by Leeya Hendricks (@LeeyaHendricks) As the final frontier in Star Trek, customer experience (CX) remains the ultimate lead to transformation that will propel us into the galaxy.
Corporate leaders expect chief marketing officers to have primary responsibility for growth strategies and revenue generation. CMOs need to find new routes to drive revenue. With various trends and outlined predictions for growth, one common thread is data. Data is now at the heart of customer experience, and companies are embracing advanced technology that helps them use data better.
Last year’s expert predictions of where customer experience would be headed in 2017 are already seeing traction with an ongoing stream of modern technologies that are challenging enterprise businesses to adopt smarter capabilities. Technology is impacting customer-experience development and delivery, and influencing rising customer expectations. Leading companies are integrating technologies into their existing processes to create innovatively connected experiences that increase long-term customer loyalty.
Data leading the frontier
With a growing adoption of these technologies, it is creating a higher level of customer-experience maturity, connecting systems and removing silos to create a common data source that drives more effective ways to engage customers and propel business growth. Data collection, analysis, and application allow for a richer understanding of the customer across your entire organisation.
There is a clear mandate among senior management teams and board members for marketing to be the growth driver and business value creator in their organisations.
Many CMOs highlight challenges in embracing integrated data-driven analytics to embark on the drive for revenue generation, and enduring customer relationships; with their being less involved in the development of new products, markets, customer experiences and business conversions, this should not be the case. Here lies the opportunity: data-driven platforms may help CMOs get the boost they are seeking.
Business has gone digital and there is no turning back
New-age digital consumers demand more, and expects something special each time they deal with a brand. Customers have a wide array of choices when it comes to choosing the right business to invest in, and often go with the best the market must offer that fits their budget.
What’s the first thing people do when they have a negative experience? They share it with other people. According to a research paper by American Express, 95% consumers share bad experiences with each other. If businesses don’t transform themselves digitally, they might lose their potential future customers to their competition.
Delivering an awe-inspiring customer experience remains imperative for a business to survive these times of digital transformation and delivering a consistent CX is the imperative.
Delivering a consistent customer experience
At the most-basic level, collaboration is key. If you have individual teams responsible for each area of marketing and they’re not working together, you’re going to have a disjointed customer experience.
Integrating all the departments — technology, HR, marketing etc — within the business is key. Achieving the optimum mix on how all the different departments work together is the biggest area of focus and opportunity.
In terms of managing data, consolidating it into one organisation helps, and having one platform of analytics is key. When you’re overloaded with data and everyone has a piece of it, this then adds to the problem.
The more insights we gain from data and the smarter we get with the data, the more we can prioritise and become more targeted and remove items off the list. Over time, we learn what to focus on and what not to focus on.
Marketing, technology, and management were silos of the past. Marketing technology management — MarTech — is the fabric of the future, as so eloquently put by Scott Brinker. And the best person qualified to handle all of these is the CMO, the propellant of transformation within the new frontier.
Leeya Hendricks (@LeeyaHendricks) is a chartered marketer, global marketing strategist, a digital driver and a Women in Tech leader. She joined Oracle South Africa in 2016 as marketing director SADC, responsible for leading integrated modern marketing strategies for the business across the Southern African region, and is currently marketing director for the ECEMEA region, based at Oracle UK, responsible for driving digital strategy, demand generation and transforms portfolios to develop sustainable revenue growth.
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