On any given day I’m consistently answering WhatsApp messages and emails on my cellphone, checking media for breaking news and booking company trips.
We’ve never been more linked than we are now, and we anticipate the manufacturers in our own lives to participate with real time communication across all stations — together in precisely the exact same way.
We anticipate to be reached when WE want to be reached, HOW we wish to be attained, and we care for.
This sort of one-to-one customer encounter is becoming critical for a company’s long term success. In reality, our latest Connected Customer report indicates that 45% of customers and 57 percent of business users say by 2020 they’ll change brands if a business doesn’t actively anticipate their requirements.
Delivering this kind of experience depends upon information and lots of it.
In our large information world entrepreneurs need to make sense of this data and use it to provide content to customers that’s timely, relevant, personal and most importantly. Marketing is no more predicated on gut instinct; it is data-driven and digitised.
I feel it’s time for the CMO to step in the CIO’s sneakers — to become more tech savvy and understand under.
Marketing is embedded in engineering
Nowadays marketing goes hand-in-hand with technologies — and I am not only talking digital advertising here.
Traditional tools like events that are in house and trade shows rely on procedures and data analysis with the goal of driving each and every campaign down to a personalised engagement.
That’s why I think it’s inevitable that as marketers utilize more and more marketing technician — or what we ‘martech’ — they need to work collaboratively with the CIO and the IT department.
The CMO has to take the IT government and present systems when buying a new piece of martech or rolling out a campaign, to make sure that it performs optimally.
The CIO needs to think about prioritising integration or the development required to successfully install marketing-critical software.
It is somewhat like a car, where the design needs to take into account what is under the bonnet. A high-performance engine is suited to a Formula One car, whilst something is better for a run-about.
The customer journey is the responsibility of everybody
Almost every customer journey, from research to buy and onto care, touches more than a marketing team is accountable for.
Customers interact with a company through so many channels — to the contact center group’s phone chat, by a secretary’s tweets. Nowadays as a result, advertising, service and sales all interact with customers.
This means it is now crucial so that these divisions have a 360-degree view of the customer, that businesses create a single view of each client. In the end, there is nothing more irritating than when a provider fails to acknowledge a customer interactions and conversations with them need to start from zero.
Reaching this view of the client relies on connecting their data from stations and other touch points.
Business data may flow through the marketing department, but the CIO is the data architect of the company. Both have to work together to make certain client information, from across all channels, may be recorded, analysed and shared across departments economically and quickly.
The customer experience must be the principal focus of everybody in the C-suite. Together with CIO and the CMO working companies are in a much stronger place to stay a step ahead of rising client expectations by making sure the customer journey is personal and seamless.
