Marketing leaders know that good customer experience pay off, but the majority appear to overestimate their current capabilities. Vijayanta Gupta, VP Strategy & Industries at Sitecore loks at three key customer service hurdles, and how to overcome them.
To remain relevant and competitive in today’s ever-evolving marketing landscape, businesses of all sizes and industries are undertaking critical transformation processes to align digital goals to strategic business objectives. They do this with the simple end goal of transforming customer experience, with a key approach being the ability to personalise the way they interact with their audiences.
While marketing leaders clearly recognise the importance of having a customer experience strategy that delivers return on investment (ROI), the majority appear to overestimate their current capabilities. It’s key that brands perceive personalisation as an organisational mindset, a continuous journey, and not a target to be hit and forgotten. This would enable them to make each customer feel valued and important by engaging them with content that is relevant at an individual level at the right time and place. However, a recent study by SoDA found that although 83 per cent of marketing leaders have increased their investments in personalisation for 2019, over half (52 per cent) have admitted to lacking an adequate roadmap and strategic investment plan for rolling out personalisation capabilities. This is often because not every marketer has the experience and knowledge of how to go about planning, delivering and measuring personalisation.
Furthermore, there’s also a discrepancy around how marketers rate their organisation’s abilities to improve digital experiences for their customers. According to our research, 67 per cent of marketers consider their organisations as “masters” or “experts” with robust and advanced levels of personalisation, but less than 40 per cent use even the most basic targeting criteria such as purchase history, browsing history, and the referral source.
So why do so many companies struggle to put together a customer experience management strategy for their business? Here are the three main challenges they face and how to overcome them:
Brands need to be able to extract the current, insightful information that gives customers the experience they expect, at the right time and place and in the right context. While most business leaders recognise the importance of targeting customers with personalised content, there seems to be a real disconnect in their ability to deliver the digital experience that moves customers from being a onetime buyer to becoming a loyal advocate. Therefore, it’s important that brands go through a planning phase to work out what personalisation looks like for them and what they can realistically deliver based on the customer data they have.
Furthermore, in order to make the most of all the opportunities for personalisation, brands need to employ the right digital skills and consistently retrain their employees to keep up with the technologies entering the market. Currently, only a fraction of companies have the right talent in place – according to the Digital Marketing Institute only 8 per cent of marketers in the UK and the US possess entry level digital skills while 69 per cent feel they need to upskill workers to remain competent in their roles. This means that a great majority of businesses struggle to deliver great personalised experiences to customers.
The success of a CMO’s digital marketing strategy is dependent on all C-Suite members understanding how it will enable the company to meet wider business objectives, improve sales and therefore the bottom line.
These three points all lead to the same overarching challenge – a lack of customer centricity within companies. A real customer-centric company delivers personalised experiences at every step of the customer journey. For brands embarking on a digital transformation journey for the first time, the process seems overwhelming. Therefore, seeking expert guidance, from those that can advise on how to tailor to target verticals, how to put the foundations in place and pull the key learnings from best practice examples is critical. Often, the biggest barriers to getting started and driving value from your personalisation efforts are setting up the processes and knowing what pitfalls to avoid.
Having access to resources, guides and best practices and the availability of a dedicated expert team can really help customers break through those barriers. Personalisation is what enables us to create human connections in a digital world and those that can do this successfully are the brands that really stand out. The next article in the two-part series will discuss four key steps that brands can take to tackle these challenges and improve their customer experience management efforts.
By Vijayanta Gupta
VP Strategy & Industries at Sitecore and head of the Sitecore Business Optimisation Strategies (SBOS) team