How to succeed With a Customer-centric Marketing Strategy

Advances in technology and communication, combined with explosive growth in data and information, have given rise to a more empowered global consumer. During the past decade, consumer needs have changed significantly, with technology growing at an exponential rate, influencing consumer behavior and marketing strategies. Nearly three-quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet by 2025. By 2025, 85% of the global population will have access to mobile telephony and more than 75% of the customers will have low-cost tablets or smartphones. It is anticipated that almost 75 Billion devices would be connected globally with mobile-based internet being the primary method of connectivity. Social media and unprecedented access to information such as peer-to-peer product and service reviews are giving greater power to consumers, creating more demanding and informed consumers. These experiences are shaping consumer expectations across all sectors. Amongst all of this, personal interaction is still highly considered and will remain an important component of the overall strategy.

Every day, hundreds of marketing strategies are published, each with its own set of thoughts and studies, but nothing else counts if your customers do not connect with your brand. Any strategy is good if it keeps the customer’s interest. To build value and increase sales over time, understanding your customers is crucial for a predictable result from marketing activities.

Customer centricity is a corporate strategy that prioritizes customers and places them at the center of operations in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. Understanding how to create leads based on your ideal customer and developing an overall marketing strategy that focuses on the greatest results for your customers are both parts of customer-centric marketing planning.

When a customer becomes engaged with a brand, they are 70 percent more inclined to spend than a first-time customer is. All of this is the outcome of long-term customer trust in the brand. A loyal customer base cuts down on the time, money, and effort it takes to generate additional revenue.

The most common way of creating an effective strategy, especially for marketing is to start by conducting a customer behavior study, which may assist split customers into distinct categories and personas’ as well as covering the most basic phase of constructing a customer profile, is a good place to start when developing a plan. This aids businesses in defining and focusing on their target market.

One can create original content that is relevant to one’s audience by focusing on a specific market, as a vast majority of consumers prefer relevant and personalized content. It is critical to align content not only to different stages of the buying process but also to specific buyer personas, as the type of content that will engage and incentivize them will differ depending on their characteristics and preferences.

With the proper content in hand, one can begin implementing it using an Omnichannel strategy, with special emphasis on social media. Social media and internet-based customer conversations – both good and bad – are federated, dynamic, contagious, and opinion making about products and services. As social media is about real-time and people-centric interactions, external social initiatives will have limited success if not backed by a similar focus on agent engagement. The way forward is to build internal collaboration capabilities that help deliver a superior external customer experience. The key here is to concentrate one’s efforts in the areas where one’s target audience exists, engages, learns and spends time. Share the content in these places and collaborate with the audience to create memorable experiences. This will help in increasing the likelihood of customer advocacy, which can foster a sense of community within loyalty the loyal customer base.

Along with content, other factors that can contribute to customer-centric strategies include training the talent that is aligned with customer-centric thinking and understands the value of customer experience delivered by the organization. Here the role of Contact center representatives who are the first and most front-facing workforce is extremely important. They will shape many of the first customer interactions. This must be coupled with relevant and timely information. Successful organizations break down silos of information and use an enterprise-wide approach to customer information and insight. A single, accurate, accessible enterprise customer view is essential to the success of any organization that wants to differentiate on customer-centricity.

Measuring the performance of one’s strategies is equally important, so having customer success metrics to measure customer-centricity becomes critical. Calculating churn rates can assist you in keeping track of customer satisfaction. Similarly, Net Promoter Score and customer lifetime value are two metrics that can assist you in determining the success of your customer-centric marketing strategy.

95% of senior business leaders believe that the next competitive differentiator is customer experience. The irony is that 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience. But only 8% of their customers agree!

A customer-centric marketing approach is the most effective way to stay competitive, onboard ideal consumers, and increase the lifetime value of your customers. The modern consumer is acutely aware of their requirements and the myriad options and choices available to them. The transition to becoming a truly customer-centric organization is difficult and time-consuming, but even minor policy and procedure improvements can have a big impact on both employees and customers. Every part of your business should be focused on providing the best possible customer experience, resulting in your customers becoming your reason for success.

The scenario is similar in almost most of the B2C organizations like Manufacturing, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Telcos, BFSI, etc. However, the investments in marketing technology or process and people development areas to service their customers do not commensurate to this ratio currently. Moreover, organizations are driving efficiency and extending the cost play within the ecosystem and are not as much focussed on effectiveness.

To summarize, for the modern marketing strategy to succeed, it is imperative that the experiences during the acquisition and post-acquisition phases be engineered and managed properly. A customer experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer is a complex function of the brand promise, which has set the expectations to the customer and the sum total of the life cycle of an engagement or interaction experiences – product performance, service delivery, people interaction, and process experience. It is perceived through a customer’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is a blend of an organization’s rational performance, the senses stimulated and the emotions evoked and intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact 

Customer Journey Mapping: The secret to Superior CX

Customers' behavior is surmised to be rather unpredictable, thus businesses strive to make lasting first impressions and provide unique purchase experiences. Those who wish to learn how your clients purchase in today's digital environment should focus on the most impactful channels and touchpoints in their buying journeys.

 Customer Experience Mapping is a method that helps you identify your consumers' motivating elements during the purchase process. It may be defined as a customer's journey through the phases of their relationship with a company, which includes all interactions between the consumer and the firm across several channels. It's basically a flowchart that displays the steps of a client's interaction with a firm, from purchasing things online to contacting customer support.

 Although most firms are rather effective at acquiring data on their customers, data alone does not adequately express the customer's problems and experiences. At such instances, a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of a customer's interaction with a firm through time, may give insight into the customer's overall experience. It assists your team in better understanding and addressing the wants and pain points of your customers when they interact with your product or service. Thus, a customer journey map allows your company to observe how your brand contacts a potential client and then travels through the many touchpoints of the sales process.

Depending on the sort of business and the types of consumers served, each customer journey map will be unique. However, there are a few key elements that will be consistent throughout every map you build. Some of them are:

 

1.      Personas: Personas, which are composite representations of a market segment of consumers with similar requirements, objectives, and motivations, are the greatest way to understand customers' behaviors and sentiments. It may provide you a comprehensive picture of who your consumers are, what they want, and how they engage with your company across all channels.

 

2.       Identifying the stages of the customer journey that your customer is attempting to complete. Rather than focusing on internal process processes, one should focus on creating a customer journey map with phases that depict your client's goal-oriented trip.

 

3.      Customer touchpoints: One of the most significant parts of the customer journey map is the touchpoints between the customer and the business. Each touchpoint specifies a specific action the consumer did with the business. Identifying your touchpoints is a crucial step in establishing a customer journey map and ensuring that your consumers are happy at every stage.

 

4.      Emotion: It's crucial to think about how your consumers could react to each engagement. Identifying the places of friction in the customer experience may help companies see their client personas in a new light.

 After you've established all of the components, it's a wonderful exercise to bring them all together from the customer's perspective. Companies frequently need to construct many customer journey maps based on a jumbled picture of how consumers interact with them.

Customer journeys aren't always going to be straightforward. Customers may hop ahead and back multiple times within the same segment throughout the course of their lifetime. As a result, taking exceptions into account while mapping the Customer Journey may be a smart idea. Another smart approach is to involve other departments since each department has a stake in defining the customer's experience and may give a distinct perspective. Customer Journey Mapping will, in the end, never be a static entity; like everything else in the digital age, it will be forced to be Agile.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a customer experience, so your company will have to figure out what works best for you. However, the Trip Mapping frameworks you develop should help you gain a better knowledge of the journey your consumers take as they interact with your organization, brand, goods, partners, and employees. Knowing where your consumer is on their journey might help you anticipate what they could encounter next.

Where CX meets Technology - Intelligent Experiences

As the pandemic forced us to change our very way of living, consumer behavior also changed drastically. Overnight, many people who were “fence-sitters” when it came to transacting “online” were literally forced to online since in-person contact became the least preferred way of doing commerce. This online commerce forced organizations to really take a deep look at their customer journeys both online and offline. Digital Technologies, earlier often relegated to “coming in future” or “nice to have” became “essential” to survival. Retail was the hardest hit with this realization.

However, we find that now almost every area of the customer experience is being transformed by new technologies. Customers have evolved to anticipate new levels of perfection, performance, and just about everything in between as the possibilities of digital technology improve. Customers' expectations are continuously evolving; thus, the current customer experience must go above and beyond old customer care practices. Companies that give a meaningful but relevant experience that meets or exceeds their consumers' expectations will be successful.

To stay on top of these advancements and trends, we must grasp these new technologies and use them to communicate, interact, and promote in novel ways. Today's organizations need to discover the proper digital tools to provide a great customer experience, build brand loyalty, and drive sales growth. CX is taking advantage of today's technology and data to improve the entire customer experience. This involves sharing data amongst teams such as marketing and customer support, developing new roles to act on the data, and using new technologies such as AI, resulting in the implementation of a class of digital practices that leverage data to improve the whole digital trip for customers.

Leading firms in customer experience management are already utilizing these new technologies to achieve a competitive advantage. This ranking is topped by the utilization of artificial intelligence. According to one Research, by 2022, consumers would probably be handling 85 percent or more of their interactions with the organization without the need to be engaging with a human, at least for simple interactions. Many of the technological breakthroughs accessible to CX delivery teams are determined by how artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces, and robotic automation are implemented. There are two aspects to this. One is related to productivity and efficiency. By automating frequent and repetitive processes, these solutions save expenses and boost agent productivity. The other aspect, perhaps more important, is to do with delivering superior experiences through quick, efficient, and empathetic engagements during various segments of customer journeys. Conversational Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are another method for automating simple chores. Today's industry-standard chatbots offer an incredible step forward for organizations looking to automate and outsource easy, regular inquiries and interactions to an intelligent system, thanks to an algorithmic learning feature that allows it to learn from past discussions and adapt replies. Another widely used option, IoT, may boost a company's bottom line by cutting operational expenses, improving productivity, and assisting companies in expanding into new markets or developing new goods.

One technique, which seems to be gaining tremendous traction in understanding and delivering empathetic engagements, is speech analytics, which is being increasingly used to augment existing AI processes enabled processes by listening for heightened voice pitches and other emotional indications, analyzing the customer's sentiments, further contextualizing with backend order data and transferring them to an agent when appropriate. It also gives fresh sources of feedback by identifying emotional drivers and focusing on terms or themes that regularly provoke specific feelings.

Armed with this sentiment analysis technology and with comprehensive dashboards, agents can quickly acquire a full image of each client, their purchase history, and their expected goals for each engagement – and then take on a consultative role, alleviating emergent and even projected requirements as well instantly acquire a thorough understanding of each client. These new and continually growing technologies are assisting businesses not only to extend their client base but also to get a macro-level understanding of their customers. Adopting such technologies for one’s organization is providing a more competitive advantage over competitors that have yet to connect technology with customer experience.

For a few years, a huge focus of most of the organizations and service providers was to deflect a transaction or engagement towards a non-voice channel – with the hope that customers would find these easier and such channels also afford a lower cost to serve. However, as seen, most of the customers are not very comfortable using non-voice channels especially with an AI-powered bot behind the channel during a time of crisis or during a buying journey. In a country like India, literacy rates while climbing has also proved to be a challenge for a largely English-dominated non-voice channel scene. Hence, we see that voice is making a comeback, albeit in a different avatar for service providers! And Speech Analytics and related technologies are at the heart of this revolution.

This is not limited to service providers or call centers only! General use of such virtual assistants is happening on an increasingly wide scale. For example, Taxi and cab drivers in India are routinely seen using some form of voice-powered virtual assistant for doing routine things – hands-free! Mostly the interface is maps or google assistant. The next frontier in Speech-enabled virtual assistants would be real-time language translation capabilities, which would allow two humans to converse with each other even though they might speak different languages. 5G and increasingly powerful speech engines are the key. While we are far away from Star Trek’s Universal Translator, but such technologies, on a simpler scale can revolutionize the way we interact with each other and transact online.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for such technologies available through a variety of interface formats!

Virtual Assistants: Their Role in Superior CX & EX

The Digital era compels many companies to maintain continuous connections with their customers until the resolution of their queries or issues. As a result, with customer service as a top priority, the ideal customer experience allows consumers to communicate via the channel of their choosing while keeping the context of interactions intact. A limitless firm has a new operating system that incorporates a shift in thinking as well as the increased embrace of emerging technology. The conventional tethered and physical workflow is morphing into interactive customer communications through various digital channels.

The role of Virtual assistants is developing as businesses adapt to the Omni Channel experience which is increasingly being expected by their end customers. Though virtual assistants first appeared in the 1960s with ELIZA and IBM's Shoebox voice-activated calculators, this technology is now emerging as the go-to solution in the realm of customer experience.

A traditional virtual assistant may be conceived of as an application that responds to a user's voice or text command and does the work at hand. Emerging virtual assistants, on the other hand, are programs that integrate the use of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract information and complicated data from conversations in order to comprehend and process them.

Structured data with standardized rules can easily adapt to RPA solutions whereas unstructured data with less application of standardization utilized Cognitive automation, a virtual assistant is a next-level combo that can extract information and complicated data from a conversation using a voice and text-based interface.

Virtual Assistant algorithms develop the capacity to construct data models that detect and adapt behavior patterns by merging past data. With the inclusion of historical data, preferences, and other user information on a regular basis, a virtual assistant can answer difficult queries, offer suggestions and predictions, and even start a discussion.

Pre-programmed virtual assistants, which are more rule-based, with logic mapped out with a logical next step for various answers users might ask, are giving way to more complex and dynamic AI virtual assistants, which can be divided into two categories: NLP virtual assistants and machine learning virtual assistants. As a result, virtual assistants are becoming smarter by ditching automated chats and becoming more participatory, as seen by one of the most popular products on the market, Google Home, which knows each user's voice and issues a secure ID to each. The trend is also emerging to integrate different Virtual assistants, which can provide enhanced functionality to consumers and end-users.

However, there are certain privacy issues with AI-enabled virtual assistants that gather and retain user data indefinitely for better upgrades and user experience; this may be mitigated with strict data privacy rules from the corporations that provide this technology. After all, technology is a double-edged weapon that must be handled with caution.

Virtual Assistants have a chance to build a new digital workforce that will supplement human talents while also benefiting B2C and B2B end customers. Virtual assistant technology may be efficiently applied to external customer-facing use-cases using Conversational AI and cloud-enabled services, assisting enterprises in meeting the demands of digital natives and growing omnichannel digital contact with Omnichannel digital virtual assistants. At the same time, with employee experience also becoming increasingly important in the delivery of holistic Total Stakeholder Experience, virtual assistants are playing an increasingly important role in enabling employees to perform their tasks with much more accuracy, speed, and efficiency. These assistants are used in a variety of formats including conversational text, guidance coaches, and even as “co-listeners” to a voice conversation and then providing guidance based on inferences derived from a vast database of previous interactions and persona-based profiling.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for virtual assistants available through a variety of interface formats!

Benchmarking Your CX Organization

 To develop your business, you must first improve the customer experience (CX)  that your business delivers to guarantee that your customers are well-served and have transformative interactions with your brand. For a fully connected, effortless CX that adds value to your consumers and business, you need a well-defined CX strategy and clear leadership.

It's good to see companies continuing to value customer experience as a key differentiator. Benchmarking assists businesses in understanding how these strategies and staff perform in comparison to rivals and what customers are truly saying.

Thus, for setting your organization up for long-term success, it's vital to take a critical step of Benchmarking.

The first step would be setting up KPIs such as Net promoter score, customer satisfaction scores, Customer acquisition and retention, Customer effort score, Average ratings across listing platforms, Volume and sentiment of online reviews, and Consumer engagement for Benchmarking Customer Experience that is important to compare to previous results both internally and outside.

Customer and Employees feedback - By interacting directly with your customers, blind spots in the organization can be identified and understood what’s not working.

Using reputation management software that uses natural language processing (NLP) can help you to evaluate client comments as one approach to gauge consumer sentiment. It might provide insight into the precise issues that need to be addressed in order to improve your client experience.

Another method is to use Voice of the Customer initiatives, which are aimed at gathering and evaluating customer feedback in order to find chances for operational or product changes, which helps to achieve the ultimate objective of increasing customer acquisition and retention.

Comparing the most recent available scores to these earlier scores can assist you to determine what is and isn't working with your client experience when you begin your benchmarking CX.

Competitive Advantage via Benchmarking – we must focus on our customer experience via Client satisfaction to create a loyal customer base and keep business away from our rivals. When we're evaluating our company's performance, look at how our rivals are doing via internet reviews and social media mentions to get a sense of how they're doing and what areas they're having trouble with. With this kind of study, we should be able to pinpoint areas where we can enhance our client experience and address some of their concerns, perhaps luring them to our company.

With at least one-to-one comparisons, the aim should be to figure out where your competitors are outperforming us, where we can improve, and how our customer experience stacks up against the competition.

Benchmark revenue measurements can reveal where our team spends more, less, or the same as comparable organizations of our size, and these insights can help us better allocate our company's resources.

Benchmarking in fact forces us to evaluate ourselves in comparison to other organizations in our industry, rather than our own prior success, and holding our firm to industry standards maintains the focus on becoming the best among competitors.

Identifying the relevant KPIs, gathering consumer insights, and evaluating our achievements against the industry are only the beginnings of a customer-centric organizational transformation.

Benchmarking and improving customer experience is a long-term marketing strategy which is a long-term investment after adoption

Digital Customer Experience Strategy

With an ever-expanding spectrum of digital technologies and tools at our disposal, the distinction between digital and physical customer experience is becoming increasingly hazy. For competitive marketers, digital channels are becoming increasingly vital in supporting their whole customer experience strategy.

In my opinion, companies will, increasingly, compete on customer experience as a focused area alongside their product or service, thus they will be prepared to pay more for a great customer experience.

A successful digital experience plan needs organizations to consider how digital interfaces fit into their customer engagement strategy, which utilizes customer data and provides businesses with customer insights to improve digital interaction across interfaces and boost customer retention.

In order to promote genuine gains, digital customer experience management must become an executive priority and fit with the overall business strategy. Delivering a seamless experience across individual customer contact points by leveraging unified communications as a service is a fantastic example of channel flexibility when consumers want to remain engaged with the same agent across digital channels.

This may be accomplished by deploying cloud management solutions that allow customers to switch between your brand's multiple channels, therefore addressing the growing need for response time, which customers rank as critical when they have a customer service query.

Companies must make the effort to completely map and understand their customer journey in order to increase customer engagement scores, where consumers are willing to share data with you in exchange for personalized experiences that make their journey easier, easy, and convenient.

When the objective is to decrease consumer friction and effort, it's critical to build complicated systems that simplify client interactions as every move in the firm has an influence on the consumers in some manner, hence companies must be aligned towards customer-centricity.

This is possible with the help of a specialized digital team that specifies alignment and synergies with other relevant business divisions. This team must define KPIs to push the organization's and culture's thinking toward digital transformation and customer experience, as well as simplify processes to generate efficiency and reduce redundancies.

When you simplify your digital journey and offer tailored digital experiences for your consumers, you achieve customer satisfaction with less effort, which leads to an increase in your customer lifetime value.

Brands that have a strong CX strategy make a concerted effort to connect company goals with these consumer expectations.

Building and Sustaining the Digital culture during COVID-19 & Beyond

COVID-19 outbreak is a world-changing phenomenon that will have long-lasting implications for our global economy. It’s a once in a generation global impact event. This is the opportunity for each SERVICE PROVIDER to conduct an organizational re-framing of their pre-COVID business model, behaviors & practices. Flexibility and adaptability in operational control whilst continuing to operate as close to the prescribed core organizational culture, are the traits that will secure their futures.

We are witnessing that:

·       Pandemic has severely disrupted production processes.

·       Digital has helped through the rapid scale-up of platforms resulting in changes to the traditional boundaries of firms.

·       With the advent of new business models, digital platform first firms have been able to evolve rapidly. The year 2020 can be described as the year that “a forced test of many things we had thought about but not tried.”

Building and sustaining a digital culture during COVID-19 & Beyond would require:

·       Introducing flexible and adaptable operational controls to secure SERVICE PROVIDER’s future.

·       Skill & hire for technologies such WFH, digitally secure online presence, blockchain, and IoT.

·       And most importantly, enhanced Investments in automation space as the next big thing.

COVID-19 induced pandemic and disruption is being seen as the catalyst for a global reset and the acceleration of digital transformation. Across the organization, everyone must recognize that, for a business to achieve sustained innovation excellence, it is very important that an innovative mindset must be integral to every employee’s job profile. Also, Leaderships teams need to measure and reward innovation so that it becomes a core competency that drives priority-setting, resource allocation, talent acquisition, and the development of influential leaders.

New age leadership teams know that many old ways of working are basically incompatible with a successful digital transformation culture and a tremendous, yet subtle cultural change is required. Given that every company is different, according to Protiviti (https://www.protiviti.com/IN-en/insights/bpro102) the leadership teams should consider whether the organization is a digital follower, expert, or leader:

• Digital follower — under this category, a given company has developed a digital strategy and has a proven track record delivering on digital initiatives, which are typically focused on discrete aspects of the customer journey as well as internal process automation.
• Digital expert — under this category, a given company has a proven track record of adopting emerging technologies has achieved high levels of process automation and quantitatively manages digital aspects of its strategy enterprise-wide.
• Digital leader — under this category, a given company has a proven track record of disrupting traditional business models; digital aspects of strategic plans are continually improved based on lessons learned and predictive indicators.

Other experts tend to agree. According to the Danish business leader and leadership author Torben Rick (https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/culture/culture-change-is-key-in-digital-transformation/) , digital transformation isn’t really about technology, it’s about organizational agility - and culture plays a vital role in the digital transformation of any business.

Building and sustaining a culture of digitalization is also the new core for each organization making an attempt to grapple with the onslaught of economic process fuelled by digital disruption from its competition. digitalization is regarding permitting technology to drive your organization – your product, services, client interactions, and core operations – so as to maneuver quicker. However, digitalization conjointly needs an organizational culture where folks are both ready and willing to adapt. Thus, digital culture and transformation go hand in hand. Ignore culture and risk transformation failure. Rick identifies digital culture transformation as leading the adoption of recent technology; it's the shift from ancient, analog culture, wherever choices area unit supported marketing research, careful business cases, and careful in-house reportage, to a digitally-driven surrounding, wherever choices area unit created by cross-functional groups supported live customer-centric information. It’s being ready to fail quickly instead of being averse to risk.

Organizations don’t transform, people do.

Digital culture is a company-wide change in mindset and behavior that has a good chance of succeeding only if it is instilled from those at the top. Leaders need to demonstrate their enthusiasm for new technologies and be prepared to develop new skills themselves in order to empower people to transform within the organization.

But then one might question, why all this fuss around digital and digital culture? Well, as it turns out, with empirical evidence, it does appear that digital organizations move faster, favoring continuous iteration over refining a product or service to perfection before launching it. Another fundamental tenet of digital culture that is highlighted in multiple articles is the great benefit of flattening organizational charts. When collaboration across teams is encouraged and valued over individual effort, and employees are trusted to make judgment calls – no matter what their role – empowerment follows, and this empowerment fuels motivation, which can lead to faster decision making and, ultimately, more wins.

As the teams learn to collaborate, the organization will become more transparent, and finally, as digital culture embeds in the business, the organization’s focus will inherently shift outward. Outside expertise and customer feedback will be sought-after rather than feared as the organizational culture changes into an agile and resilient digital powerhouse.

To summarize, digital transformation depends on having a digital culture supporting it because digital culture:

·      Enables focus on customer needs rather than internal processes

·      promotes agile thinking

·      places high emphasis on collaboration

·      drives transformation

·      empowers workers across the company