Customer Context and Digital Insights drive the future of successful Customer Engagement

This article highlights the current challenges of existing customer engagment and explain how context driven marketing can empower the customer engagement of the future. Examples of successful companies are provided.

The existing challenges

·???????Campaigns are far less effective at winning/ retaining customers than they once were. Many consumers do not trust ads and want to be exposed to them.

·???????Existing digital insights practices are often not good enough to support digital transformation

·???????Competing for customers across mature and emerging digital channels requires capabilities that existing digital & analytics practices cannot deliver.

·???????Analytics solutions often still deliver isolated web or app retrospective reports and dashboards.

·???????Piecemeal of customer engagement capabilities. Each engagement type has its own isolated system of insight and are not coordinated with each other.

·???????Organically built tech stacks create digital interaction data silos. Impossible to have holistic customer view across channels.

Solution

·???????Need self-perpetuating cycles of real-time, insight-driven interactions with individual customers.

·???????Need a holistic view of digital interactions that informs the continuous optimization of customer experiences.

·???????Need a technology architecture the coordinates many related capabilities within three integrated tiers: Digital data management, analytics and experience optimization

·???????Create a contextual marketing engine:?A brand-specific platform that exploits customer context to deliver utility and guide the customer into the next best interaction.

·???????Manage the interaction that people have with your brand outside/ beyond campaigns.

·???????Assemble enterprise marketing technology ecosystems and form contextual marketing engines. Those exploit customer context to delivery value and guide the customer to the next best action.

Customer Context changes marketing

·???????The responsibility of today's marketing is to identify and use context to create a repeatable cycle of interactions, drive deeper engagement, learn more about the customer in the process, and to facilitate even more engaging interactions in the future.

Contextual Marketing Engine

·???????Identify your unique interaction cycle.?Reinforce what your brand is about.

·???????Facilitate customer journeys as shoppers think about the end-to-end experience.

·???????Assemble a technology ecosystems. Not just a collection of point solutions.

·???????Manage your Contextual Marketing Engine as a product, not as a project.

·???????Taylor every piece of content the customer's specific moment.

·???????Map technology assets to customer journey. Uncover potential friction points. Identify how your current MARTECH and ADTECH?Technology affect those journeys. Identify redundancies and opportunities to streamline. (Note: MARTECH and ADTECH are increasingly merging, often referred to MADTECH. MARTECH enables cross-channel campaign management using attribution models and other analytics to nurture leads and opportunities. ADTECH tools and platforms use automation and machine learning to buy, sell, and deliver display ads and target audiences. MADTECH enables intelligent engagement at every touchpoint and in-the-moment, one-to-one marketing. It leverages cross-channel/ cross device behavior, ML, prescriptive analytics, etc. )

·???????Leverage marketing automation platforms to trigger the interaction cycle. These software platforms include cross-channel marketing campaign management, Marketing Resource management, marketing automation platforms.

·???????Add ML to Web analytics capabilities to cover breadths of channels and speed of digital interactions.

·???????Excel at customer recognition, not just segmentation. It is still hard to accurately identify customers across touchpoints. Stick together customer's identity.

·???????Prioritize the analysis of in-motion data. Traditional analytics rely on sampling at rest-data from marketing and customer databases – unable to deliver contextual marketing. Leverage real-time interaction management (RTIM) technologies.

·???????Use time/ event sequenced analysis to guide customers to the next best actions.

·???????Strike data partnerships. Example: Walgreens and Fitbit. Members of the pharmacy chain's balance rewards loyalty program can link data from their Fitbit activity and collect more points.

Best practices

·???????Insight driven is the foundation to be customer-centric/ focused. Digital intelligence must empower all phases of the customer life cycle.

·???????Leading companies such as Amazon create a continuous cycle of insight driven contextual interactions.

·???????Personalized interaction data creates context and enables value exchange with users.

·???????Proprietary algorithms reveal insights from that context. Proactively guide customers to the next best action (ex: Google Now, Nest Learning Thermostat). Go beyond multivariate testing, personalization and recommendation engines.

·???????Sensor technologies extend context further. Insurance companies monitor driving habits, create personalized pricing, generate valueable insights for further improving the interaction cycle(s).

·???????Digital transformation moves beyond market and commerce to driving the operating model and delivering optimized experiences across all functional areas that engage with customers (Tesla, Uber).

·???????New generation digital platforms empowered by digital data and analytics.

·???????Move from online and/ or offline engagement models to hybrid approach to support seamless enagement (Alibaba, Amazon, BestBuy, Nordstrom).

·???????Provide persistent incentives to engage. Contextual marketing aligns customer understanding with brand strategy and brand experience to continuously spark new interaction cycles.

·???????Think outside in! Allow customers to manage the relationship they have with you. Respond by sharing. Anticipate customer's needs rather than reacting. Deliver value in the moment rather than just at the point of purchase.

·???????Expand the purpose of campaigns beyond selling a product or service. Establish relationships, drive registrations and account generation.

The current digital technology stacks often fail to deliver a holistic experience at scale

Proposed Three-Tier Architecture to enable organizations for the customer engagement of the future

Historically, the success fo functions like marketing and eCommerce relied on scale, volume , and resources. Today it depends on the ability to scale the delivery of optimized customer experiences based on data an insights.

Customer engagement is necessary in every industry. One example is the automotive industry where customer intimacy is very important.

Special credits

This article leverages much of the content & insights of Forrester, a world leading market research, data and advisory company. It is a true pleasure to engage and exchange thoughts & expertise.

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