Kirsten Newbold-Knipp, Research Director, Gartner, started out her session at Sitecore Symposium 2017 highlighting both good and bad customer experiences. The following are my notes:
Key question: Who did you tell the last time you had a bad customer experience? The answer is probably, a lot.
Statistic: 81% of marketing leaders expect to compete almost completely on customer experience
The future: the house opens the blinds and wakes the consumer up in a nice way so she can go on a morning run with friends. After the run, they went to the coffee shop where her favorite coffee was ready. Back at home, her bathroom ordered some Aveda shampoo since it was down to the last few ounces. After that, she popped on the VR to choose paint colors mapped into her home. In doing so, she chose and received a discount, and ordered her paint.
Quote: Let’s face it, we’re not talking flying cars.
Today, you printer can order ink for you. Today, Lowe’s has a virtual room experience with your own home.
So today, you have the greatest opportunity given all the change. Staples has an easy button that works to order office supplies for example. You can take lessons from Uber and others. You may not change the world; you can still create great experiences. Remember, you are being judged through the lens of the greatest brands on earth.
Statistic: More than a quarter of every dollar spent in marketing goes to marketing technology. That’s nearly on par with what CIOs are spending.
Prediction: By 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen. (Think voice)
Prediction: By 2020, 25% of digital commerce transactions will originate from an IoT device.
Prediction: By 2020, virtual agents will participate in a majority of commercial interactions between people and business.
What Are We Going To Do?
But remember that marketing is at its best about people. It’s still about the experience. Your Martech stack should reflect the customer journey, but you can’t do it alone.
Customer Journey
It has three stages:
- Prospect to customer (Buy)
- Loyal customer (Own)
- Starts with a loyal customer and ends with a loyal advocate (Loyal)
The buy, own, advocate journey has a lot of steps. Your company, won’t use every step Gartner lays out but it will include some elements. You need to understand that journey.
Marketers are experts in the buy journey but so much is lost in the “own” journey. If you put as much emphasis in the deepening relationship, you can create a self-fulfilling loop. You can put customers to work in selling your company.
Quote: Customer success comes when consumers reach “love”
Today’s Journey
Ever tried to pick a white paint before? The array of colors is confusing. Kirsten’s journey to Atrium White……
- Started on Pinterest to research the best shades of white.
- but was never retargeted by any brand
- Her builder suggested she narrow it down to two manufacturers.
- She created a matrix from these two and narrowed it down to nine paint colors.
- Got it down to six with the swatches
- Narrowed it down to three and took them home. Put them on poster board and looked at them in different conditions
- Atrium White
Note: the eventual paint brand doesn’t know Kirsten and her husband. She is effectively invisible to them. (typical B2B experience)
But what could it have been like? What could have turned Kristen into an easier buy journey and make her into an advocate?
- How about bigger paint swatches?
- Why not make it easy to order samples and pick up in store?
- How about giving a thank you note and given a small touch-up paint can?
- Why not send an email about the time the paint gets old with options to replace?
Quote: customers don’t see boundaries between these stages.
Creating the customer journey is a lot like building a house. It takes people, process, and technology. What tools should be on your radar? Your MarTech stack should reflect your customer journey.
Steps in this process:
- Look at your neighbors. Attend the “open house”
Gartner’s pace-layering framework:
- Systems of Record: what are used for common foundational ideas? You don’t change them frequently.
- This is the foundation, plumbing, etc.
- Core: Email marketing, web analytics, WCM, data management platform
- Common: digital commerce, DAM, digital marketing hub/cloud, customer data platform, customer identify management, digital marketing analytics
- System of Differentiation: change every 3-5 years and integrated to foundation
- This is like the framing. Same concepts but applied in different ways
- Core: surveys, site retargeting, content and social marketing
- Common: CX and Journey mapping, Loyalty and advocacy marketing, social analytics, data visualization
- Advanced: Demand side platform, SEM/SEO tools, Tag management system
- Systems of Innovation: enable entirely new ideas. It’s a new tool or capability even if it’s not yet proven.
- Her house has a pool. It’s unusual “on top” of a home
- Core: note the blank
- Common: note the blank
- Advanced: perosnalization or site optimizaiton, multtouch attribution, dynamic creative optimization, ad verification, mobile analytics
- Now note how none of the voice, IoT, and machines are in these. That’s because they are embedded.
- Voice: what would be different with voice? it’s the channel they enable.
- Ask your search and social tool vendors how they enable voice. That’s first
- Things: lots of cool options. RFID, and other things are important But that means technology needs to catch up.
- Machines: They are all over the place. You can expect infusion of machine learning and machine utility. But you need to know what you are empowering the machine to use.
- Voice: what would be different with voice? it’s the channel they enable.
Quote: Not everything can be solved with the perfect MarTech stack
Statistic: 11% of the time, technology partners came up as an inhibitor.
Recommendation: Build a joint roadmap with marketing and IT.
So share your goals between IT and Marketing. Start to build that relationship. Then build a joint road map.
Bottom Line
Remember that it’s still all about the experience. Start building this one step at a time.
