Celia Fleischaker is CMO at Verint, overseeing the company’s global marketing, customer experience program and sales enablement.
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While pandemic disruption continues to present a myriad of challenges, there are also many opportunities — including the opportunity to become laser-focused on improving the customer experience to leapfrog over competitors. Though dramatic swings in customer behaviors and trends can make it difficult for companies to determine what will stick moving forward, the increased use of digital channels is bound to continue.
The chief marketing officer (CMO) helps drive the customer experience, and much like shifting customer dynamics and journeys, the role of the CMO is also undergoing a transformation given the customer engagement imperative.
In the 2021 CMO Survey, which surveyed nearly 3,000 top U.S. marketers, 72.2% said that the role of marketing (which is fundamental to managing customers, among other business growth ventures) increased in importance during the last year. Likewise, marketers in the survey reported that customer experience (in addition to product quality and a trusting relationship) was most important to their customers; over one-third of marketers rated it as their customers’ key priority.
However, company resources aren’t necessarily changing to meet these new imperatives. Digital channels remain the primary touchpoints for many customers, which means CMOs should stay committed to making critical moves to optimize digital experiences. My company’s 2021 Engagement Capacity Gap Study — which surveyed 2,281 business leaders from around the world in 2020 — found that although interactions and channel growth are way up, so too are customer expectations — and there is an engagement capacity gap that puts pressure on customer experience, particularly in the digital realm.
It’s important for today’s CMO to champion the critical role digital experience plays in a company’s overall customer experience strategy. When it comes to shaping the future of customer experience, CMOs should adopt a “boundless” approach to understanding and improving experiences across the entire enterprise — including the digital realm — so companies can thrive in the engagement economy.
As the CMO of a company that offers a customer engagement platform that leverages AI and analytics, here are four tactics boundless CMOs can use to gain more command of customer experience initiatives.
Leveraging Digital Behavior Analytics
The pandemic redirected consumers online like never before. Still, I’ve found that many want to continue their online conversation with a customer service rep on the phone or in-store. However, as more customers use digital channels, CMOs have a tremendous opportunity to learn from behavioral data to improve the digital experience.
At a basic level, you can learn a lot from website visitor analytics. Where are they coming from? What pages are they visiting, and how long are they staying? CMOs should go beyond traditional metrics to understand specific consumer behavior and retrace their steps for maximum marketing effectiveness and success. The same applies to content consumption and performance metrics. What content is most viewed and downloaded, and what content drives more leads and conversions? In addition, the boundless CMO can use data like this to pinpoint where the customer is struggling and make immediate changes to improve the customer experience.
Breaking Down Data Silos
In our study, an overwhelming majority (79%) of business leaders said that having a single view of customer engagement activities and overcoming data silos is a top concern. Today, many organizations have invested in analytics, but if data silos still exist, analytics efforts could be hampered. By aggregating customer experience data across the enterprise, the boundless CMO can quickly isolate where customers are experiencing challenges, drill down to understand customer feedback, listen to customer interactions for more profound context and respond to customer feedback in real time.
Establishing a matrixed CX team with the right mix of different organizational functions to share data and findings is a significant first step toward breaking down data silos. For example, CMOs can use a phased approach that starts with sales and marketing collaboration and later adds customer service. It’s also ideal to choose a single customer engagement platform for collaboration or ensure the platforms you use include strong integrations so you can leverage unified data from all areas of the business that engage with customers.
Adopting Best Practices And Benchmarking
It’s important to listen deeply to customers to inform action and drive strategic improvements based on trends in industries and amongst peers. Gather customer, industry and peer leadership insights to help you understand overall trends and prioritize strategic actions that will drive maximum positive impact on the bottom line.
Championing The Use Of AI
When we asked business leaders to gauge their level of preparedness to support customer engagement priorities in the future, 94% reported understanding and acting on rapidly changing customer behaviors as a top concern. Inadequate preparedness and a lack of resources can overwhelm many enterprise leaders, which means that many have high hopes for AI. AI can enable companies to deliver differentiated experiences and optimize the human touch at scale. However, it’s important to keep in mind that AI is most impactful when you have large amounts of data available for generating insights and actions. CMOs can use AI to map the customer journey in order to determine their current state and desired future state. As part of that customer mapping, CMOs should work to understand where knowledge gaps exist and where AI and automation can best help improve and shape the customer journey so they can apply it to the right use cases.
Boundless Customer Engagement
A gap exists between what organizations know they need to do and the resources they have to work with to meet rising customer expectations. Today, CMOs are expected to “see” across the entire enterprise to understand and improve the customer experience beyond the digital realm. The boundless CMO is strategic and looks at experiences holistically. By taking the steps above, the boundless CMO can take the opportunity to optimize customer engagement, improve customer experience and close the engagement gap.
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