Category Archives: Digital Analytics

Marketing Responsible for Customer Experience?

 The Data

According to this survey, Marketers are not now really “responsible”  for the customer experience (whatever responsible means in this context) but will be over the next 3 years.  If it was just the vendor (Marketo) trumpeting this idea, I’d be more skeptical.  But this vendor hired the Intelligence Unit from The Economist organization to do this work and the report includes the actual questions, meaning you can check for bias.  Population is 478 CMO’s and senior marketing executives worldwide, seems decent / not cherry-picked.

So I will cut the vendor some slack.   Questions though, right?  Just what is customer experience, in particular for the purposes of success measurement?  How does it fit with related ideas like Customer Journey / LifeCycle and Engagement?  Certainly if the above is a significant macro trend we ought to sort this all out first?  And of course, putting some analytical rigor (structure, process, and definitions?) in place to support the effort ;)

The Story

I know a lot of marketing people who have either had this authority for years (multi-channel database marketing) or are moving in this direction, so the results make sense to me.  To be clear(er), “experience” for these people reaches all the way back from UX into fulfillment and service.  So when they talk about experience, they are talking visitor and customer; not just navigation and landing pages, but also shipping times and return rates.

Perhaps increased access to customer data is revealing the significant impact customer experience in this larger sense has on long-term customer value?  This idea, coupled with increased focus on accountability (also covered in the survey) could be driving this trend.

Worth the read, only 20 pages long with a lot of charts.  Here’s 4 snippets to hook you:

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Measuring the $$ Value of Customer Experience

 Marketing IS (Can Be?) an Experience

Early on I discovered something from the work of leaders in data-based marketing business models: they were always very concerned with post-campaign execution – not only from marketing, but also through product, distribution, and service.  I thought this strange, until I realized they knew something I did not: when you have customer data, you can actually identify and fix negative customer value impacts caused by poor experience.

This means you can directly quantify the value of customer experience, budget for fixing it, and create a financial model that proves out the bottom line hard money profits (or losses) from paying attention to the business value as a result of customer experience.

And critically, this idea becomes much more important as you move from surface success metrics like conversion and sales down into deep success metrics like company profits. Frequently you see the profit / loss from “marketing” often has less to do with campaigns and more to do with the positive or negative experiences caused by campaigns.

Examples

You might think taking the time to provide special treatment to brand new customers would always encourage engagement and repeat purchase.  You’d be wrong.  Sometimes this works, sometimes this does not work, depending on the context of the customer.  Does it surprise you to find out customers often do not want to be “delighted”?

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