In the modern, connected world, nearly every company is working towards a digital frontier of meaningful customer experiences across all channels. As we charge into 2015, it’s imperative that marketers realise that the customer journey is an integrated, enduring experience that needs to evolve as the customer interacts with your brand – from in-store, to mobile, online, email, sales and support.
In order to drive customer satisfaction and impact business results, each touchpoint a customer has with your organisation must be anticipated, relevant and effortless – every single time.
With influence beyond direct customer acquisition, marketing is increasingly responsible for the entire customer experience. Bluewolf’s recent global report showed that 91% of companies say that their marketing teams have a strong executive voice. As marketing continues to spearhead digital transformation and its influence in guiding the customer journey continues to grow, I predict several growth areas that will lead marketing strategy in the coming year.
Mobile-first mindset
From Salesforce’s recent mobile behaviour report, customers are spending 3.3 hours a day on their smartphones and 85% of consumers said mobile devices are a central part of everyday life, especially for online search, email, messaging and staying connected socially. Additionally, 73% of mobile searches trigger some sort of action, whether it’s visiting a retailer’s site, connecting with a business directly or making a purchase.
Mobile is your customer’s first interaction with your brand and increasingly becoming their preferred medium for content consumption and communication. Failing to develop marketing strategies and a seamless customer experience with a mobile-first mindset is no longer an option.
The gap between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing will disappear
Whether your buyer is a business or a consumer, there’s a person behind every interaction. While the buying objectives may differ when buying at work or for personal use, people expect the same high-quality experience in both instances that serves to inform, build trust and provide a solution for their needs, even if that need was unknown to them at the time.
Customer intimacy with analytics
Data intelligence is at the heart of digital transformation and marketing is becoming the most data-driven function inside organisations, outpacing sales and customer service. Bluewolf’s report also shows that 64% of marketers place more value on existing customers than acquiring new ones. Through the promise of analytics, organisations are racing to transform the data they capture into consumable insights that foster customer engagement and retention, and drive actions aligned to their business outcome objectives.
Service and marketing convergence
In order to satisfy customer demands and expectations, technology and process alignment across service and marketing is critical. Technology only gets companies part of the way; if there aren’t cross-departmental processes in place to support employees, then the overall customer experience won’t be cohesive and will ultimately suffer.
The ability to immediately connect interactions and behaviour patterns between departments – ie the marketing team monitoring and flagging a service-related remark on social media to the customer care team – enables brands to improve the digital customer experience in real-time, with personalisation, and produce responsive support and communications on the channels that customers choose. Customer service is marketing, and the blend of both is vital in informing the customer that they are valued in that moment and for the long term.
This year will be a more exciting time than ever to work in marketing. The pace of innovation, learning and collaboration has never been more important – and the stakes have never been higher.
Corinne Sklar is the global CMO at Bluewolf