Gartner’s Polk: CX Goes Beyond Marketing
“It’s incumbent on marketing leaders to have a view of their own data, but also to be aware of other types of data outside of marketing,” says Gartner research director Jennifer Polk.
At a time when the marketing industry is abuzz about customer experience, Gartner research director Jennifer Polk says the topic is bigger and broader than marketing.
For the chief marketer, that means strong alignment with other customer-facing parts of the business and access to the data those groups are collecting on your customers.
“CMOs need to know how to access that data, how to use it, and how to blend it with marketing data to enrich their view of the customer and the customer journey,” Polk told CMO.com in an exclusive interview. “They also need to share that view with leaders across the business to shape a shared definition of CX success and set of CX objectives and metrics.”
In the interview below, Polk talks about CX data vs. marketing data, as well as the metrics for measuring CX success—both topics for her discussion at Gartner’s Digital Marketing Conference, May 10 to 12 in San Diego.
CMO.com: Customer experience is definitely the buzzword of 2017. What’s data’s role in achieving customer experience success?
Data is critical for tracking and measuring CX objectives and, of course, assessing the impact of CX on business outcomes. This could mean assessing a specific tactic, like a new mobile app aimed at improving customer engagement. Or it could involve measuring the impact of a broader, cross-functional CX program on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.
CMO.com: So CX should be a cinch, since marketers have all the answers right at their fingertips, right?
Polk: CX data is a little bit different because not all of the data involved in customer experience is going to be at the fingertips of the marketing leader. Customer experience is bigger and broader than marketing. It extends into sales, customer service, and operations–really every customer-facing activity function–meaning CX data sits in various systems and silos. This means it’s incumbent on marketing leaders to have a view of their own data, but also to be aware of other types of data outside of marketing.
CMO.com: What are some of the most important metrics for measuring CX?
Polk: In partnership with my colleague Augie Ray, we recently published “Use the Hierarchy of Customer Experience Metrics to Drive Action and Validate Business Outcomes,” which talks about metrics marketing leaders should use to manage and measure CX programs, drive organizational alignment, and show tangible business impact from marketing-led CX.
This document proposes a hierarchy of metrics to connect tactical CX execution to more operational metrics, both within and outside of marketing, and show how those KPIs are linked to strategic metrics executives often use to gauge success. That success is not solely focused on revenue growth; it also relates to the organization’s CX maturity and employee engagement—both of which are barometers for how well you’re executing with a customer-first mindset.
Those are examples of internal data and performance metrics. There’s also internal and customer data. This is really where marketing leaders who have customer experience responsibility should be looking at first-, second-, and third-party data. [They should be] aggregating and analyzing that data, using approaches like customer journey analytics to understand how customers interact with their brand across touch points and time and to better automate, personalize, optimize, and innovate along that journey.
CMO.com: What’s your advice for marketers just starting out in analyzing and thinking about improving their CX?
Polk: It starts with understanding who your customers are and developing data-driven segments and personas that allow you to identify your highest-value customers. In Gartner’s “Loyalty Framework,” we refer to those customers as “loyals.” They’re high-value, high-retention customers. Marketers should be using behavioral data to identify those individuals, understand their behavior and what differentiates them from other customers.
If you can zero in on that behavior and how that behavior aligns to their expectations, interactions, and transactions, you can focus CX improvement on the moments that matter in terms of their importance to high-value customers and their weight within those customers’ journeys. This is your North Star, your guide to the key points in the journey that warrant the most attention and investment and are likely to have the greatest impact on results.
CMO.com: Where are marketers in terms of maturity for how they’re using data to guide their CX?
Polk: It depends. If we’re talking about developing segments and personas, I would say many companies have a view of their customer segments. However, that view is oftentimes just a demographic view. They have a view of audience demographics–they know that they are going after women ages 18 to 54, which is very broad and delivers little meaningful insight.
Customers are more than demographics. If that’s where marketing leaders stop and if that’s how they’re operating, they’re on the low end of the maturity scale. More mature organizations are going beyond demographics; they’re analyzing behavioral data, psychographics, and ethnographics to understand who customers are, how they behave, and their wants, needs, and expectations.
Mature organizations have analytics teams and analysts who aren’t just data junkies but they’re also excellent communicators. They use tools that extend beyond data aggregation and analysis to dashboards and data visualizations that illustrate the meaning of the data and drive faster, better, and more intelligent decision-making. And they really have a better understanding of not just the immediate decision that they’re trying to make and the change they’re trying to drive, but the broader customer journey and the opportunities that that presents and exposes. That’s a big shift from how companies used to make decisions based on their gut and what’s good for the organization toward relying on data and putting the customer first.
CMO.com: Why should attendees come to your session at the Gartner Digital Marketing Conference?
Polk: Marketing leaders with customer experience responsibilities, as well as those seeking to optimize marketing and customer engagement within the customer journey, are going to walk away with a better understanding of how data can help them identify their customers. They’ll better understand how data can help them track customer behavior along the journey and use that insight to optimize key parts of the journey for customer satisfaction and business success.