Marketing technologies are evolving rapidly to keep up with customer demand and privacy laws. Last year, CMOs told Salesforce that they only use 42% of the breadth of capabilities they have within their martech stack. In this blog, we summarise the challenge lying ahead of CMOs, and the three pillars to putting your customers at the heart of your digital transformation project.
New goal for digital transformation
Customer-centricity is a key focus for today’s CMO. Defined as understanding “customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations”, CMOs need to gather and utilise more customer information than ever. This, at a time when customers place high importance on data privacy, and governments globally respond with strict regulations. In addition, customer data the business does have can be disparate, inaccurate, and disjointed.
The goals of digital transformation are changing. Approaching customers digitally is no longer enough. When organisations approach customers, it must be a truly customer-centric experience.
Achieving customer-centricity with first-party data seems like an overwhelming challenge. But this is the only way organisations can deliver relevant and timely products, services, and experiences to their customers.
Customer profiles
Marketing, sales and customer success activities usually span multiple technologies and systems within one organisation. This means customers’ behavioural and profile data is often held in independent, unconnected platforms – or offline. That’s why 62% of business buyers say it feels like they’re communicating with different departments, not one company.
Every business is looking for a single view of the customer, or a single source of truth on their customer. In Salesforce terms, a 360 view. But even with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud integrated seamlessly, organisations may still lack:
- Connected data
- A way to match platform-specific IDs or unknown visitors to a known person record
- Consistent data across a customer’s lifecycle
The challenge of gathering first-party data has become so complicated that these challenges can only be overcome with newer marketing technologies.
Customer behaviours and engagement
To understand customer lifetime value, you need to examine earned customer analytics. But often, this analytical data is separated across different platforms or channels, impossible to connect. And, as with customer profile data, traditional (or even quite recent) marketing technologies struggle to keep up with evolving privacy regulations and customer preferences.
A third of marketers say their marketing attribution process is manual, meaning the business cannot get a real-time view of the customer journey. Disjointed views lead to significant gaps between advertising, marketing, sales and customer service efforts from an analytics and operational perspective.
Marketing’s role is to deploy meaningful and tailored customer interactions across relevant channels. However, because marketing technologies each have their own first-party data limitations, personalised interactions can only happen with historic data. The only way to personalise interactions in real-time is with a salesperson’s involvement.
Digital customer-centric experience transformational pillars
There are three mission critical pillars to achieve a digital customer-centric experience:
Extract and transform existing owned customer data into an integrated customer profile for a single (or 360) view
Connect disjointed customer analytics across business functions to drive customer intelligence, using data for predictive insights and targeting
Make use of integrated customer profile data and customer analytics to automate interactions, with real-time personalised experiences across owned channels
By achieving this new digital transformation goal of the digital customer-centric experience, organisations will drive customer awareness, engagement, conversion, and loyalty.
Guide to CDP and RTIM
Read on to learn more about customer profiling in our interactive guide to customer data platforms and real-time interaction management. This guide will help inform your decision on what kind of martech you need to achieve customer-centricity.
Related articles:
- An Introduction to CDP: What Is It and Why Should I Care? by Mike Fleming, Business Solutions Architect, BrightGen
- When a Lead Stops Being a Lead – How to Automate Lead Management by Mike Fleming
- How to Think About Data, with Ian Thomas, Chief Data Officer, Credera