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The debate over who should have the customer experience process has raged on. CMO Clint Poole, of global translation and localisation company Lionbridge, says marketing departments are best positioned to take ownership of this for a number of factors.
US based Lionbridge is not a organisation that was small. It is a600m revenue firm with seven acquisitions to date. It is 20 years old however went public in 1999, making its first foray into purchasing businesses.
It works around the world to increase global market share with over 800 brands, and offers advertising and content management solutions in addition to translation.
Poole was in London recently, also MarketingTech caught up with the CMO to pick his brains about client experience and marketing.
Possessing CX
Poole came into his current role three years ago, but has had over 20 from the advertising industry generally.
Since his appointment, he’s worked on solving a typical larger-organisational problem: fixing and streamlining a inconsistent customer experience.
Lionbridge has increased due to acquisitions that have added the organization and growth opportunities and solutions, Poole says, including it’s vital that the organization’s culture is with challenges its clients are currently facing. Poole was brought into focus on client experience, brand and demand generation.
So one of the first things he did was to: “split up from the product group and generate a business unit around need”.
“We spent the last year-and-a-half attempting to build up our global advertising capabilities, ramping up our marketing teams’ focus on developing brand awareness and global demand abilities,” he adds.
The CMO talks about the significance of having an outside-in view when interacting with clients, rather than an inside-out one; some product and sales teams have.
“I am watching marketing emerge as the owner of consumer experience. It’s something that needs to be embedded into a company’s culture and someone needs to own it – CMOs are trying to accomplish that.
“In this function, you’re directly responsible for components of it. You’re the individual voice of the client and help determine what buyers want from the brand, and your function would be to bring them into the company. Marketing, across all verticals, is taking charge of this for the correct reasons,” he states.
Personas
Marketers nowadays have so many tools and channels at their fingertips and Lionbridge alone has “a mismatch” of heaps of different systems, from Salesforce to Google Analytics to Marketo.
As soon as it’s “not immune” to trying out the latest marketing technology trends, it’s focused on creating a worldwide personal data plan with its own content and as an element of this is assessing its tools.
But something that’s been an incredibly useful feature of tools is the ability Poole says.
“Once I came into this space 20 decades ago, there were less stations: we’d PR, direct marketing, outdoor – so we had been restricted and spent all of our time studying the buyers”.
While advertising has always been data it changed to incorporate a complexity of channels and access to enormous amounts of data, allowing the production of personas – something the company began to do.
“That’s how we’re tactically coming all these different markets. We now have roughly 26 personas that buy differently, participate differently and how they supply vendors is very distinct,” Poole adds.
Personalised content
We’ve seen the research; personalisation is central to a good customer experience. And if you’ve got the proper tools to map personas out and make sense of reams of information, there’s no reason its advertising messages that are personalised can’t be optimised by brands.
“Personalisation is the first output of analytics for us,” Poole says, “We have been using it at the back end to inform the planning process. We have third party information mining agencies, after which our own ecosystem of electronic advertising prioritise and to identify that our key customers are.
“These notify the campaign process to figure out that we are targeting with laser precision. We all know that which personas inside which accounts have the lower share of pocket,” he explains.
Bottom line
The execution of research and resources to customers and their buying habits is essential to businesses. Poole argues that if you do not make use of existing channels and tools, your brand is going to be “highly inefficient”.
“That level of insight will help you understand how you can map out that and notify your marketing strategy
“This is a ‘cease’ exercise but you have to choose the opportunity to map out this. You are hearing that from all the key analysts and they are correct.”
