Autopilot is now Ortto

TLDR: We have evolved beyond the journey builder and now help customers unify data, messaging and analytics on a single platform. Autopilot was a generic word and we wanted a brand that we could own long term. Ortto is spoken “Auto” and is a nod to Autopilot and our past.

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We never really gave ourselves a name. That might seem like a strange comment, but it’s true. In 2014 our customers of Bislr (Biz-ler) LOVED an app on the platform called Autopilot. They loved it so much, in fact, it’s all they wanted.

It was clear that Autopilot was our future, and so in 2015 we adopted the name and released Autopilot, the visual customer journey builder that many of you know and love.
Our disruption at the time was making multi-channel marketing automation accessible and affordable. That meant that Autopilot would easily plug into existing marketing stacks, and orchestrate the customer journey. The product was adopted by everyone from one-person startups, to teams in the enterprise.

What was previously time-consuming, complex, unaffordable, and relegated to the tech elite, had now become accessible and affordable. Users could try Autopilot and scale up their plan as required, without ever speaking to a salesperson.
Autopilot was designed to be as simple to use as drawing on a whiteboard. Many concepts we still take for granted today such as the visual journey builder, form capture, and annotations, and collaboration on the canvas were invented in Autopilot.

But over the years it became apparent to us that our customers struggled with two other problems:

The first was data.

As customers grew, they struggled to unify their data from all the numerous applications they used to run their business. To be able to personalize the customer journey, they needed to understand the customer in context.

The data model of CRM had been outgrown for this purpose. Its data model was too geared around the sales process and ignored event-based data.

So many growing businesses adopted data warehouses (including us), but this only made the problem worse. Teams had to either learn to write SQL or speak to a data person to get a list of contacts they wished to target. They would then upload these contacts into Autopilot (or another marketing automation solution like Marketo) and then send an email.
This problem is still surprisingly prevalent today. In growing organizations, we often hear stories from marketers about logging internal tickets just to get a segmented list of contacts for a campaign. And smaller teams struggle to make sense of the data from all of the different apps they are using in today’s marketing automation solutions.
Marketers feel handcuffed by their data instead of empowered by it.

Ortto aims to solve this issue with a customer data platform that, just like journeys in 2015, aims to make the modern data platform accessible and affordable. With Ortto’s CDP you can easily connect all the applications that store customer data, get a single unified profile of the customer in context, and easily segment through all of your customer data to find target audiences. You no longer need to rely on developers, marketing ops, or write complex SQL into a data center.

The second problem was analytics.

Today we view analytics across the customer journey through many different lenses. We look at our sales performance in Salesforce, our website analytics in Google Analytics, our product analytics in Amplitude, our marketing metrics in marketing automation software, and billing metrics in Chartmogul.

And while there is nothing wrong with these solutions (in fact we use many of them ourselves) the fact is the modern marketer is required to look into all of these different analytics tools to make sense of the customer beyond clicks, opens and basic attribution.
Want to see website visitors from a particular campaign UTM, that filled in a form, were sent an email, then clicked that email and signed up to your app to find drop off? You’ll need to transverse Google Analytics, Typeform, your marketing platform, and Mixpanel.
The truth is it’s simply too hard to understand, gain insight and make sense of opportunity across the customer. Nothing connects and most of the time you’re flying blind. This leads to management often questioning the value of marketing campaigns, or the decisions by marketing teams.

So what is the solution? Well in most smaller businesses there isn’t one. In larger organizations often data analysts are hired to make sense of all the data in your data warehouse. They present visualizations in Tableau and Looker. But how can a marketing team then quickly operationalize these insights?

Just like the data problem, the analytics problem arises. Whether your team is small or large it’s the same result: Marketers are simply not empowered to use data for insights.
Ortto aims to democratize customer journey analytics and dashboards for marketers, and other departments across your organization. We’ve taken once complex visualization tools and built a report builder on top of a customer data platform. The result: marketers are now empowered to make data-driven decisions, create visualizations and see opportunities.

So what is Ortto? Ortto is the evolution of Autopilot. It’s your customer data, messaging and analytics working together.

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