“It is not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it is about marketing effectively in a digital world.” This quote from Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes sums up the role of digital in today’s organisations.
Digital has not been the greatest disruptor this century, consumers have been. It’s the way consumers use technology to meet their needs for instantaneous gratification that has been the greatest disruptor. So why do organisations keep diluting the customer experience in their pursuit of technological advancement which only hinders, frustrates or repels the very thing they need to survive – their customers.
Digital, IT, Social and Marketing teams need to collaborate at a vertical level through the organisation to drive real productivity that will benefit the customer and employees and stop competing with each other. CEOs and boards need to stop chasing the shiny objects and get back to basics – their people – their customers and their employees.
So how can digital deliver a better experience for customers and employees?
Big data vs. small data – Finding a way to personalise offers involves making sound decisions on which data is meaningful, and in what context. Customer analytics tends to get conflated with the phrase “big data,” but success is just as dependent on “small data.” What’s the difference? Small data is knowing something specific about your customer.
Finding a starting point – Being able to segment customers is a critical starting point, the first stop in ending the “one size fits all” approach to customer communication. Your analysis needs to review customer behaviour data to develop insight into how they will respond going forward. Increasingly, understanding online behaviour (how a customer moves through a website or app) is critical to successful segmentation. Using tools such as customer journey maps and developing personas are critical at this stage.
Optimisation and real-time strategies – It becomes critical to optimise customer process and use real-time monitoring. Optimisation does more than create the right offer and the right means to get it in front of the customer. It calculates the opportunity cost of not making the offer. The real-time component makes sure that if an offer is necessary, it happens as quickly as possible and while the customer is still in-session. And the offer should be tailored to what she’s done or liked in the past. If one customer responds to a direct email or text message, that might be the approach to take. For another customer that tends to engage when she goes to do something online, she might see a pop-up ad while doing a search.
Customers like feeling that you ‘get them’ – Customers want recommendations for products and services based on their lifestyle, previous purchases and search history. Years of shopping on sites like Amazon and itunes and Ebay that offer personalised recommendations based on search patterns condition customers to expect this. This level of personalisation is becoming a factor in how customers view service quality. Online retailers get high ratings, where industries that typically shy away from customised offers fare worse. In a Millennial Bankers research study conducted by 6peas in 2017, millennial bankers wanted to be talked to at the right time, with the right offer”, in other words approach with offers when it is most relevant.
Continuous improvement – feedback provided by customers and employees should be used to drive a culture of continual improvement. Using technology to share customer and employee feedback, to give employees better data on each customers so that employees can serve the needs of their customers better is critical.
The biggest challenge for organisations is the tendency to chase the “shiny object” by creating C-suite roles to suit every new marketing trend. Yet we know that there is one element that remains constant – customers and our need to acquire them and our need to retain them. Putting digital and IT as C-suit priorities causes a lack of transparency, conflicting priorities and stretched budgets which do not put the customer at the centre of strategy. The creation of these silos is often contradictory to improving the customer experience and delivering on customer centric KPIs – acquisition, retention and loyalty.
CXInsights 360 – no one could put it better than Steve Jobs when he put the consumer truly in the picture of design priorities, “you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
6peas is a marketing and engagement consultancy specialising in customer strategy, research, training and advice. We partner with organisations to identify their next big growth strategy – their customers. 6peas works with organisations to create “sharable experiences – memorable+positive experiences” with customers, employees and partners to deliver a superior customer service and outperform competitors. We work with c-suite, middle management and boards to design a customer centric framework around 6 key pillars – leadership, customer, brand, employees, culture, and governance.
Carolyn Grant is the founder and managing director of 6peas marketing and engagement. With a passion for delighting customers and business improvement, Carolyn has found the way to facilitate change with Australian businesses. Carolyn has a broad range of industry experience in Health, Retail, E-commerce, Utilities, Banking and Finance, Professional Services and Education and Training.