In order for the marketing teams to focus better on customer experience (CX), they definitely need to develop the ability of better managing big data. By 2020, the customer experience as a whole, is expected to be handled by chief marketing officers only, and the majority of them are already planning for it. Given the fact that big data really took over lately, marketing professionals will have to step up and better analyze and monitor CX data, using big data visualization tools.
Now, more than ever, a customer’s relationship with certain brands is relying on the CX. Marketing professionals are responsible for this relationship between customer and brands, that’s why it’s obviously their job to take care of the CX. There’s a good number of reasons why CX is so important in data-driven marketing, and here are a few of them:
Customer Value Drives Business Value
If we talk about customer value, we talk about one of two things: business value or experience value. The first one mostly refers to customer engagement and the later one describes the advantages that a customer has.
In recent years, CX has become very important to customers when they’re trying to make a decision whether to buy something, to invest in something or not. That being said, brands need to switch their focus on experience value, otherwise their business value might be affected.
The challenge that marketing professionals are facing is the fact that CX is represented by multiple data points and it needs to be visualized as one. So what is the best way to optimize the experience value? One thing that companies could do is to build proprietary cross-channel data analytics platforms maintained by a data analyst that could help the company make the right decisions. The other solution for the companies is to hire a third-party service that would do all the hard work and bring back intelligible data to the employer.
Marketing Departments
Even today companies are not fully aware of the importance of CX, and maybe that’s why they lose more than $300 billion every year. One of the biggest mistakes that brands made in the past was to divide the responsibilities of CX, throughout different departments within the company, like: customer support, sales etc. Fortunately, many companies today figured out that it should be the responsibility of the marketing department to handle CX.
Since CX has become so important, it is understandable that brands need to create a strong, more human connection to their customers. So it’s kind of obvious that the marketing people in a company should be the ones to handle the CX, not other departments that don’t necessarily do people-related work.
Value Over Time
A customer becomes more valuable over time. That’s exactly why brands should focus on the customer experience and on the fact that they have to meet their customer’s expectations when it comes to products or services. It’s not about customer acquisition; it’s about building a strong relationship with those people that could become very valuable over time. The numbers of sales could be higher by almost 100 percent, when a company has a 5 percent increase in customer retention.
The most obvious way to increase the number of valuable customers is by collecting and analyzing the necessary information in order to make the right decisions for a company.
Data-driven Mentality
In today’s era, the power to sustain marketing value stands in the hands of the customers.After all, they decide whether to buy a certain product or to use a certain service or not. Of course, it’s important to give the customers what they want through CX, but as I was saying, companies rarely consider the fact that CX is crucial when it comes to raising the number of valuable customers.
In order for a business to work properly in today’s society, data-driven decisions are the most important ones. Whether it’s a decision about how to divide the responsibilities in a company when it comes to the CX, or it’s a decision about how to meet the customer’s expectations, certain aspects like: centralization of the data, detailed analytics and data driven marketing overall, are definitely essential.
