A marketer’s guide to achieving the ‘total customer experience’ in 2020
Understanding consumers and personalising every touchpoint will make the difference between success and failure for brands in 2020.
Today’s savvy consumers have much more control than they did just a few short years ago, largely due to concerns over privacy and choice. They are exercising control over their own data, the content they want to consume, the experience platforms they prefer to use, and the brands they wish to interact with on a daily basis.
As marketers, we have to adjust our own mentality to become ‘consumer-first’. And that’s not just about addressability; it’s about wilfully thinking about the consumer with every decision we make across the enterprise.
Every CMO’s success will hinge upon achieving that next level of hyper-personalisation and playing a leading role in the direct-to-consumer revolution. You’ll achieve this by learning how to master identity, balancing the mix of in-house and outsourced skillsets, delivering a total customer experience.
As your customers begin to feel like you understand them with every distinct interaction, you both will reap the benefits of your emphasis on the total customer experience.
David Williams, chairman and CEO, Merkle
The ‘identity revolution’
The decade behind us was all about digital; the next one will be about identity. The equation that comes to mind as we bring those two powerful forces together is that digital transformation plus data transformation equals customer experience transformation.
If you can nail your digital capabilities and maximise your data assets and analytical skills, then you can transform into a highly customer-centric organisation, using technology to enable the personalised experiences that build strong bonds with customers.
But as marketers, we must wrap our heads around the fact that, in the world of customer experience transformation, marketing is really just one piece of it. The total customer experience includes every interaction the customer has with the brand, from marketing to sales to service and everything in between.
Marketing has traditionally owned advertising and communications, but we need to expand the reach of our influence and our skills to inform other aspects of the customer experience. And the only way to deliver that total experience is to know the customer.
Marketers find themselves navigating these forces, while at the same time adjusting to increased privacy concerns, as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sparks further regulation. The CMO is in the driver’s seat of a major pivot in the marketing approach that must be carried out across the entire organisation.
Hyper-personalisation means targeted, relevant experiences at every encounter, encompassing the brand as a whole. Consumers consider all of these touchpoints part of the connected customer experience, and the role of the CMO is evolving to influence it.
The CMO role evolves
Today’s CMO is a business person who has accountability for revenue and costs and a responsibility to drive overall growth and profits for the organisation. Many Marketers now have a pathway to become CEOs, which was unheard of in the past, because of the broader business skillsets required.
The 2020 Marketing Imperatives we’ve identified will help you attack this new reality, using data, analytics and technology to enable hyper-personalisation that will drive the total customer experience. Brands’ success will ultimately hinge upon them playing a leading role in the direct-to consumer revolution.
Read more in the 2020 marketing Imperatives to gain new insights and tools to remain competitive in an ever-evolving market, learning to master identity, balancing the mix of in-house and outsourced skillsets, and delivering a total customer experience.