Key To Mastering CX: Know The Customer
No matter the technology trend, “At the end of the day, everything comes back to how a prospect or customer interacts with the brand,” said Matt Goddard, CEO of R2i.
Customer experience is top-of-mind for marketers, with most touting their focus on improvements at every touch point.
But the first step to a better CX is understanding who the customer is, according to Matt Goddard, CEO of R2i, an agency focused on marketing technology, demand generation, and digital.
In an exclusive interview with CMO.com, Goddard detailed how brands can get to know their customers, whether hiring a chief experience officer is necessary, and what is making CMOs’ lives “a living hell.”
Goddard: I think the main catalyst of customer experience is the fact that the customers we’re trying to reach or the people that we’re trying to engage with our brand now have a lot of control over what they do because they are driving their devices. They are telling their computers what they want to do, and the brand isn’t actually part of that process at all times.
When you think about experiences in the olden days, there was a lot more control. Take a television commercial or even in-store experiences, where the company has a lot more control over what is happening. But in a self-driven marketplace, the customer experience matters a lot more because of the fact that the customer’s actually creating the experience as they go.
The other reason customer experience matters so much is because of the plethora of social media and the fact that we have advice-seekers and advice-givers sitting inside of this wide, crazy, complicated social network graph that has been created across the world. They can easily provide their own information or opinion about a brand relative to the experience that they had with that brand, and that is also a very new phenomenon.
CMO.com: I bet clients come to you all the time and say they want to improve their customer experience. From an operational standpoint, what happens next?
Goddard: If a client says they want to improve their customer experience, the first thing we need to understand is, who is the customer? What type of personas do they have? How many different personas do they have? How do these customers use the Web? What devices do they have in their hands and in their homes? How they manage their in-store experience? How do they use all of those touch points to make purchasing decisions? And then how will they, maybe in the future, relay those purchasing behaviors or those touch points to other people? What level of influence do they have over others in their network?
So it’s a matter of really understanding your customer and knowing what your customer wants, when they want it, how they want it, and trying to create the right experience for them. This is very difficult for brands to do because, as you know, there are more than 7 billion people in the world. They’re all different ages, from different walks of life, with different personal experiences. It’s very difficult for a brand to compartmentalize everybody along the customer journey and to compartmentalize all these various personas to realize how to generate the best customer experience.
CMO.com: Where’s the industry with customer experience? Do most companies have it figured out?
Goddard: At the Fortune 500 level, it’s already there, and it’s probably a gigantic boulder that’s rolling downhill. In the middle market, it’s just starting to gain momentum. They may think, “How does somebody experience my brand when they land on my home page of my website?” and that’s part of customer experience, but customer experience goes well beyond that.
To me, customer experience is any moment in time that an individual prospect touches your brand, whether it be an e-mail they got from a friend, a billboard they saw when they drove down the street, or a mobile ad they saw on their phone. Customer experience is everywhere.
CMO.com: What do you make of hiring customer experience professionals to lead the charge? Do you think that’s necessary from an operational standpoint? Do companies need a chief customer experience officer?
Goddard: I think it’s an evolving field. I think it’s a very smart idea to think of it as a position and to think of the people that need to be surrounded by the management in that position.
However, I think a lot of companies may struggle in that they either may not have the budget to add these people, or they often may struggle with just the crossover that this position is going to have. How does this person interface with the marketing department, which is charged with revenue growth? How do they interface with the customer services department, which is charged with loyalty? How do they interface with the engineering and IT departments, which are charged with keeping the servers on? And how do they interface with everyone inside the company?
But org charts are changing across the entire landscape of business right now. We’ve seen digital titles that didn’t exist 15 years ago. I do think having a centralized customer experience manager that’s very high up in the organization, that has a team around him or her, does make sense, but it’s going to take time. It sounds great on paper, but execution is going to be very difficult.
CMO.com: Other than CX, are there any marketing trends that you’re paying attention to?
Goddard: Mobility’s a major trend. The Internet of Things and virtual reality are also big ones. These are the newest technologies and the way that customers are organizing and living their lives. But at the end of the day, everything for a brand comes back to how that prospect or customer interacts with the brand. If it’s a virtual reality headset, a mobile device, or a smart refrigerator, which is showing you a commercial because you’re out of milk and the refrigerator knows you’re out of milk–all of that is still customer experience. That’s why it’s such a big topic right now.
CMO.com: What’s your advice to marketers for gaining a competitive advantage?
Goddard: Ten years ago, before all the marketing cloud technology platforms and all the programmatic media platforms really started to take hold in the organizations around the country, creative and how creative was executed was probably the main competitive advantage you could deliver in your marketing world. I mean, there’s competitive advantage around products and product features and which products are the best, etc., but in terms of your marketing world, in terms of delivering your message, creativity was a major differentiator item.
Then, all of a sudden, all of these great technology tools came into play. Everyone chased these shiny objects for a little while because that was how they were going to gain competitive advantage. If you’re able to create a highly personalized experience for a particular person, at a particular moment in time in the buying cycle, you’re going to get a higher return on investment than somebody that sends a generic message.
Now that a lot of the Fortune 500 companies have the technology and tools in place, creativity is making a comeback. Companies can no longer gain competitive advantage from these technology tools because our competitors already have them, so how are we going to get competitive advantage again? Well, we’re going to go back to the creative components of business. We’re going to go back to delivering the highest, best impact relative to creative that we ever could.
CMO.com: You talk to brand CMOs all the time. What are hearing from them? What keeps them up at night?
Goddard: Any CMO’s challenge is how to grow revenue and improve engagement across the organization. Those two are obvious. One less obvious thing that is driving CMOs crazy right now is that they need to manage all of these advanced technology platforms. And they not only have to understand which platforms to purchase, they also need to understand how to configure them the right way and how to ensure that the features of those platforms are being used at the highest level they can be. Then they’re also challenged with driving traffic into all the assets that the brand has to generate that return on investment.
CMO.com: I’ve heard marketers say digital is the CMOs biggest blessing and biggest curse. Can you talk about that?
Goddard: Digital has made the CMO’s life a living hell from an accountability perspective because everyone wants perfect attribution, which is an impossibility. But now CMOs are being tasked with actually delivering that.
You can’t get perfect attribution because I could go online tomorrow, search “Home Depot,” get an ad that popped up, click on that ad, and then buy a lawnmower. Home Depot would attribute the sale of that lawnmower to the fact that I clicked on that ad, when, in reality, I drove by the Home Depot store on my way home and said, “Wow, I need a lawnmower,” actually went into Home Depot and checked out the lawnmower I wanted to buy, left, and then bought it online.
It is just impossible to do perfect attribution, and it has created a lot of additional accountability for CMOs. But in a good way, it has also shed some light on CMO spend that may not have generated any return on investment. In the advertising industry, they used to say, “Fifty percent of our advertising works; I just don’t know which 50%.” It sheds some light on whether 50% of it was working or was not working. I think it’s been a benefit to organizations to have this level of detail, from a metrics standpoint, but I think it has been extremely unfair to CMOs to expect perfect attribution.