How to Thrive In a World of Disruption: Transform Your Business By Delivering Relevant Customer Experiences

Transform Your Marketing to Design Contextually Relevant Marketing Programs Across Channels and Along the Entire Customer Journey:

It is not just Cable Company X that fails to deliver great customer experiences. The data shows that most companies deliver at best good experiences, very few can claim to be great. However the race to differentiate is heating up. Forrester predicts that “the race from good to great CX will hit the gas pedal... to personalize and tailor experiences in real time...adapting to the needs, wants, and behaviors of individual customers.”

In practical terms, let us look at what happens when someone visits a website. Individuals come to websites for a variety of reasons; information, support, entertainment and sometimes to buy things. It’s a matter for marketing to figure out who they are, why they are coming to the site and what content is going to be most relevant for them to accomplish their goal.

Marketing needs to work together with insights and research professionals to understand their audiences, produce digital personas and organize them around actionable segments based on context, intent, behavior and attitude. Then they need to take that knowledge and document a content strategy to determine what types of content will be most relevant. And finally they can begin to develop content marketing programs that will deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time (and on the right device, via the right channel and using the right platform.) Only once the plan, the program and the content is addressed, is it time to talk about the distribution and presentation of the highly personalized content.

Transform Your Technology to Deliver Contextually Relevant Customer Experiences Regardless of Channel, Device or Platform:

You’ve changed the culture at the company and become customer centric. You’ve designed and developed personalized content, campaigns and programs that will address the individual needs of each segment of your audience. Now it comes down to making it happen on any channel, device and platform. It is time to talk about technology.

The evolution of all the components of what we call the enterprise marketing platform has been surprising over the last couple of year. Advances in CMS, CRM, analytics, campaign management, email, recommendation/decision engines, digital asset management, marketing automation, search and social intelligence, not to mention new tools for inbound marketing, re-targeting, lead management, and media purchase and placement are coming out on a regular basis. Whether you choose to go with an amalgamation of individual best of breed solutions, one of the newly minted, customer experience suites or opt for a cloud-based managed services alternative, there is a solution for every size and shape of business.

The key is that your technology has to have the ability to dynamically deliver targeted and personalized content that is not only relevant to the audience, but to the context of their interaction. While the variables can be infinite, the most likely to produce results are having the ability to personalize based on location, device and customer journey stage. This extends to the ability to deliver the experience on any sort of mobile device, regardless of whether it’s a responsively designed mobile web experience, a custom app or via a third party solution, like a partner, agent or affiliate.

The first step in being able to deliver these differentiated experiences is to conduct a thorough assessment of your existing ecosystem. What systems do you currently have? What data are you collecting? How well are the disparate systems integrated or at least communicating? And how well are your internal users able to leverage the technology to deliver the intended customer experiences?

Once you know where you’re starting from, you can go back to the customer journey map, take a look at the priorities and then determine what the best technology solution is and what are the current impediments to extracting the most value from the investments your company has already made.

The answer may be that the best solution is to consider going outside. The option of considering a fully managed services solution, where a company contracts for not only the technical management and support of the customer experience technology, but also for the marketing operations, enabling a brand to deliver sophisticated and complex dynamic customer experiences without major investments in IT or marketing resources is gaining in popularity. In some cases the capability is being used as a sandbox at an innovation lab or simply a place to experiment with different campaigns and creative.

Of course the whole concept of digital transformation can be daunting. It isn’t something that can be done overnight and it isn’t something that can be done in isolation by a single department or team. It requires cooperation, collaboration and sponsorship all the way up to the CEO. Back to the Forrester study, it shows that CX success can means a difference of more than 70% in the company’s stock valuation. That is something that always matters to the CEO. The fruits of success are immense, but the outcomes of failure are even greater.

Now, what’s stopping you?