In the age of CX.ai, how to get the basics right.
As a marketing analytics professional I keenly observe my own experiences with brands, and I had an interesting experience which goaded me to write this article.
Most progressive enterprises today have realized that delivering a personalized, relevant and timely communication to the customers is critical. The explosion in the Martech stack is a clear testament that organizations are spending millions on getting the right tech stack. The global Martech industry itself was more than $100 Bn by end of 2018 and expected to grow fast in 2019.
Martech spend is already about a quarter of the total marketing budget and increasing year on year. Organizations are also increasing looking to build the tech stack in-house with a keen desire to deliver superior customer experience coupled with widespread distrust in agencies.
Marketing Automation will remain the most exciting trend as organizations strive hard to deliver superior customer experience. While the spend on Martech has increased, the reality is, however, overall customer satisfaction with Martech software is only about 5.8 on a scale of 1 (not satisfied) to 10 (very satisfied), according to Real Story Group research.I suspect the reason for this is the failure to feed the Martech stack the right data and intelligence. To draw an analogy with a sprinkler system, Martech is like the plumbing while data and intelligence is like water flowing through the pipes. If you have no water running, the best of the plumbing is useless.
Coming back to my recent experience with a reputed Automobile brand, my lease with a SUV was coming to an end. The SUV was a good lease, I got it cheap and it behaved as expected minus a few issues which I was okay to live with.
From a data perspective, I believe the brand a lot of information on me. They had all my PII data, with OnStar technology in my car, they were getting my personal driving information and service details and financial information from their leasing department. About 6 months prior to my lease’s end date they started communicating to me about options after the lease. However, a series of things happened that tells me that this brand is failing on delivering coordinated customer experiences even after probably investing on a full tech stack. Here is what happened:
1) A day before the day I thought my Lease was ending, I went to the showroom to return my car. As I parked outside the showroom, a lady asked me my purpose, asked whether am looking to lease a new car and when old that hadn’t decided yet, she directed me to the pre-owned section of the showroom. I think she lost a real opportunity to provide me options for a new lease.
2) The person I dealt with in the Pre-Owned car section was nice but told me that I had 7 more days of else and hence I to keep the car of another week.
3) However, the next day I get an email from the showroom informing me that my lease had ended, and that I should contact them immediately. I replied to that email without ever getting a response.
4) Then I got another email which offered me discounts for a variety of upgrades to my car!!!
5) I returned the car the next week with no trouble, but I have been told I will know the final charges after a week, which leaves me with a little uncertainty. He even asked me to check with the leasing finance wing the nest day to make sure my car has been grounded.
6) I again get a friendly reminder (My car’s birthday apparently) for a service appointment.
Assuming am not an exception this is an inconsistent customer experience delivery. The communications from the dealership are well meaning but disjointed. They do not seem to have communications mapped to a Single customer journey and that they lack touch governance. I am certain they have automation in place for marketing communications but the customer data which is the backbone of their marketing systems isn’t doing its job. (I haven’t yet covered how their Adtech Stack failed to target me based on the research I have been doing on new lease options, but I won’t get there as the dealership probably isn’t handling it themselves and there are other players involved.)
Purely from a Martech perspective though, this indicates that data and analytics remain the biggest opportunity and the greatest threat for the enterprises, as the sheer volume of data and technology options can bog them down.
Hence here is a list of basics that an organization needs to deliver on superior customer experiences:
1) Knowledge on the customers which translates to data capture and synthesis. AI/ ML technologies today have evolved a lot, but organization need to first have supervised learning models before jumping to unsupervised learning models.
2) Mapping a Customer life-cycle and a desired interaction strategy. This is strategic in nature, could be guided by data but also needs creativity and vision.
3) Creative content which can breakthrough the clutter and resonate with the customers at an emotional level. Dynamic content creation has brought a paradigm shift in how content is created and delivered.
4) Technology to deliver the content seamlessly at scale across channels. This is where the Martech stack comes into play. Brands need to realize there is no perfect stack, only a journey to constantly improve.
5) Governance becomes extremely relevant an although some industries are more sensitive, almost every industry has suffered a setback based on communication that has gone awry.
6) Last but not the least, the right people and partners would determine how successful a firm is when on a journey to deliver great customer experiences. Delivering great customer experience isn’t just the job of marketing and hence people across the organization need to rally around the vision of delivering on great customer experience. The fact that great customer experience is a moving target also means that apart from the skills to deliver it, the people need to be passionate about it and that goes right back at the culture of the organization.