Holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes; welcome to the CX programs of tomorrow, today
Words by Arunima Singh
Effective CX strategy is non-negotiable in this new world order. CTOs & CMOs are being asked to work together like never before to rethink CX priorities and solve the technology integration enigma to aspire for optimum engagement and personalization.
A pivotal ingredient that differentiates successful businesses from unsuccessful ones is the consistency of the customer experience (CX), which ensures that your customers remain loyal and highly engaged with your proposed solutions. The evolving nature of customer engagement also means that the most well-rounded marketers are also technologists. CX will remain marketers’ North Star.
Businesses need to prioritize their MarTech stack, leveraging AI, ML, CRM, Dashboards, Analytics & Attribution to build the foundations for successful CX, which is critical to helping identify customer requirements, improving customer experiences and making MarTech Future Ready. Building an emotional connection with customers will drive CX’s success, and the key stakeholders driving this are none other than CTOs and CMOs. Technology and Marketing must align to leverage the right tech stack to co-create a CX strategy that imbibes a customer-centric personalize and customized approach for future growth plans.
Many companies have changed their working mechanisms after 2020 to adopt technology and digitization. No C-suite role can innovate as effectively and vastly as the CTOs & the CMOs crucial and vital. As customer expectations continue to scale through the pandemic & beyond, CTOs & brand engagement teams, especially the CMOs, should be working in tandem to adjust technology to shifting and ever- evolving online customer journeys.
Traditionally, CTOs dealt with just internal users and only provisioned internal systems & resources. However, with the evolution internet and the much-spoken digital transformation, the need to focus on achieving customer excellence, be it internal or external, is imperative. This urgency could easily be equated to the paradigm shift in the speed of change and technological disruption leading to higher customer expectations. Today, a differentiated offering is the baseline assumption for better customer experience.
Historically speaking, providing the above experiences was the responsibility of CMOs and their brand management team. However, the must-haves requirements for exceptionally customized offerings now require technology experts to chip in across functions.
Leading vintage and young brands are focusing on building experiences which are deeply engaging, drive growth, and impact the bottom line. Underlying everything is the need to drive collaborative synergies between technology and marketing, giving evolution to MarTech Solutions and an impending need to integrate today’s technologies with tomorrow’s trends. Customer experience becomes meaningful when your brand purpose is the unique catalyst that combines people’s needs, business issues and enablers such as technology, data and more.
Four Principles are identified to offer the best-in- class CX:
Personalization: Customers today expect communication to be customized to their profile, and brands need to consider customer’s previous interactions with the brand to deliver data-led personalized experiences. Personalization is a key factor in driving Customer Experience excellence. Going much further than target marketing, which seeks to simply reach a certain demographic, personalization aims to recommend the right solution for the unique needs of the individual.
Seamlessness: Ensure the extension of current offline experiences onto digital platforms, as the customers are looking for a consistent and seamless experience across touchpoints. Alongside this, brands also need to pay extra attention to their owned channels where customers visit to gather information. An omnichannel service is essential to meet customer expectations, drive loyalty, and improve the overall experience, avoiding a siloed experience by using the right technology that is holistically integrated and optimised.
Responsible & Caring: Brands need to be more responsible, interactive and caring. In the post- pandemic world, consumers are expecting brands not just to sell but also to act more responsibly. Brands should strengthen their technological prowess to solve increasingly complex customer problems with utmost empathy.
Emotional Connection: What consumers are looking forward to is a pleasant purchase journey, one which is easy to navigate. The simplicity of the experience leads to a delightful CX and gives brands a chance to go beyond consumer expectations when it comes to CX delivering tangible results by focusing on capability-building programs. Brands should continue to build agility around infrastructure, advancing innovations continuously and testing their resilience in order to become future-proof proof, which is key to customer satiation.
These days, customer experiences are not only limited to the digital world. Hence, efficient CX must seamlessly flow across mediums such as traditional brick-and-mortar stores, websites, mobile apps, social media, AI-powered chat, support forums and even be explored through creative mediums across IOT.
Businesses need to take cognisance of the fact that CX is multi- dimensional, so rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach, businesses can customize their CX offerings to match the behaviours of their consumers. That is when a business undergoes a transformation from within rather than just on the surface, and in turn, brings together all its departments- sales and marketing, content, technology and innovation, data, and user experience- to work together harmoniously towards one common goal- and enriching CX model.
Since CX is the relationship between a business and its customers, it includes every experience designed by the brand at relevant touchpoints where the new-age customer is seeking the brand or its products.
Transform: By helping brands move from internal operations-focused to customer-centric organisation.
Deliver: Design and build a meaningful experience at every touch point of the customer journey.
Engage: Orchestrate customer interactions across all channels to improve engagement.
Arunima Singh is the Chief Operating Officer of Asymmetrique, a new-age, digital-first media agency that harnesses creative content and integrated digital strategies to drive sustained growth and captivate audiences.
To better understand how Marksmen Media can give your brand a platform to reach growth objectives rapidly contact@teammarksmen.com
