For many businesses, ‘customer-led’ marketing is anything but what it says on the tin. The most well-intentioned customer-focused campaigns and journeys are built and driven by marketers’ views and agendas about what they believe (or hope) a customer wants, rather than by the customers’ wishes themselves.
“Over the years, we’ve become accustomed as marketers to using specific journeys and following set paths of triggered actions based on common denominators derived from aggregate data,” explains Vexelman. “We need to change the way we look at CX. Wouldn’t it be delightful to create a journey that is truly different for each person?”
As marketing technology continues to evolve and AI and machine learning become more sophisticated, this breakaway opportunity is closer to reality than it has ever been.
The right mix of accurate data and technology, combined with a team of people with knowledge, insight and emotional intelligence, means this vision can not only become a reality, but the benchmark by which future CX strategies can be measured.
Vexelman argues that “to make this happen, we need to look at people, not segments. We need to look at our marketing and say, ‘the way to delight my customer is not just through incentives, but to give them a journey like no other’.
“We can do this by re-thinking the way we build marketing programmes and designing them to create truly delightful experiences and moments.”
Starting with the customer: Collecting first party data
Good quality, accurate data will continue to be at the core of effective customer marketing. Vexelman warns that if you don’t start by collecting up-to-date first party data from your customers and make it accessible, you are already behind the curve.
“Customer data platforms have been the CX buzzword for the past few years, but just collecting the data from across the organisation is not enough,” he explains. “To create truly customer-driven journeys, your marketing team needs to be able to access and make sense of it without third party intervention.”
Just collecting the data from across the organisation is not enough.
Re-imagining CX relies on customer data and Vexelman emphasises that accessing and using the right data is the only option for success. He believes it will only get easier to use and interpret:
“We’re not far off the ability to use natural language when it comes to searching data. In the future, marketers can become data analysts.
“With the right training and understanding of what information needs collecting, what to look for and how to work with it, marketers will be able to start any action or campaign from the viewpoint of individual customers.”
The people factor
A big part of true customer-driven marketing is understanding when a customer wants to interact with a human and when they are happy to use online-driven prompts and self-service. Getting the balance right varies for everyone and isn’t always intuitive.
For Vexelman, whilst the human element is “super important”, from a business perspective it is also “super expensive”.
He explains how “the challenge is to provide a CX that ensures there is a person to interact with customers when they need it, but is not available every time. It is about communicating that you can help solve some of their issues digitally and actively re-direct them to a person when it’s needed.”
