Written by: Dr. Sharmila Banerjee
About the author: CEO at Green Chillies Motion Pictures | Founder and CEO -IWLF | The Leadership Consortium
Create a synergistic marketing environment where the CMO and CXO/CCO can collaborate to create the best customer experience
Marketing is any business action that creates interest or gathers information about a prospect or potential customer. The sales process begins once a business knows a prospect exists — and sales teams help that prospect move through a purchase decision. However, in the digital age, marketing has taken over many educational responsibilities from sales. Today, roughly 70% of a buying decision happens before a customer talks to a sales rep.
As growth becomes the top issue in most boardrooms, CMOs and their teams are challenged to evolve their value to the organization. From their comfort position as traditional approach of print and broadcast media to reach consumers, today’s CMOs are serving as transformation leaders for the enterprise and, increasingly, owners of the customer experience across marketing, sales, service and even operations.
Within many large companies, the ubiquity of mobile devices and social media has spawned the creation of the chief experience officer (CXO) or chief commercial officer (CCO). Typically, younger, tech-savvy and digitally minded, the CXO/CCO has overall responsibility for the customer experience (and often, unfortunately, limited authority). From working with IT, to designing the ultimate online experience, to shaping customer service interactions, to making packaging recommendations that improve how a customer feels when he or she receives a shiny new product, to guiding social media strategy, the CXO/CCO oversees every customer touch point.
Companies that compete to win will elevate customer experience, and the associated marketing disciplines, to the level of research and development within the organization. Within this new operating structure, CMOs have to devise different strategies “they have to imbibe new skills and talent to build and differentiate on customer experience”
The Digital Explosion
The digital revolution is in full swing. Technology is moving faster than ever and accelerating every day. The massive mainstreaming of mobile devices and local media combined with the rise of the super consumer means companies are no longer competing with industry peers. They are competing with every other company in existence to create the ultimate customer experience.The person they look to initially to create this experience is the CMO. The digital revolution also means that digital is now interwoven into the customer experience. As such, within some companies, the CXO/CCO will also serve as the chief digital officer and vice versa.
To create a synergistic marketing environment where the CMO and CXO/CCO can collaborate to create the best customer experience, companies should:
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Measure the customer experience
The first step in creating the best customer experience is to understand the customer experience in the context of a company’s brand. Companies need to explore what drives the most engaged customers. Customer surveys, social media brand sentiment assessments and direct feedback can help to identify key drivers. Based on the drivers identified, companies can then establish metrics against which to analyze and measure performance.
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Elevate the role of the CXO/CCO
The CXO/CCO role may reside in various locations depending on the type of business and its strategy. However, the CXO/CCO’s position on the organization chart notwithstanding, CMOs and CXO/CCOs need to work closely together to determine how best to integrate a new digital experience into more traditional marketing efforts. It’s less about eliminating market segmentation, PR or communications and more about using marketing’s insights on the customer to make operational improvements that enable companies to drive the customer experience from brand through billing.
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Make customer experience the team’s job
The consumer is firmly in the driver’s seat. Every touch point the company has must reflect that. The CMO can help the CXO/CCO create a culture that more effectively controls these touch points and, ultimately, the customer experience.
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Co-create the customer experience with the consumer
Today’s consumers want to do more than select the best customer experience, they want to design it. They want to have a say in how a company designs, sells, delivers and services a product. By developing collaborative relationships with consumers, the CMO-CXO/CCO team can generate new ideas and build brand loyalty, creating a win-win experience.
The role of the CMO has expanded significantly. The pressure to remain at the forefront of leading digital marketing strategies and the technology and competencies required to support them are enormous. In this environment, IT is often unable to cope with the speed of change at the customer interaction level — and that’s not where the function’s focus is. IT is more concerned with maintaining operational systems. As such, CMOs now spend approximately 15 to 20 percent of their budget on technology.The result may be greater speed to market in the short term, but also greater headaches for IT over the long term as systems and infrastructure become increasingly fragmented across the enterprise.
If companies expect to differentiate themselves on the customer experience, the marketing team of the future needs to be constantly learning about the rapidly evolving technologies that enable it to provide the best experience at scale. However, the team also needs to consider how to more closely involve IT in the process.
Another factor to consider is that the CMO has traditionally been more of a creative role. However, more and more customer experience require a mixture of both creative and analytical activities. CMOs are being pushed to justify marketing spend, measure the voice of the customer and transition digital “vanity metrics” such as “likes” and “followers” into business impacts.
Amid such complexities, companies also need to determine where the CXO/CCO fits — how it can help bridge the gap between IT and generate synergies with marketing to maximize both the customer experience and the company’s competitive edge.
What is the Bottom Line?
As the empowered consumer continues to move firmly into the driver’s seat, the need for companies to differentiate themselves on experience is paramount.
To create the ultimate customer experience, companies need to find the right balance that bridges the analog-digital, boardroom-hipster divide. By finding synergies that amplify the skills and competencies the CMO and CXO/CCO bring to the organization, companies will be able to stay current with both rapidly advancing technologies and changing customer needs.
To create the ultimate customer experience, companies need to find the right balance that bridges the analog-digital, boardroom- hipster divide.
