Personalisation and brand experiences are evolving to focus more on what they give the customer, with the aim of increasing each one’s lifetime value to the business
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4 december 2020
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Customers will only receive a great brand experience if data is connected, different business functions collaborate and the benefits of marketing activity is measured and communicated effectively.
These were the findings from a recent roundtable sponsored by Salesforce and hosted by Marketing Week editor-in-chief Russell Parsons, who asked a panel of top marketers to discuss how brands can make every customer interaction valuable and meaningful.
During the roundtable the participants, speaking under the Chatham House rule, were united in their view that customers want relationships with brands that are frictionless and joined up across multiple touchpoints.
The Salesforce ‘State of the Connected Customer’ report backs this up. It claims 84% of consumers consider the experience we have as being just as important as a brand’s products and services. In fact, more than half would switch to a competitor if the experience was better.
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Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columnist
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By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones
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By Steve Hemsley
Leaving legacy tech behind
The marketing director of a high street brand in the health sector talked about the challenges it had faced in recent years, as the company moved from being predominantly a bricks-and-mortar operation to also offering its services online. It had to tackle aging technology infrastructure and siloed data, and had little idea who visited its shops or which individuals interacted within different categories it serves.
“Our move to online booking four years ago really heralded our shift to a multichannel approach in how we communicate with our customers,” he said. “Similarly our customer records programme, which reminds people when they need an appointment, also went online, and a year ago we started to integrate that data into our email and SMS activity.”
The brand invested in a large piece of work with a partner agency to discover what a customer’s ideal journey would look like.
“This flagged up where the pain points and the opportunities were,” he said. “We realised we had to be realistic and not try to deliver everything at once, so we went for the low-hanging opportunities first. It can be difficult to get buy-in across the business with any new data or technology project without people at the top seeing some reward.”
Indeed, there has to be investment in data and technology to provide an excellent customer experience that is as personalised as possible. This means those leading the organisation must buy into a customer-first approach and the whole business needs to be encouraged to collaborate. He said this means empowering people across the organisation, including in this brand’s case the retail partners who run its network of stores.
“We are having more conversations about how everyone wants to do the right thing for individual customers and that everything is joined up,” he said. “For us there is the marketing and customer service piece, plus the physical retail store environment and the clinical part of someone’s journey with our brand.”
“The big question is how do we market based on predicted profitability and get a sense of a customer’s value?”
Raj Kumar, Aviva
The importance of customer lifetime value
With so many of consumers’ interactions with brands now taking place online, data on these touchpoints is often held in the cloud and can be pulled together, as the CMO at a leading online luxury fashion retailer noted. He said the business is currently focused on lifecycle marketing so the data sources from its marketing, data science, CRM and customer service functions need to ‘knit together’ to create a single customer view.
“The big question is how do we market based on predicted profitability and get a sense of a customer’s value?” he said. “Many customers are hugely valuable to us and retaining them is critically important.”
He added that during lockdown many consumers who would usually shop at luxury high street brands in London, New York or Tokyo are now buying through its website. “We need to build a lifecycle programme and experiences for these customers who are typically accustomed to shopping in physical stores.”
“We’ve adjusted our content strategy to realign around what’s important to clients.”
Samantha Burns, KPMG
A senior marketer at a public transport provider said she is also embarking on a major project that will help the organisation understand the importance of customer experience. The business needs to find out more about its customers who travel on its network every day. The company has recently launched a rewards programme to incentivise people to purchase via digital channels.
“The data we have is transactional, so the starting point is to encourage our customers to engage with us and tell us who they are,” she said. “We need to focus on what matters most to them and deliver that. This means doing a lot of work to understand our different customer segments.”
The business is also engaging more with its drivers, who have a crucial role to play in improving the customer experience. Internal marketing includes initiatives to change the culture where necessary and promote agreed values to change any behaviours that underpin customer experience. “We are helping our people to understand the needs of the different customer groups we have,” she said.
Evolving the purpose of personalisation
A customer communications and brand director for a telecoms and electrical retailer told the panel how his brand had established a customer experience department covering marketing, CRM, branding and social media. He leads this team but said the customer experience is owned by everyone across the company because different people are involved in the customer journey in their own way.
“When it comes to personalisation we take a federalist approach based on different touchpoints,” he said. “These can be simple personalisations in the customer journey, perhaps when someone walks into a store, visits the website or receives an email. People know when they are being treated as a valued customer rather than as any individual.”
A CMO in the consumer finance sector said it was also important that, in their quest for personalisation, marketers consider clearly what the customer wants. “We’ve all experienced the frustration as a customer when things do not feel joined up and a brand does not understand you,” she said. “There are other times when privacy fails and you feel as if you are being stalked online.”
She added that personalisation ultimately has to be about improving the relationship with a customer so an individual wants to spend more money with you over a long period of time. It can be easier to secure a repeat purchase if someone feels warmth towards your brand.
“As a brand we have become really good at optimising for the short-term and the next stage for us is to have more patience - in the same way you would when building a brand long-term - and think about what kind of personalisation will work for which customers.”
The fashion retail CMO pointed out there is also an important distinction between personalisation and curation. “We want to avoid people just scrolling through lists of items so we edit lists for them,” he said. “People then engage with personal communications, such as being told their item has been shipped from a boutique in Italy or Tokyo and is on its way. Commercial reward cascades on the back of this.”
The consensus on the roundtable was that brands can deliver the right customer experience and reap the rewards if they invest strategically in data and technology. It is also vital that marketing and customer service are working together. After all, what is right for the customer is right for the business.■
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84%
of consumers consider the brand experience as important as its products and services
Source: Salesforce, ‘State of the Connected Customer’, 2020
“We’ve all experienced the frustration
as a customer when things do not
feel joined up.”
By MaryLou Costa