Accenture’s Joy Bhattacharya Picks Four Key Issues For The Board

In the introduction to the series of articles by Accenture Interactive Leadership, the managing director in charge of the consultancy’s UK business puts customer experience at the top of marketers’ agenda.

“The businesses that focus on delivering and executing customer experiences are the businesses that will win, and the role of marketers now is to make those customer experiences happen.”

So says Joy Bhattacharya, managing director, Accenture Interactive Lead, UKI. Next week CMO.com begins a series of articles written by Accenture Interactive Leadership looking at key issues facing marketers as we move into this new world. As an introduction to the series, Bhattacharya spoke to CMO.com, and the first thing we discussed was what those issues are.

Bhattacharya: We’ve looked at the issues marketers are dealing with and grouped them around the four themes most talked about at board level: the changing customer agenda; leadership and culture transformation; how marketing is evolving; and technology, making sure the ways of engaging with customers that you’re creating link to the back end to make those end-to-end experiences happen.

Then within each of those themes we came up with three topics that we heard most about. For example, one topic in the customer agenda theme is: how do we ensure that the design that we’ve come up with gets delivered, that it doesn’t become so compromised down the line that nothing gets delivered.

For the leadership and cultural transformation theme, a big topic is how to get customers more involved in the process? And then in the evolution of marketing, diversity is a big topic; how do we tap into the diversity of our organisation, or build that diversity, so we can bring that richness of thinking to our proposition development, for example?

CMO.com: If you’re beginning a conversation with a marketer covering these areas, what two or three things would you start them thinking about?

Bhattacharya: The first is how well they deliver meaningful customer experiences. How would customers rate them compared to their competitors in-sector, but also experiential competitors?

The second is how they’re structured in terms of having the right blend of creativity, insights from data, the way they think about and deliver experiences. This organisation structure—is it lean, do they feel it’s too complicated, do they feel there are thousands of partners?

Then the third one is that every organisation has thousands of marketing technologies in place. How much do they really utilise? How seamlessly are they able to tie what they want to deliver with how they’re structured?

CMO.com: What about people who feel customer experience is all very well, but they’re in a category that doesn’t suit this approach? As BuzzFeed likes to say, “Nobody wants a tweet from their toilet roll.”

Bhattacharya: There is always something customers associate the brand with. We are entering a world of services, so I might think about how the customer would order their next set of toilet rolls. Is it at the store, or is it actually at the point they realise they’re running out? I press a button, it understands what brand I have, it loads Amazon’s shopping cart app or Amazon Dash. That’s the point marketers need to think about, because their brand could easily be substituted by another that makes it more convenient to buy at that point. Then the experience is not the brand association, it’s about convenience and ease of refilling.

CMO.com: What would you say to a senior marketer who sees this as the future but doesn’t have the organisational support that you were talking about?

Bhattacharya: It depends on the context, but the first point I would emphasise is how well their customer experience journey is mapped out. Is it clear to them what messages they’re sending? At which touch points are customers consuming those messages, how integrated is the experience, and how well does it cater to the future? Where do the opportunities lie?

From there it doesn’t have to be a massive infrastructure upgrade or getting a team in place. It’s about identifying some of the low-hanging fruit and using that as a way of upskilling marketing capabilities.

We’re working with a leading insurer which is not a known brand. They don’t have a big budget. They’ve got a unique proposition, and they know their customers are more prone to use them if they’re going on a trip, for example. We zoomed in on that customer set and figured out that social media was the best channel to use.

Then we did a small pilot project with them to figure out how they could use Facebook marketing as a way of deepening engagement with that customer group. Just that pilot led to a higher return on investment, higher engagement scores, and an increase in the number of people engaging with the brand.

This didn’t take too long or need new infrastructure. We just found a new way to connect with the customer. So identifying the broader customer map and then looking at those points of opportunity that can have high impact is a way that people can get started.

CMO.com: The other question is cost. Everybody would love to target a segment of one but can they afford to, and will it pay back?

Bhattacharya: When you talk about a segment of one, the message you’re trying to get across is that the way you’re targeting your customers is still too broad. Forget about hyper-personalisation, and segment of one, and all that stuff; actually, our marketing campaigns are still broadcast. People talk about how we narrow it down, but it doesn’t happen.

There are two levers that marketers need to think about. One is that a lot of marketers think about brand awareness and engagement but obsess less about conversion, although they’re starting to get keener about it. They’re increasingly getting challenged on budget, and if they don’t justify their investment with performance, there’s a problem.

The second is that technology has become quite commoditised. Using the right digital technologies, you can significantly lower your cost of acquisition. What it needs is a mindset for performance and an ability to embrace the new, and to understand how digital marketing can help.

Then, finally, a lot of the mindset is changing the way you use agencies. A lot of our positioning when we go and talk to our clients is around payment by results, and true results. For example, if we sell a car for you, pay us for the car that is sold.

Then if we can drive transparency, performance, and more use of available mass technologies, this notion of targeting down to a finite subset isn’t out of the realms of possibility.

CMO.com: Can you give an example of a conventional, established business that has adopted these approaches and is seeing the results?

Bhattacharya: A good example is one global car manufacturer. They’re a multi-brand company with global distribution, and while they had the right level of infrastructure, it was not necessarily mature or working at speed across all their geographies and territories. Their cost per acquisition was quite high, and their customer experience was inconsistent and, in some cases, completely off-brand.

They took the bold step of saying they were just going to be measured on one key outcome—how many cars they sold through digital. They went to their agency partners and said: “We want to pay you on one thing, which is results. Are you willing to sign up to a partnership where we pay you per car sold, whether it’s through an email campaign, paid search, whatever; and can you track that for us?”

And then there was the organisational change—getting more analytics in place and restructuring their marketing organisation to make it happen. It’s a good example of how a marketing organisation transforms itself at scale, by putting customer experience at the core.