The marketing industry is undergoing tremendous transformation, particularly as the pandemic continues to influence how businesses interact with their customers.
Because digital sales are outperforming in-person sales, digital marketing is quickly becoming a key differentiator in sales performance. The shift necessitates sales, marketing, and even IT management rethinking their brand’s relationship with its customers, and then supporting that new relationship with the proper customer experience.
Brands who have adopted an adaptive CX strategy are already reaping the rewards: In Forrester’s Forrester’s US 2021 Customer Experience Index, 21% of brands received much higher scores than the previous year, owing in part to rapid digital transformation, creation of experiences that fulfil consumers’ new needs and empathy for their safety concerns.
Marketing and sales leaders must now develop new digital capabilities in order to meet and surpass consumer expectations. For a truly end-to-end seamless experience, these expectations necessitate real-time personalized omnichannel customer engagement, and for companies to recognize customers in every channel, and tools that can forecast consumer behaviour and offer next-best actions.
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To allow for rapid iteration as consumer expectations continue to rise, all of these aspects require adequate measurement and optimization analytics.
What can businesses do right now to improve customer experience?
Companies must focus on three criteria to offer the cross-channel consistency that customers expect from brands: technology, data, and collaboration.
Data is the foundation of digital CX, and because customer data is becoming more fragmented, creating a unified customer profile across the company is more difficult than ever. When there is a 360-degree perspective of the consumer, businesses need advanced marketing technology in the form of an adaptable, scalable martech stack that can understand customers, forecast their behaviour, deliver actionable insights, and foster loyalty.
Continuous collaboration is required for a technology-focused marketing strategy. Even the most technology- and data-rich marketing campaigns can fall short if sales, marketing, support, and IT do not define CX goals, share data across functions, and plan together to achieve those goals.
Marketers can also benefit from cross-departmental problem-solving to address some of the significant challenges that lie ahead.
Customer concerns about data privacy and their need for clarification about how organizations handle the data they share are the first of these challenges. Customer insights, the technology to contextualize personalization to meet customer preferences and an awareness of the kinds of personalization customers value are all required to strike the right balance between personalization and data sharing.
Another challenge is the demise of third party cookies – Google is planning a three-month phase-out of third-party cookies in 2023. That may sound like a long time away, but it only allows marketers a few years to incorporate new techniques to identify and track customers, particularly unknown customers, throughout their journey.
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How businesses can drive customer experiences with great digital experience
Organizations will be equipped to build a stronger CX with enhanced marketing technologies, unified data, communication among executive leaders, and a plan to cope with new issues.
Great digital CX involves:
- Customer identification resolution: Personalization at the individual level is achievable with a complete, actionable customer view.
- Contextual customer insights: Possessing customer history and real-time behaviors of customers in the same perspective allows marketers to identify how early-stage marketing impacts later actions and iterate based on that information.
- Real-time active listening driven by AI: Using consumer identity and behavioral insights as a resource, AI can recommend activities, content, offers, or messages to better engage and cater to customers throughout their journey.
- Seamless omnichannel experiences: To have CX consistency, an all-in-one engagement stack can handle dialogue and delivery at each touch point.
- Insights for strategic planning and continuous interactions: Successful organizations will be able to monitor non-traditional engagement metrics in real time, such as consumer intent, in addition to standard engagement data.
All of these features are designed to provide additional value to customers, resulting in increased brand trust.
It is possible to improve a customer experiences when they recognize the value in sharing their data. When there is a data gap, modern martech can help close it to improve the customer experience and gain trust.
Marketers can deliver the highly personalized, seamless, end-to-end digital experience that customers desire now and will continue to expect from their favourite brands when all of these aspects are in place, along with cooperation and support from IT and sales.
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