actually look like to bring along these folks and actually implement the system that they would then use and be excited to use? How did you manage the change management aspect of this massive rollout?

Yeah, I'll break it down into kind of pre build, then build and launch, and then post launch where we're in the adoption and optimization phase, which is where we are right now. But going back pre launch, where we did this very extensive research, at the same time we were doing that research, we had a layer of constant ongoing change management strategies that were being implemented along the way.

And those strategies included having transparency around where we were in the process, around what we were doing, about what we were learning from the deep dive that happened, and also about some of the things that we discovered along the way that we called quick wins, the things that we could fix for the team to start to build that trust and get them engaged and understanding what's going on. It wasn't just there was this study done and then we went away and you know into a black box and we did a bunch of work and lo and behold we came out with this wonderful solution.

So that was pre launch. We were making it very clear that their voice was part of the process, that we were leaning into those interviews that we had done and that we were distilling that down and this is what we had learned and this is how we were going to build things.

So that was the pre launch phase. Towards the end of that and probably leaning into the build and the launch step was a co creation process that we went through. So we identified some areas like we needed to rethink our process, eliminate some of the duplication in there, really identify some of the clarify some of the things that needed to happen in the workflow. And so we had teams come into a workshop to do a co creation exercise and we had representation from all 15 of those companies and it was a two day thing, two different teams, quite a few people represented to help us rebuild what it is that was going to work for them.

So we wanted them to have that ownership again to feel heard, to build that trust and to get excited about, Oh my gosh, my work is going get better at some point. I'm not going to be burdened and working till, you know, late hours in the evening. Things are actually going to improve. They're listening to me.

And so that change management happened throughout. We also had change champions who were specific people that we ran a lot of things by as we were developing them. Does this communication make sense? Does this workflow make sense?

And on and on it goes. So we had them identified throughout the organization.

And then we had a very structured and in person mandated training session for everybody. So for all 900 people, they had to go through the technical training of how to use Asana and how to see it from the perspective of onboarding a campaign and then how does that generate the workflow and how do they manage through all of that. And that was critical. We have to show people how to use it, but the tool itself is quite user friendly.

So it was good. We also had incentives along the way. So we had we tried to add some fun and some excitement. I'm also a marketer.

So I am likely to always bring in those marketing techniques. We have posters around the office, we had prizes for people who did certain things within a certain time period, we had testimonials, we have a monthly email that we send out to tell people when we showcase the super users who are doing everything right and have them tell their colleagues about it. We went around and went to everybody's team meetings and talked about it and also had a very purposeful feedback loop to hear, okay, well, what's not working? How do we fix the things that we launched?

We knew it wasn't a perfect solution when we launched, but we wanted to get it out there, get people's hands on it so that they could really opine with specificity around what's not working, what should we fix, like help us to build it even better for you. So that feedback loop was huge. And then we also, last one thing is we had desk side assistance. So after we did the training, when any marketer was setting up a new campaign, we said, Don't do it by yourself.

Somebody from my team will come and sit with you and they will show you the first two or three times that you need to set things up. We will show you how to do it to make sure that you're feeling comfortable with it. You're doing it right. And you're not intimidated or just going, Oh, this is too complicated.

I can't do it at all and not doing it at all. So that was a bunch of change management that we did along the way, and it still feels like it wasn't enough.

I don't know about that. I mean, I hope you're taking notes, honestly, because outside looking in, this is a playbook for what change management looks like. Honestly, I see it all the time. I hear it all the time. People are not adopting the tool. What can we do? Training.

Okay, great. That only gets us so far. I remember that day I got on a 5AM flight from Halifax, Nova Scotia, flew into Toronto, got in just in time to the RBC office with my carry on in tow. And I walked in and I saw the room, I saw the posters on the wall, I saw the change champions ready to answer questions. All the tables were set up with stickers and pamphlets. They had step by step SOPs on what the workflow was we were gonna walk through that day.

Brandon Llewellyn on our team and Julie helped put together some videos that we would watch and then pause and you orchestrated all of that, right? You thought about all of that. So again, if you want an example of what true change management looks like, this is it right here. And even after the fact, Liz spoke about the help desk, right, being available for your team members.

And I remember seeing all the marketers come into the room, they were excited, right? RBC made it fun. They sat down, Okay, when do we get to use a tool? Okay, how do you do this?

And we were walking around helping them, right? So it does take a different way of thinking. I wanna stress that. It might not look as big as this, but some semblance of, you know, what they have done, I think, is, you know, something we can take away from.

So congrats to you on all of that.

Thank you.

It's been several months since that now. How are things going? You know, what have you learned? What have people shared with you about the experience about them using the tool? And if you were to do it all over again, would you change anything about the process?

Yeah, you know, I mean, for those kind words about change management. But like I said, it still feels now like we're about seven, eight months post launch of the tool.

We're in that adoption phase where, you know, some people are fully adopting it. We have those super users who love it and are doing everything they want. Some people who are, you know, I'm never going to use Asana, this is the worst. And then we have most of our people in the middle who are still trying to figure it out, but still have a good attitude about it.

So I would do more change management, honestly. It just feels like there is 's almost a limitless amount of change management that you can do.

In terms of specifics, we did have leadership support throughout the whole build up and launch of the tool, But we didn't launch with reports or specific functions that leaders like senior leaders like SVPs and VPs of these line of business teams that they could go in and use in a really slick, very super like, executive friendly way to run their team meetings or their one on ones. And so there was a little bit of a disconnect between, you know, the teams being accountable to their leaders, which so I would do that. I would change that. I would be a little bit more purposeful and maybe wait a little bit longer until we had those reports built and ready to go so that we could get leaders in right away and maybe have some separate training specific to leaders.

Leaders didn't really come to training. We did that more one on one, but I think we could have done a better job of that so that that that accountability to your boss happened right up front. So that's definitely one thing that I would do. I would also focus a bit more on training the process.

So when we ran our training sessions, you were at one of them. Yeah. Or a couple of them, actually. It was very tool focused.

And the tool was built and the workflows were built. Those templates were in there that were guiding teams through what they needed to do. So we believed we'd never done this before. So we believed you needed to focus on the functionality of the tool, get people in there, and then the rest would kind of carry them through the rest of the workflow.

But the reality is there still a lot of them are still operating outside of Asana. So spend more time I would insist on longer training. We only had two hours per team per session, which was not long enough, which should have been full day, maybe the system in the morning and then the process in the afternoon or vice versa. I would spend more time on that and sort of understanding what the or explaining and educating teams on what the underlying process is that Asana supports and why we're doing it and how it's important and how it connects back to audit requirements and sharing the theories that we've built into the AI rules rather than relying on the tool to do it.

Great segue because we haven't touched on AI just yet.

We've got this foundation. We've got all our processes figured out. We're moving towards this future state. Like AI, we've seen it all today and we've been doing it at work. It's enabled us to do so much more, faster, better, whatever it may be. Where are you seeing AI make the biggest impact with your marketing team today?

So there's a couple of things which I've touched on one of them already, where when we initially built, we leveraged the AI studio to build a bunch of business rules to inform the intake of a campaign and connect it to what all the different rules are. So we cross referenced the AI cross references into who are the right collaborators to attach to a workflow, what are the approvals that are needed, and so on and so forth. So it takes that thinking out of the responsibility of the marketer to always remember or for their boss to remember. Things change so much, so fast from either a regulatory perspective or team turnover and on and on it goes.

We went through a huge merger last year with HR, two years ago with HSBC. That just changed the landscape completely. And AI takes that variability out of the mix in the upfront. Now that we've launched and we are getting teams into the tool more and we're getting a little bit more of that feedback loop and specifically, okay, what are you finding difficult about the process and the tool?

The marketers really had a hard time with multi homing. They could not get their head around how or why they had to do that. It's a clunky process.

I know I've heard other people talk about how great it is, but marketers did not like it. They also had to manually sort the tasks. So when the workflow generated all the tasks, there was a sorting step that they had to do. So we created...

We leaned in. As soon as we heard about teammates, we leaned in and built two of our own teammates. One of them is called Homer, and he multi homes for everybody. And everybody was, like, jumping for joy, cartwheels in the hallways.

They loved it.

And then the other one is sorter, and it goes through and does that. So it just automates it. So it just takes those clunky, awkward things that people are struggling with out of the process, and it automates it for them. So they love it.

What's your favorite AI teammate?

Out of the two, or Oh, maybe you have well, love Homer's name, I'm going to Of course.

Say And that was the bigger pain point as well, right? So, Homer... We all love Homer.

Okay. Perfect.

Likely got a a number of enterprise, you know, marketing leaders in the room that are probably thinking about a change that they need to go through. Their systems are broken. They don't know where to start. Maybe they've tried something in the past. What would be some advice that you would give to them on what transformation should look like or how they should go about it before actually starting to do the work?

Yeah, I would... I'm going to lean in on process first. So one of the things that we recognized right away is that you can...

It's really one of the easier things is figuring out what your tech's going to be. Because you can put an old crappy process into whatever fancy new tech, you're still going have the same problems. Right? So really starting with your process and digging deep into that to understand what part of it works, what part of it doesn't work, what do you need to fix before you start to build out that tech solution so that you're not putting a bad process into a new fancy tool.

The process you need to really start with process. And then secondly is AI. Like, don't be afraid of AI. It's life changing.

I don't feel like anybody in here is going be afraid of AI after this session, but after this conference.

But really lean into it and leverage it. There are so many use cases. It's it's game changing.

Thank you so much, Liz, for sharing all this today. I think the part that stands out the most is when you're thinking about, you know, changing or transforming how your teams work, it doesn't have to be, you know, complex. Right? You approach it in a systematic way.

You think about what it looks like to bring together your people, your processes. You need to have that solid foundation. You mentioned, you know, rolling in governance into the conversation. And I think most importantly, is bringing along the people on your team to be a part of that change as well.

So thank you so much for the time. Love the conversation.

It was my pleasure.

Yeah. And most importantly, thank you to all of you for joining us today. Thank you.