Call To Arms - How Do We Drive Profitable Growth in The Customer-Centric Era? A Treatise for these CX Times...
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The Context: These are not easy times for CX, Marketing and Sales professionals. We are caught in an endlessly changing, increasingly digital world which is upending the ways in which we have gone about our business for a long time. Serious, fundamental transformation is required. But what? And how? In what sequence? And even who does what?
The Challenge: Technology and the pervasive digital culture have transformed both the “How” and the “Who” of demand creation and maximizing customer lifetime value. In this new era of Customer Experience it is the customers who are (and will remain) truly empowered.
- Customers are empowered by unlimited access to information, opinion and shared experiences
- Media costs are going up while response rates are going down
- Customers’ media usage has rapidly shifted to real-time and is increasingly contextual
- Content consumption has shifted to personal devices, “Mobile First” and “Mobile Only” are now primary, challenging considerations for all Marketers
- Ad blockers, privacy, flawed (over-stated) attribution are increasing complexity
- Customers expect value at every micro exchange and they expect all experiences to be personalized and relevant
- While interested in personal gratification they often also seek identification with a shared macro purpose and expect products and services to be authentic
- They expect immediate access to information, rapid gratification and they want seamless transactions directly with brands
Customers have shifted and will continue to evolve their media and content consumption. The newly empowered consumer is forcing brands to radically rethink how marketing, customer care and other areas of the enterprise need to serve these evolving behaviors:
- To both consume and create content that evolves dynamically across channels and in real-time
- To find and discover information and opportunities through Google
- To engage and share through Facebook and evolving affinity based networks
- To update in real-time through Twitter or smaller, specialized social communities
- To receive recommendations through Amazon
- To hear and watch brand stories through You Tube
- To transact immediately through PayPal and other mobile payment providers
- To have equally informed call center personnel, customer service representatives, front line sales associates and executives who can easily measure the impact and the ROI contribution of each
Marketing, sales and customer experience professionals have a mission critical role to deliver long-term value as well as execute operationally with a focus on measurable growth performance. The implications for the enterprise are that Marketing and what in the past was referred to as “CRM” and Sales Force Automation are no longer separate activities or simply one-off current year budget categories.
- Marketing needs to create experiences inextricably linked with sales, operations and service
- Customer-centric organizations need to both create content for and receive content from the entire enterprise, extending from corporate communications to R&D
- Customer-centric organizations will drive investments in technology that will be connected to enterprise systems
- Customer-centric organizations will require access to data from across the enterprise combined with the ability to rapidly develop and deploy insights based upon that data
- Marketing budgets will require financial modeling of ROI (both expense and capital) that must be clearly connected to sales outcomes
- Marketing must be a humble, collaborative partner with sales, technology, service and customer experience colleagues
Marketing, sales and related customer experience activities are an expanding, very fast-growing area of enterprise investment. These budgets will continue to grow beyond paid media and therefore influence and control is sought by an increasing number of potential players inside and outside of the enterprise…and beyond the Marketing department.
- Agency holding companies, with disconnected offerings and limited scale across advertising, media and digital agencies
- Management consultants, seeking customer insights and marketing implementation capability
- Technology vendors, seeking to engage the CTO, the CIO, the CMO and the CRO to deliver innovative technology solutions while not always fully understanding customer-centric strategy
- Traditional Marketing Service Provider’s with database solutions challenged by real-time behaviors or insights from unstructured sources
- Research companies delivering survey and panel data without delivering actionable insights into behaviors and returns
- Digital media and publishers, offering a new breed of solutions searching for a role within the ecosystem of clients, agencies, media and publishers
Our collective mission must be to enable the enterprise, inclusive of and beyond the CMO, to define and deliver new customer experience-centric growth strategies that respond to the dramatic transformation that organizations face as they seek to rapidly adapt to new requirements in this era of the customer.
- Commencing with analytics and insights which redefine consumer value and consumer roles as champions, co-creators and critics as well as transactors
- Establish proprietary metrics, systems and performance dashboards for the entire organization with profitable customer experience engagement as a new primary objective and driver of growth
- Defining brand experiences in terms of the audiences with whom one seeks to engage, both in terms of purpose as well as relevant content
- Developing the content plans across the enterprise to deliver to customers, personalized to individuals or for their communities
- Redefining the roles of paid, owned and earned media and integration with sales, service and operations
- Connecting marketing to operations, sales, technology and service through carefully mapped and defined customer journeys
The ideal approach calls for an integrated team and platform to both define and execute the strategies. Teams need to be customized and expert at leveraging best-in-class data, tools and technologies.
- The team will leverage a robust, KPI focused, strategic framework to develop programs designed for one or more segments or divisions of the business
- Given our penchant for test and learn, ideally, initial projects would consist of at least one customer-centric marketing program across all media and channels for an agreed period, typically no less than 12+months, with testing of significant growth opportunities and real-time tracking
- These types of programs must run on a connected data solutions platform with first party customer data supplemented by relevant data sources, and with technology that enables real-time content activation and personalized experiences
- The capabilities and skills in the team will be full service across strategic planning, analytics, creative, content curation, as well as activation across all channels, development, production, publishing, and optimization
- Program governance should be shared across departments utilizing best practices in workflow, program management, reporting and performance measurement
Success will best be achieved when the CMO, CRO, CIO and COO as well as the new “Chief Customer Experience Officers” work seamlessly to design and orchestrate these programs across all functions. To enable a continuous test and learn approach toward the development of customer-centric” growth strategies and their supporting organization(s). This will also require a commitment to organizational design, workflow and training across-functions in order to:
- Ensure Customer-Centricity across the enterprise in actionable, tangible ways.
- Connect Marketing, Sales and Customer Care with the CIO and IT organization around technology planning.
- Connect Marketing with the COO, operations and services organizations around connected experiences that span from search, to sales, to loyalty.
- Connect Marketing with Research around a decision-making framework.
- Connect Customner Care with Marketing & Finance & Sales for the business case and evaluation criteria.
- Connect Customner Careand marketing with HR for future skills and training requirement
The benefits we should all commit to deliver will enable the CXO, CMO, and the CRO to plan, prove and scale performance-based marketing across a continuous lifecycle
- Fact-based business cases based on rigorous analysis of both acquisition and retention opportunities
- One connected plan and program for driving change and ROI
- Real-time tracking of performance and shared learning
- Recommendations for internal skills, workflow and organization
The advantages of this differentiated model from the increasingly ineffective, more traditional, less connected single solution approaches are many:
- Marketing, sales and customer experience expertise will be coupled with specific technology solutions/platforms across all aspects of the customer lifecycle
- Knowledge of the ecosystem of Media, Technology, Data and Content, enabling the right solutions will be matched to the clients’ needs
- Methodology will be deployed to plan and execute with discipline, rigor and speed
- Talent will be selected for this customer-centric, performance based model and trained in its operation
- Compensation will be inclusive of output and performance with shared accountability for business outcomes
- Lower overheads from efficient process and staffing
- Elimination of the waste, inefficiency and cost of managing multiple vendors
- All underpinned by deep expertise in analytics, insights, metrics, technology and continuous optimization