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Organisations today recognise they must get customer experience right to continue to stay in business. Where there’s often a gap is composing customer journey orchestration and conducting the organisation-wide approach needed to achieve seamless and enviable CX.
That’s where marketing leaders, as brand and customer custodians, must step in. And thanks to the wealth of technology and data-driven insight available, marketers now have the tools to execute internally and externally on these wider CX ambitions.
During a recent CMO in-person roundtable lunch, sponsored by Microsoft Dynamics 365, we explored the changing role of the CMO thanks to customer journey disruption and the imperatives when engineering end-to-end experiences.
What we discovered was strong appetite and raft of effort across the marketing fraternity to champion the CX cause. But it’s also apparent choreographing end-to-end customer journeys, and actioning all-important insights, is very much a work in progress as marketers evolve data practices and actionability and overcome integration challenges. What’s more, marketers know they must win over cross-functional teams, from sales and service to fulfilment, plus bust long-standing customer myths, to ensure the whole organisation moves towards a customer North Star.
It’s worth diving firstly into why CMOs and organisations want a better view of customer journeys.
At Pitcher Partners, journeys are a critical way of understanding clients’ value drivers and aligning this with the accounting firm’s go-to market strategy, says director of relationships and brand, Toni Borthwick. There’s also a desire to grasp how clients and potential clients interact with the firm, as well as actual versus perceived experiences. “Additionally, it fuels our quest for continuous improvement,” Borthwick says.
FMCG giant, Lion, is well aware consumers have fragmented usage and multiple decision entry points. “If we don’t understand their journey pre, during and post, we are essentially flying blind,” says CMO, Anubha Sahasrabuddhe. “The old rules simply do not apply and who and what we are competing with is so much wider.”
ASUS head of marketing, Farzeen, Quadir-Hegde, advocates identifying customer touchpoints, be it in-store and/or online, to be able to provide the best product value proposition. “This is critical from research stage as we get to understand if the customer is searching product by a brand name or looking by usage or purpose,” she says.
“This helps us determine and plan how we need to change our content and marketing strategy from something as basic as looking at SEO, product navigation path on websites, key campaign messages and so on.”
Over at JLL, marketing and communications team globally are in the midst of one of the biggest transformations ever to collaborate across teams and geographies and ensure the commercial real estate business is pushing in the same direction.
“Our brand has just changed too, and its positioning is lighting the path to a cleaner, smarter and more human way of living and working,” says JLL head of marketing and communications A/NZ, Craig McCarthy. “When we talk about transformation, a big part of that journey is how clients see us and the value we bring to them.”
Microsoft Australia CMO ANZ, Renee Salaberry, cites growing demand for more personalised experiences, along with complex buyer journeys, as catalysts for mastering customer journeys holistically. “Our customers want to engage with content from Microsoft only in areas related to their own individual or organisational priorities,” she says.
“A pure lead generation-focused mindset centred on driving customers towards content we believe they should engage is no longer sustainable. Instead, we have shifted our marketing engine towards account-based views, with personalised journeys curated based on the needs and interests of the individual. Customers can begin on one marketing journey with us and jump into another stream, all dictated by the content they engage with.”
Being a customer journey chief inevitably comes back to an ability to better harness data in decision making across an organisation, not just marketing. But even with the challenges of corralling data identified by every attendee, huge willingness exists both for more data-driven insight, as well as responsive ways of putting it into action.
“Every organisation is swimming in data from various channels and sources that impact modern marketing. The key is to be able to transform data into predictive and prescriptive insights,” comments Salaberry.
Business Applications Enterprise Director, Angela Hughes, positions data as the centre point of every digital transformation agenda.
“When we speak to customers, digital transformation is anchored on four key areas – customer, product, people and processes – and data is flowing from all four areas at any one time within an organisation,” she explains. “You must then be able to not only process that data, but reason over it to create intelligence. Only then are you in a position to engage with your customer proactively based on their interactions with your company.”
Several attendees highlight ‘objective data’ as a step-change in the way customers and their journeys are both understood and acted upon across organisations. Disciplined processes around employing data and a sense of data-driven accountability across cross-functional teams is also what’s needed to keep organisations on track with customer journey and experience ambitions.
Hughes highlights inferred insights around how your people interact and engage internally as critical here, along with how customers then interact with your products, solutions or services, and business processes as they pertain to efficiency and optimisation.
When it comes to specific data sets helping improve customer insight, voice of customer is an increasingly common source. This is because it’s imperative when trying to change wider business thinking around customers to understand what the pain points are and what journeys actually look like.
“Providing clients with a platform to deliver their feedback is an important piece of the puzzle to deliver exceptional client service. With this in mind, we launched our formal Client Listening Program in 2022, using an independent technology platform we gather a mix of quantitative and qualitative feedback on our behalf,” says Borthwick.
“Data is used to measure client experiences across the firm as well as within divisions while mapping a client’s value, the number of services they use and the people they work with. Insights are used to drive decision making, develop opportunities, integrate with performance frameworks, align value drivers with our go-to-market strategy and most importantly, celebrate success.”
McCarthy knows JLL’s clients are undergoing major transformation too. “The way we work, live and play has been impacted by factors such as the climate, pandemic and economic change,” he says.
“We need to deliver our products and services to meet changing expectations of clients. To do this, we are working harder to understand them better and tailor the experience using technology including Adobe, Medallia, Eloqua, Salesforce and Microsoft.”
Like JLL, Lion has upped its technology game. “Beyond that, it’s about capabilities we have invested in across data/advanced analytics to demonstrate how value is added to that data to get to the ‘so what, now what’,” Sahasrabuddhe explains.
“We are in our infancy for sure. But it’s vital we keep going as acceleration will come through the iterative nature of data collection, enrichment and usage.”
Data is not the domain of any one function, and Lion invests across the enterprise to ensure data use and analytics is the norm, versus skunkworks or a test-and-learn exercise, Sahasrabuddhe adds.
Where marketing leaders at the roundtable found further common ground is in finding a solid ‘why’ that drives customer data and journey orientation. Brand purpose and vision, along with regulatory imperatives, help here.
For instance, data chief of a financial services firm at the roundtable cites onerous and obligatory regulatory conditions around providing member information. This provided the outcome needed to ensure everyone worked to the same objectives when corralling and bringing data to life.
In addition, customer data is critical when attempting to bust myths and show businesses ‘they don’t know what they don’t know’. By bringing external customer insight to the table, you provide the impetus to change minds internally.
Just take the longstanding attitude of sales knowing their clients best Borthwick is trying to overcome at Pitcher and Partners. “‘I know my clients, there is no need to ask them for feedback, as I know what they think’ – this is an accurate statement in many instances. However, the data can prove otherwise,” she points out.
Within the beer category, Sahasrabuddhe is trying to overcome misconceptions across different generations of drinkers. “We have used data to help our customers and internal stakeholders understand the shifting drinking preferences among genzennials, which has led to new innovation pipelines and leveraging our beer credentials into beyond beer,” she says.
“For too long, the industry has focused on existing consumers and their needs and is totally out of step with what the next generation are seeking – in how they engage with the category and brands within. This has been a real inflection point in strategic direction and implications that come with it across the business.”
It’s essential customers understand product benefits when purchasing a PC product, says Quadir-Hedge. Yet it’s only by through customer insight was she able to successfully change ASUS’s messaging along the consumer purchase journey.
“In our recent campaign, CreatorXchange, targeted at content creators, we identified our usual approach of marketing highlighting product features will not work,” Quadir-Hedge says. “We changed our approach of marketing to this target audience group to engage and communicate in a language they understand and via mediums they trust, such as influencers and industry. We simplified product positionings to feature and benefit-driven content and communicated through influencers to better connect in an authentic manner.”
Yet inhibitors abound for CMOs. Technology integration is as a particular issue when trying to build these data-driven view of customers and journeys. Most attendees suffer from disconnected marketing and data systems, limiting their ability to gain a single view of customers. Indeed, knowing what success can look like has left many envious of those who’ve advanced their technology roadmap and integration program.
“One moment you are jealous of the tech stack and data an organisation has to play with, the next moment someone wishes they had access to what you have,” Borthwick comments. “It is important to be curious and learn from others. Understanding successes and failures will help in your quest to build a data-driven customer view.”
One integration particularly important for marketers to achieve a better customer journey view is linking CRM with systems such as digital communication, ecommerce and partner marketing tools.
Sahasrabuddhe is definitely looking for that integrated single view to dial up actionable insights. Data sets Lion has to tap include internal one, such as sales/customer/ first-party data; external sources, such as Kantar, scan and B2B customers; YouGov and macro insight.
Technology is enabling specific outcomes JLL’s clients are looking to drive, adds McCarthy. “JLL draws on technology and data to provide our clients with quality advice on their real estate strategy to help them deliver a better experience to their employees.”
Outside of systems and data sets, Salaberry stresses the necessity of marketing teams connecting with data and IT peers if they’re to access the critical data points and metrics that matter.
“As CMOs, we are the internal custodian of our customers, the voice of customer and too often we are waiting on our data and IT teams to take action on the data collected,” she says. “We have the opportunity to take control and to work in partnership with teams closest to the data to ensure data collected and presented directly attributes to what we need to make sense of customer behaviour.”
In building a go-to-market approach based on customer experiences and journeys, attendees agree the three elements of tech, process and culture must be in lockstep. At Lion, shared goals have been achieved by pulling sales and marketing functions into a single, demand-focused team.
“We share metrics straddling top line growth, bottom line, brand health and our ESG commitments,” says Sahasrabuddhe.
Marketers and CX leaders recognised they must provide clear visibility of how their journey efforts are delivering to the bottom line as well. Key measures here include customer acquisition, profitability, better decision making and efficiency.
For Microsoft’s marketing operations, key measures of success include scale of penetration, or the percentage of accounts with engaged contacts, along with new lead acquisition focused on key role types. Engagement quality, a scoring-based system that quantifies the marketing engagement the contact engaged and opted-in with, is another marker.
“If we then flip to sales, we firstly look at tool adoption, such as monthly active usage and repeat users from our sales teams with our modern marketing and sales enablement tools. Secondly, qualification of leads to opportunities. And then collectively, we assess the data feedback to improve signal quality and conversion to opportunities,” Salaberry explains.
Democratisation of data is a further step in orienting a business around the kinds of data-driven decision making needed to better meet customer experience expectations. Again, this is something many roundtable attendees are looking to improve.
Then there are changing consumer behaviours and macro forces providing the grounds for rethinking customer journeys. In ASUS’s case, a spike in sales and activity and changing behaviours during the pandemic prompted a new dialogue around what customers are looking for. This provided the impetus for campaigns to shift from product features to customer benefits.
“We were one of the few industries to see upswing in demand during Covid. This meant we had to work on more targeted digital campaigns to reach our customers and educate them, given they could not go in-store to see the product and decide to purchase,” Quadir-Hedge says. “We switched lot of our ATL advertising from traditional to digital or programmatic. We also initiated more A/B testing on our social media buy campaigns with different creative and content and different target audience groups, to see what works best and adjust investment accordingly.”
The ASUS CreatorXchange digital platform and community then enabled a free flow of ideas spanning all creator disciplines. “This gave us some great results and very interesting data to study on customers’ purchasing decision,” says Quadir-Hedge. “Customer journeys and metrics have helped demonstrate the need for localised marketing for a global brand to connect better with local target audience in an authentic way.”
Whatever the approach, metric, platform or customer pain point, marketing leaders know being a strong customer journey chief is about progress over perfection.
“The most important aspect is not only using the data to drive decisions; we use it to drive conversations. We don’t just deliver the data, we have conversations around it,” Borthwick says.
“It’s about celebrating every win that gets you a step closer,” adds Sahasrabuddhe.
“Our Furphy AFL grand final activation as well as our State of Origin Maroons XXXX activation are great demonstrations of journey-led activations. We leveraged a digital flywheel and a real O2O experience threaded through the line with on ramps for the consumer at so many entry points.
“This was a great example of disrupting traditional assets and key selling periods and having a consumer and digital-first approach leveraging multiple data sources with more dynamic content and data capture. It gave us really great proof points for what else is possible.”
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