NEW YORK -- Marketing executives hoping to connect digitally with customers are prioritizing the overall experience when people engage with their brands via mobile phones, tablets and laptops, according to a recent study.
In a survey of more than 7,000 marketing, digital and ecommerce professionals, New York-based Econsultancy said the customer’s experience (22%) and the content (16%) to support it continue to be the top priorities when considering emerging opportunities.
“The drumbeat of customer experience continues to sound, though it is increasingly accompanied by an emphasis on data,” said the Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing. “Increasingly, a goal of the former sets the priority of the latter.”
Sixteen percent of responding marketers also believe that “data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual is also important,” the report said. That data helps define the offers and what messages to send customers.
The report specified and ranked the types of goals and capabilities required to create a successful customer experience. These included:
- Strategy: Successful strategies need to be “customer-centric” and emerge from a culture that is attuned to the customer. In that light, any long-term plan needs to enable and incentivize all parts of the organization to focus on the experience of the customer. It will be incumbent upon organizations over time to reorganize around stakeholder input and create processes that enable the entire organization to play their part in the customer experience.
- Design: From new consumer devices and a growing number of touchpoints to mapping out a non-linear customer experience, design goes far beyond an optimized new website. The report recommends allowing designers to focus on customers’ contexts, wants and needs when building or changing products. Such insights will require collaboration to unify what customers truly care about.
- Culture: The process of attempting to unify existing practices with new digital realities has revealed the differing goals, values and attitudes that exist within any given organization. Nurturing new cultures around the customer is paramount.
- Data: Data remains the key for understanding customer journeys, cross-platform identification and personalized experiences. However, just as important is having the tools and personnel to understand and manipulate data sets, with the purpose of revealing something new.
- Skills: Skills such as new technologies and capabilities, and reformulating business fundamentals in a new digital world, continue to be a vital piece of the puzzle.
- Technology: Separating customers and addressing each one as an individual, and doing so with both speed and at a marginal cost, is the role of technology. Implementing such technology will take considerable but necessary upfront investment.
- Process: While strategy is most likely ranked as most important (47%), process (30%) is one of the least likely elements to achieve this distinction, according to client-side respondents. Given the likelihood of organizational change being quite severe due to shifting incentives, an impetus should be put on ensuring that the strategy is being carried out effectively.
- Collaboration: Least likely to be ranked as most important to success (27%), collaboration is perhaps the most underestimated element, the report said. While it may be difficult to measure its overall effect, collaboration is fundamental to having a cohesive customer experience. Without teams working together, the experience becomes disjointed as the customer flows through the different parts of the journey, invariably interacting with different teams with potentially differing viewpoints.
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