Uncovering customers unmet need

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In todays’ age, empowered and digitally connected customers is a cliché. However, they still continue to be one of the main reasons that keep a marketer awake at night.

Todays’ customers are equally forthcoming in sharing their positive as well as their negative experiences with the entire world and with just a few clicks. Customer experience is a daily battle and marketers need to consciously and continuously modernize in the way they engage. CMOs are facing an expanded mandate to reimagine their role. Their challenge: to set new standards for the way marketing gets done. As customer champions, they need to create exceptional and personalized customer experiences.

As organizations evolve from product-led businesses to experience-led, CMOs as the brand stewards and customer champions, need to strategically address how to compete by increasing value; creating exceptional, personalized customer experiences; and shifting corporate cultures to embrace a truly customer-centric way of thinking and operating

With Digital media all around, Marketing is increasingly becoming a technology powered discipline. There are tremendous changes happening in the marketing tech landscape. There is a need to design and operate technology solutions to fuel marketing, a primary engine to engage with customers.

Let us take a look at today’s customer and why marketing technology has an ever important role to engage with her on her terms –

• She navigates not one, not two but three or more devices (smart phones, tablets, laptops and so on) and expects marketers to understand her need and the pace with which she operates
• She shares personal information expecting marketers to make good use of it for anticipating and fulfilling her needs
• She rarely hesitates to share her experience with her friends and social circle, be it positive or negative
• In effect, she is a double edged sword to a marketer’s nightmare or delight.

Customers want to find information on their own terms, on a channel of their preference. Marketers need to strategically address how to compete by increasing value; create exceptional, personalized customer experiences; and shift corporate cultures to embrace a truly customer-centric way of thinking and operating. The recent edition of the Global C-Suite Study by IBV, reveals key insights on CMO’s perspective

• Changing market dynamics, changing customer preferences and new distribution channels are once again the external factors that the C-suite is prioritizing. And these factors sit squarely in the CMO wheelhouse.
• CMOs anticipate that today’s business environment will likely shift organizations from being product-led businesses to experience-led. CMOs also predict that businesses will place less emphasis on product innovation and more on business model innovation.
• CMOs report their ability to lead organizational growth and change is now essential to their professional success. This is reflected in the top five priorities of the CMO must-do list for the year

According to the IBV C-Suite study more than 70 percent of CMOs report their ability to lead organizational growth and change is now essential to their professional success.

These trends clearly indicate the importance of marketing to drive digital reinvention to reimagine customer experience and to clearly be able to demonstrate RoI.

According to a recent IBV benchmarking report, 44 percent of marketers claim their organizations don’t sufficiently measure and attribute the effect of campaigns on sales or profitability. Another IBV report on customer experience found 51 percent of executives say they are only able to measure the ROI of their customer experiences to a ‘moderate extent’.  A sizeable 41% marketers feel that they are not doing well in delivering personalized customer experience.

So, where is the opportunity? Opportunity clearly lies in Data.

The last few years, we saw organizations focus on omni-channel engagement, creating a single customer view and a seamless digital experience. The time now is to use customer data intelligently, so as to anticipate their needs, their aspirations to personalized experience and delight them by moving one step ahead by being proactive and not reactive. Using Data to identify unmet customer needs may be the most important capability to differentiate from competition. This means –

• Using both structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources to determine what customers want at a given place or time.
• Integrating data from multiple sources to predict customer needs and behaviour pattern.

The next step would be to use AI that can take data driven experience to a whole new different level. AI systems can understand unstructured information in a way similar to humans, thereby taking personalized experience to a whole new level. And marketing can employ AI in a variety of ways –

• Help deliver insights to assist customer experience design and development teams and customer facing professionals
• Provide direct personalized experiences such as chatbots or robots.
• Automate marketing tasks thus freeing resources for a higher value activity

To put customer needs at the front, mapping the entire customer journey is becoming increasingly important to marketing function. A comprehensive customer journey map is increasingly becoming a vital tool for marketers. By leveraging marketing technology and processes, marketers can visualize the vast connection of customer touch points revealing customer pain and delights. It helps marketers develop authentic messages and strategies factors outside their control, such as social media and feedback.

Gone are the days, where marketing would plan yearly or even quarterly. The platformization of marketing enables marketing to think and behave in an agile and iterative manner, adopting and implementing customer feedback, knowing customers’ changing preferences, by being more transparent, more efficient and in lesser clock time. The power of data is exactly what marketing needs to harness using technology such as Cloud and AI.

IBM Watson Assistant as a cloud conversational computing platforms are an effective way to build, engaging interactions with customers that deliver value. Forrester recently announced IBM Watson Assistant as a leader in conversational computing in The Forrester New Wave™: Conversational Computing Platforms, Q2 2018.

Read more on how IBM Watson Assistant is helping organizations world over here