Customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), user interface (UI), customer relationship management (CRM), customer journeys (CJ) and customer journey analytics (CJA). Will it ever end? What is going on in marketing?
All hell is breaking loose, that is what's happening. The good old days are gone, buried, cremated. So, what do we do now? Enter the forces of evil driving change – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Next Best Actions (NBAs).
AI has rendered the world of ‘too much data, what the heck do I do with it’ dead, buried and cremated. AI enables us to track, measure and evaluate a single customer journey, including all the digitally recorded events and experiences, and analyze their ultimate effect on a customer’s propensity to spend more cash, and store it in one place.
So, get the boxing gloves out, who is going to own that knowledge and data? Marketing? IT? CRM? Every business will have to decide. Why is this important? Because your marketing solutions love data. More and more data. Traditional departmental silos are becoming obsolete. Access to data and the means to organise, curate and share it within an organisation, has become key.
We call it data science for a reason. Data comes before science. Without data nothing can happen in AI. The better news is that AI forces massive change. Tear the silos down. All of your business’s data MUST be organised.
Why is it so hard to get this done and why is this massive shift only taking place now? From my experience marketing data is often the most poorly curated. It is not uncommon to get details of past marketing events via thousands of PDFs. Well, knock yourself out trying to operate at scale like that.
Marketing data not being in the best shape is far from uncommon, and the reason for that is rooted in past computing issues. Once upon a time when the legacy systems that we use today were put in place - 10-20-30 years ago, in many cases - computing and memory systems were mind-bogglingly expensive, compared to the vast cloud infrastructure that we see being deployed today.
This meant that once the ERP system got its ‘stuff’ done, the accountants always came first. They pay us, after all. Every two weeks, there was not a lot of budget left for everyone else, including marketing, data teams, creatives, etc.
Also, both structured and unstructured data take up vast computing resources when they are digitalised. So digitalising marketing data is only now gathering the required support across many organisations.
AI marks a profound change in information gathering, storage and insights. Giving marketers the opportunity to map one customer journey per customer, utilising all the data that we have stored over the years – including ERP, transactions, telemetry, marketing, surveys, blogs and macroeconomic. The list is endless. Imagination rules. AI can make sense of all of this. Providing deep insights into which customers wants to buy what; what inventory should be sold to which customers.
