Deepening the Conversation for a More Personalised Customer Experience

Cus­tomer expec­ta­tions are always ris­ing. For­tu­nate­ly, many brands are ris­ing to the occa­sion by pur­su­ing new and cre­ative ways of deliv­er­ing rel­e­vant and per­son­alised cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. In fact, cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has been a com­mon thread through our exclu­sive con­tent on CMO.com over the last cou­ple of weeks. Mar­keters are look­ing for ways to get their brand in front of cus­tomers and deep­en their con­ver­sa­tions with their customers.

Rick Jones, gen­er­al man­ag­er in the UK of Adform, dis­cussed the chal­lenge of pro­vid­ing an unob­tru­sive, seam­less cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in the age of ad block­ing tech­nol­o­gy. Jones encour­ages mar­keters to embrace a dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing strat­e­gy that com­bines cre­ativ­i­ty, data, and automa­tion. While ad block­ers are a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge to mar­keters, Jones offers hope that the best anti­dote to ad block­ing is pro­vid­ing con­sumers with cre­ative and rel­e­vant per­son­alised content.

Thomas Hus­son, vice pres­i­dent and prin­ci­pal ana­lyst, mar­ket­ing and strat­e­gy at For­rester, shared the oppor­tu­ni­ty brands have to deep­en the con­ver­sa­tion with con­sumers through instant mes­sag­ing (IM) apps, such as WeChat, What­sApp, and Face­book Mes­sen­ger. He encour­ages Euro­pean mar­keters to learn from their coun­ter­parts in Chi­na, where con­sumers are already using the WeChat app “to book a doctor’s appoint­ment, pay a bill, or con­trol the light in their hotel room, lead­ing them to spend more than a third of their total mobile time in the app.”

I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to share some of the insights from the Econ­sul­tan­cy 2017 Dig­i­tal Trends Brief­ing. As expect­ed, the report found that most mar­keters believe that pro­vid­ing an opti­mal cus­tomer expe­ri­ence will set their com­pa­nies apart from the com­pe­ti­tion. Deliv­er­ing these expe­ri­ences, how­ev­er, often requires a com­plete organ­i­sa­tion­al shift in cul­ture, strat­e­gy, skills, and process­es. While the report found that many com­pa­nies strug­gle in these areas, it pro­vides plen­ty of insight into how com­pa­nies can move in the right direction.

In an exclu­sive inter­view with CMO.com, Stephen Wind-Moz­ley, direc­tor of dig­i­tal at Vir­gin Media Busi­ness, shared his company’s strat­e­gy of pre­sent­ing a com­pelling and infec­tious nar­ra­tive to its cus­tomers. An impor­tant insight shared by Wind-Moz­ley is the idea of tar­get­ing the envi­ron­ment that deci­sion mak­ers inhab­it rather than the deci­sion mak­ers them­selves. It then becomes about mak­ing the deci­sion mak­ers aware of what the com­pa­ny offers and adding val­ue to the conversation.

Jim Clark, research direc­tor for Econ­sul­tan­cy, offered fur­ther insight from the firm’s 2017 Dig­i­tal Trends Brief­ing while speak­ing at Adobe’s CX Forum in Lon­don. To illus­trate that the focus on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence shows no signs of abat­ing, Clark men­tioned the approach tak­en by Domino’s Piz­za. They’ve shift­ed their per­spec­tive of what they are from a piz­za com­pa­ny to an e‑commerce com­pa­ny, which has result­ed in “60% of orders com­ing through dig­i­tal, and half of those com­ing through mobile.”

We hope you’ll engage with our exclu­sive con­tent on CMO.com and learn from some of the top lead­ers in mar­ket­ing. Please let us know what you think.