The advent of cloud-based, AI-powered contact centers is transforming customer support into a more effective, efficient and differentiated customer engagement discipline, enabling a highly responsive, integrated and consistent brand experience across every channel of market interaction and service delivery.

Chief marketers now have the opportunity to deepen and leverage data and behavior-driven customer insights and relationships using social, mobile, web and instant messaging channels. They can also migrate to lower cost self-service models, improve feedback and listening, easily add scale and flexibility to customer handling, as well as derive more value and return from market interactions.

Giving customers more options to access help, advice, and assistance anywhere, anytime with the least amount of hassle is a new marketing imperative. Smart brands are using Gen AI technologies and digital media channels to promote valuable consumer-inspired content, form self-help communities, activate third-party problem resolution, as well as embrace new ways to acquire, retain and grow customer relationships. Using mobility in the cloud, CMOs can unify actionable customer data, obtain a real-time view of customer interactions, and immediately determine the success (or failure) of product adoption and use.

Centralizing and unifying market/customer data and extracting meaningful, actionable intelligence from vast volumes of transactional, behavioral, and attitudinal information requires ever-more tighter linkages with IT functional leaders and the C-suite. In addition, many marketers are tapping data flows from third-party sources for supplemental profiling of current customers and prospective buyers. All of which must be refined, adapted and integrated in real-time.

Chief marketers are in a position to lead the way when it comes to defining, driving and delivering on the model of a "Customer-Intuitive Enterprise" in today's digitally connected world. However, they are struggling with the never-ending pace of marketing technology change, customer engagement innovation, and new and more valuable flows of market-relevant, decision-support data.

They are faced with the need to be more adaptive, intuitive, and predictive in responding to customer needs and problems, as well as addressing revenue opportunities, reputational challenges, and competitive inroads.

CMOs must become the customer experience custodians and champions in the enterprise, working in tandem with their functional peers to realize the potential and value of a customer-centric culture at every level of the organization.

This requires a complete 360-degree view of the customer, understanding of the path-to-purchase, and knowledge of how well they reach, activate, monetize, retain and satisfy customers across rapidly evolving and more complex global markets and digital channels.