EVENT

Aligning Operations, IT, Finance And Marketing to Deliver on the Brand Promise

How to Address the Variance in Customer Experience?

As market pressures increase and margins erode, the commitment to operational excellence and back-end efficiency frequently lags, often undermining the quality and consistency of the customer experience and the level of brand advocacy and affinity. At a time when, customer retention and relationship management should be a top priority, many companies are being forced to cut corners, extract more revenue from existing customers, and reduce customer handling and support personnel.

In the age of social business, few companies today have deployed real-time customer listening and feedback systems that quickly identify and alert management to problems, issues or risks in the everyday customer experience and multiplying channels of interaction. They are not culturally, organizationally or operationally structured to quickly remedy and address deficiencies in the customer experience and marketing is certainly not leading the way in this regard.

Siloed, distributed data still remains unconsolidated and untapped from a customer insight and intelligence gathering perspective and marketing groups rarely have a hook into the customer service and support center to monitor, recover or prevent churn, defection, account loss or turnover issues. Or, for that matter, leverage opportunities to upsell and cross-sell at the frontline point-of-interaction.

Consumers have stated that a single negative experience with a brand can alter the decision to do business with a company. According to a Harris Interactive poll of over 2,000 adult consumers, 80 percent of consumers will never go back to an organization after a negative experience. Marketing’s mandate is to revitalize sagging loyalty and retention numbers and drive top line growth through deeper, more meaningful engagements with customers. Senior marketers must now, more than ever before, upgrade customer interactions in order to foster lasting and profitable relationships. 

CMO Council Advocacy Platform

The CMO Council is readying a new initiative that will enable marketers to “Map the Operational Gap in Customer Insight and Engagement” on a social media, CRM, operational, cultural, IT structural and organizational level. This is based on the belief that:

• Quality and consistency of customer experience is being undermined and compromised by disconnects between marketing and back office operations, and lack of frontline account knowledge.
• Too few real-time listening and feedback systems are in place to quickly alert management to problems, issues or risks in everyday customer experience and multiplying channels of interaction.
• Organizations are not culturally, organizationally or operationally structured to quickly remedy and address deficiencies in customer experience and marketing is not taking sufficient ownership.

This campaign will:

• Look at requirements to modify and adapt business processes and practices to better meet customer demands for always on, always-accessible commerce, service and support
• Examine how operational disconnects and deficiencies impact experience and resultant loss in revenue, margin, reputation and brand equity
• Highlight value and benefits of using big data analytics and customer insights to create a more relevant, personalized and gratifying experience

Dinner Discussion Topics

Please come prepared to engage with your peers on the need for CMOs to own, evangelize and be accountable for customer experience.

• How do you rate the quality and consistency of your customer experience and to what degree is it impacting business performance?
• What challenges do you face in improving customer experience from a technology, data, pricing, partner and operations standpoint?
• What methods and metrics are you using to measure and track all facets of customer experience?
• Where do you see gaps and disconnects between the brand promise and operational delivery?
• How connected and culturally aligned is your organization to the customer and what are you doing to improve this?