Elevating the Marketer’s Role in Customer Experience

Today’s CMOs don’t have it easy. Their tenure is the lowest of the C-suite, even though there’s often a direct link between the value they bring and the company’s bottom line. It’s easy for them to become frustrated in their jobs—either due to organizational roadblocks or perceived underperformance.

Sometimes the problem is a mismatch of expectations and authority. According to a study done by Deloitte, while more than half of CMOs surveyed said, “an enterprise-wide mind-set was one of the most important factors in a CMO’s success,” a small portion actually believed that it was important for them to have a key role in company growth initiatives or to be a part of a customer-centric company.

Yet, when asked, CMOs noted that the most important driver of their success was their knowledge of customer data and analytics.

CMOs Have an Opportunity to Take the Lead in Owning the Customer Experience

Customer expectations are rising. According to a Salesforce study, 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs—with personalized content and experiences key to high satisfaction. Who is responsible for driving customer loyalty? In a study done by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 86% of marketers surveyed said they expected Marketing to own customer experience by 2020.

But the right question to ask might not be, “Who should own the customer experience?” Some people will answer, “Marketing;” some will say, “Sales.” Some will even say, “Support.” The truth is that all of these departments play a key role in keeping the customer happy. In reality, everyone owns the customer experience—just as the customer journey touches every aspect of a company. To optimize the customer experience (CX), enterprise leaders need to take what they know about customers and use that data to deliver innovation, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

CMOs are in an excellent position to lead a cross-departmental rally around putting the customer at the center. They can facilitate and empower those across the enterprise to understand key customer personas, customer journeys and interactions. Here are four areas in which CMOs can show leadership and deliver value to the entire organization:

#1. Customer journeys
Marketing creates customer expectations and initiates demand through its branding and advertising activities—and can continue to delight customers at every touchpoint through the website, mobile apps and customer support interactions. Knowing exactly where customers are engaging along the way and controlling that engagement are key activities to overall customer satisfaction.

#2: Measurement and analytics
Marketing can measure and communicate all the key metrics around customer behavior, such as bounce rates, churn and retention rates, and measure the value of campaign investments in customer acquisition. This helps validate their spending activities and prove their ROI.

#3. Customer insights
Marketing can glean key insights on valuable customer segments and share them widely within the organization. These insights can include key demographic information, data on how frequently customers engage with the brand, their satisfaction levels, purchase preferences, cross-device behavior, and even interactions with competitors.

#4. Customer-first mindset
Marketing can act as a central repository for all customer information. Marketers can play a key role in defining the customer experience, outlining a vision and strategy to the rest of the company, educating employees along the way about customer needs, preferences and pain points.

Data and the Rise of Marketing Accountability

As CMOs take the driver’s seat on customer experience, they’ll be expected to make smart decisions about where to invest marketing dollars—requiring measurement, metrics and models to inform their marketing strategies and their mix scenarios. Marketing accountability—the measurement and optimization of marketing investments to overall business value—has emerged as a key issue for enterprise leaders. Without data-driven models, it is nearly impossible to make critical trade-off and allocation decisions required to remain competitive. CMOs need a framework—or a platform—that measures (and proves) the efficacy and ROI of marketing activities.

Today’s enterprise marketing groups are making vast improvements in their customer experience using their access to data. One of the largest beer makers in the world—with whom we’ve had the privilege of working—is a good example. With the goal of generating $100B in revenue through direct marketing efforts and channels, they were determined to enable better consumer visibility through every touchpoint. Their tactics were to deliver routine, clean customer data and tightly measure conversion across touchpoints. Reconciling more than 4M duplicate consumer profiles, initial results showed a 36% savings in advertising spend.

If you’re not taking full advantage of the customer data you have today, here are four ways you can take immediate action:

1. Make a map to define an ideal customer journey (or several).

   Look at where customers find you and determine whether it is where you are spending most of your outreach and communication efforts. Also see where they are engaging the most (it’s not likely with marketing—so you may be missing a rich source of information). Then look at purchase frequency and channel, as well as repeat purchase patterns, to begin stitching together a typical customer profile.

2. Gather a small data set and try out your skills at identity resolution.

   As our recent blog post explains, identity resolution is the process of analyzing disparate data sets to resolve a customer’s identity. This entails matching different customer identifiers within each data source, and unifying the records for a more complete view of customer data. The resulting data graph creates a persistent identifier that is unified across systems, and this identifier is used for further analysis and to define future interactions.

3. Store your customer data in one system for analysis.

   Customer data is probably coming from a handful (or more) of sources and separate systems. We recommend pulling all of that data into a unified system in order to create a ‘single source of truth’ for customer information. This way, you have one place to reconcile all of your analysis and findings. And, a way to keep asking questions. Your goal is to find out if the data you have today does a good job of answering them all—or if you need more (and better) data to have a greater business impact.

4. Analyze—and socialize—the data.

   Once you have all the data in one place where you can access it, analyze how customers interface with all departments within your organization—and then work cross-functionally to share the knowledge widely, discussing it in detail: what it means and how it lines up with expectations. You can also begin to run tests on it by using it in communications to personalize or drive proactive customer engagement.

In addition, you can apply what you’ve learned to optimize the Customer Experience across all touchpoints. Customer Data Platforms were developed to automate the processes of collecting customer data across the enterprise, unifying it for individual buyer profiles and activating it through the business systems you already own. Treasure Data is a founding member of the CDP Institute and a leading cloud vendor in the space. In addition, we bring to the table deep data management expertise.

Learn more about putting CMOs at the center of your customers’ experience, attend the upcoming webinar Bridging the Customer Experience Gap with Treasure Data to see our latest capabilities and hear how we can drive value for your entire organization.