Creating Great Customer Experiences: 4 Areas to Master

CMOs understand that exceptional and consistent customer experiences can lead to revenue growth. But what does a great customer experience entail?

It means customers are receiving relevant, personalized and engaging content when, where and how they want it. But connecting with customers in the way they want to be reached is difficult for many CMOs.

Take for example, a global health insurance services company that has grown over time through mergers and acquisitions. The company makes $30 billion in revenue, has 40,000 employees, serves over two million customers across 32 countries, and processes 155 million claims annually. This company’s marketing technology stack is massive. It has 38 different email providers, 28 CRM systems, five real-time decision engines, and multiple business intelligence and analytics solutions. How does a company like this begin to create a consistent customer experience, much less an exceptional one?

Enterprise-wide change in the way the company operates and a shift to a more customer-centric model is crucial, as the company works to create new processes and organizational structures to better meet this challenge.

After all, creating a consistent brand experience starts with better management of the customer experience. Ultimately, it’s the CMO’s responsibility to champion a more customer-centric corporate culture and mindset to gain control of it. Sometimes, marketing teams or a dedicated enterprise-wide customer experience group also can help the CMO determine where changes need to be made to help orchestrate better customer experiences.

Here’s four areas to consider:

Budget

Marketers must organize and control their budget, which is vital for providing consistent customer experiences. Achieving visibility to spend is critical, as this enables marketers to make more informed discussions and adjust customer experiences with agility. A few things to consider include:

• Which experiences were most and least successful?
• How much did they cost?
• What was the ROI?

People

The entire marketing team must be aligned with the proper roles and responsibilities that enable group efficiency and cohesion to better ensure the creation of on-brand and engaging experiences. But this can be hard to do as the modern marketer’s world is often filled with mayhem that includes dynamic deadlines, increased workloads and dwindling resources.

With streamlined, agile marketing, teams can feel empowered and in control as they gain more transparency into what work is ongoing, who is working on what, and what is coming down the pipeline.

Data

To reach the right customer at the right time, marketers must have complete control over operational data (how marketers run their operations) and customer data. Many organizations focus data strategies on customer data, which is still critical given the need to personalize experiences based on in-the-moment customer data.

However, operational data is equally important to delivering customer experiences at scale. Achieving a deep level understanding of operational data—like understanding how long an experience takes to create, how much was spent on agencies, or how many times the experience had to be revised before approval— can provide a whole host of benefits. For example, understanding how many resources are typically needed to create an experience can ensure that marketing organizations more effectively plan resources for the next time the asset is created. We talk to many organizations that use this type of operational data to better understand their usage of agencies, and potentially even measure agency performance against specific KPIs.

Content

There are more channels to deliver that content than ever before. On average, today’s marketing leaders use an average of 23 channels and six social media networks to connect and engage with customers, according to a report from CMI. Enabling consistent customer experiences requires providing successful content to all these channels continuously.

To achieve content success, marketers need the ability to quickly and easily create, reuse and repurpose content that is on-brand and legally compliant. For instance, if corporate marketing launched a successful global campaign, consider the potential ROI for regional marketers if they leveraged elements of the campaign and localized them for their own audiences. A few questions to consider include:

• Can we reuse the content in other regions?
• How successful was the content? Did it justify the investment we put into it?
• Do we have the rights to the content?
• Can we reuse the content on different channels, like email or social?

Organizations that get a handle on these areas can fully capitalize on the tremendous opportunities of the digital age.

Anjali Yakkundi is product marketing director at Aprimo.

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