The main challenges around customer-centricity
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a crucial role in the strength of any organisation, from driving brand loyalty to increasing revenue. However, as marketing technologies evolve rapidly, keeping up with the competition becomes increasingly challenging. In fact, in the 2022 Salesforce State of Marketing report, CMOs said they utilise just 42% of the breadth of capabilities available in their MarTech stack overall.
Only 42% of the breadth of capabilities available in an organisation's MarTech stack is currently utilised
Customer-centricity is a key focus for today’s CMO. Defined as understanding “customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations”, CMOs need to gather and utilise more customer information than ever.
This, at a time when customers place high importance on data privacy, and governments globally respond with strict regulations. In addition, customer data the business does have can be disparate, inaccurate, and disjointed.
Delivering customer-centricity with first-party data is an overwhelming challenge for marketers. But this is what the business needs in order to offer relevant and timely products, services, and experiences to their customers.
We've identified three major challenges when it comes to achieving customer-centricity. All thee can be solved with the right MarTech strategy.
State of Marketing Budget & Strategy Report 2022, Gartner
Marketing, sales and customer success activities occur across multiple technologies and systems. This means customers’ behavioural and profile data is often held in independent, unconnected platforms – or offline. That’s why 62% of business buyers say it feels like they’re communicating with different departments, not one company.
Marketing must examine earned customer analytics to understand customer lifetime value. But often, customer analytics are restricted to one channel or platform at a time. And these platforms don't always keep up with evolving privacy regulations and customer preferences.
A third of marketers say their marketing attribution process is manual, meaning the business cannot get a real time view of the customer journey. Disjointed views lead to significant gaps between advertising, marketing, sales and customer service efforts from an analytics and operational perspective.
Effective utilisation of first-party data (behavioural and profile data) allows marketing to deploy meaningful and tailored customer interactions across relevant channels.
However, first-party data is limited to standard platform practices. So, for example, marketing automation tools can only capture information against the customer profile if they have allowed cookies. And CRM systems might store data that is inputted manually.
There is often no mechanism to personalise interactions in real-time without sales involvement. There is also no way to profile behavioural activities to determine the types of content the customer wants to interact with.
Approaching customers digitally is standard today. Most organisations have either already achieved or are on the path towards a digital customer experience.
Customers almost always expect companies they interact with to interact with them digitally. Now they want joined up, customer-centric experiences. We've identified three critical pillars to achieving this new digital transformational goal:
