9 ways to boost customer loyalty with Marketing Automation

I'm not a big fan of the lists, but it makes it convenient to talk about a few of the concepts.  Marketing automation is a very important tool for the digital marketer.  I will even go as far as saying it should be the center of the digital marketing universe.  Because digital marketing grew up as being web, this is not a popular view among digital marketers, but that doesn't mean it's not true.  

Gathering knowledge allows to build relationship: the more you know about customers, the more relevant offers you can address. Personalization is impossible without advanced behavioral and transactional analytics.

Marketing automation starts and ends with data.  Data is the basis for running any marketing automation tool.  Without a good data collection and architecture strategy, marketing automation will be hampered to a degree.  It also ends with data because the capturing of the behavior driven informs the next decision.  It is cyclical as far as data collection is concerned.

1:1 Marketing. Dynamic content and e-mails are the base of long-lasting bond with customer, because they show that you treat him individually and adjust offers to his/her particular needs. Also find opportunities to say thank you to them, ask for opinions and suggest complementary products

1-to-1 marketing is the dream.  To cost effectively do this is still farther out, but we are getting close.  The problem becomes content.  To effectively market to each person in the database is unrealistic, but start at the top.  What would it take to market to the top 10% of the database on a 1-to-1 basis.  Start from there and then try to go farther into the customer base.  

Use analytics to improve content quality: with content marketing you can not only educate your customers, but also discuss values you share, what is crucial for establishing loyalty. 30% of customers say that shared values are one of 3 top reasons for being loyal to a brand. Hence invest in content and optimize it. Read more about content marketing and marketing automation synergy.

Good content can be scary for marketers.  The time and effort to create such content is time consuming and costly, especially in the form of man hours.  It is also hard to quantify the results, which normally don't start to materialize for many months.  However, great content builds a relationship with the brand.  Storytelling and guides for customers help them relate to the brand better than most advertising.  Let the analytics guide the decision.  If customers are buying bathroom products from Home Depot, don't send them content about building a fence.  A great timed "how to" on bathroom design could go a long way to loyalty and upsell opportunities.

Measure: don’t just repeat common knowledge that making actual user buy is 7 times cheaper that bringing new one. Use advanced analytics offered by Marketing Automation Systems to measure ROI of your loyalty improving actions, and optimize them.

The crucial part to any marketing automation strategy, how are you going to measure the results?  This thought process usually comes at the end, but it should start at the beginning of your marketing automation journey.  The first thing your boss will ask after the marketing automation system goes live is "how are we doing"?  You need to not only be able to answer his questions, but you need to answer that question for yourself.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and they need to continually evolve.  The only way to determine the evolution is by understanding the results.  

How To Win Customers Without Data-Driven Marketing

The human element – even for online businesses – always shapes the final judgment on customer retention and acquisition.

This is the exact reason why becoming a customer-driven organization is so important, even in the age of data-driven marketing.  In most cases a human interaction will determine whether customers remain loyal or churn.  This is part of the customer experience, just as much as delivering the right content to individuals to drive the desired behavior.  While data-driven marketing can handle most customer experience, for offline businesses and even online businesses, the human interaction is critical to handling the cases where things don't quite go as well as you hoped.  

The morale of this story is: make sure that your employees are your strongest, most amazing asset because the most sophisticated technology or data-driven marketing can’t replace what your employees can deliver – caring, thoughtful, on-the-spot customer happiness.

Period. Full stop.

here is so much talk about who owns the customer experience and why CMO's are reluctant to own the entire experience.  In this article the letter describes the interaction with Terry from the call-center.  Now this interaction is as much part of the brand as an advertisement driving a customer to a website or in-store.  This experience defines the brand, yet the overall person in charge of this is not the CMO, it is more than likely an callcenter manager that reports up through an operations division.  

This is where the customer-driven organization has to be a culture, not an individual.  It doesn't matter what the position title is, there is no one person that can be the customer advocate throughout large organizations.  The customer advocate has to be all employees, period.  There could be a person leading the charge, but until an organization has changed its culture to be truly customer-centric, data-driven marketing and great advertisement will never drive the most ROI possible because the organization is not focusing on the customer experience as a whole.  

For data-driven marketing to succeed doesn't need a customer-centric organization, there is a lot of value and areas to increase revenue.  My belief is all organizations should be customer-centric, this enhances all aspects of the business, not just the data-driven marketing side.

The State and Drivers of Data Marketing

What matters most is the optimization of the customer experience, relevance and (perceived) customer value as a driver of business value. Data-driven marketing certainly is not (just) about advertising and programmatic ad buying as some believe. Nor is it just about campaigns. On the contrary: if done well, data-driven marketing is part of digital marketing transformations whereby connecting around the customer across the customer life cycle is key.

Very succinct vision of what data-driven marketing is, it's all about the customer experience.  The advent of "big data" was nothing more than gathering extra data about the customers.  Gathering data is only the first step of the process, albeit a time-consuming one.  The good news is after the hard work of gathering the data has been completed, the harder part starts.  Once you have data, making sense of the data and creating actionable outcomes to enhance the customer experience becomes the goal.  This is very hard work.  It takes plenty of analysis and insight to reach this goal.  But the companies who will do this the best will be the ones that succeed in the digital age.

Among the key takeaways of the data-driven marketing report by the GlobalDMA:

• 77% of marketers are confident in the data-driven approach and 74% expect to increase data marketing budgets this year.

• Data efforts by far focus on offers, messages and content (marketing) first (69% of respondents). Second ranks a data-driven strategy or data-driven product development. Customer experience optimization unfortunately only ranks third with 49% of respondents.

• Among the key drivers of increased data marketing: first of all a need to be more customer-centric (reported by 53% of respondents). Maximizing efficiency and return ranks second followed by gaining more knowledge of customers and prospects.

I believe the first step in the process is understanding where the puck is going to be and skate in that direction.  Marketers are understanding this data revolution is coming and they are saying the right things in surveys.  The real question will be how to get there.  It's easy to identify problems, it's hard to implement solutions.  The marketers who will show they are adept at change will thrive in this new paradigm.  

Customer analytics is something I have focused my entire career.  In the casino industry we have had the optimal opt-in mechanism for many years and have collected amazing amounts of data about our customers behavior.  We have used this to create targeted marketing campaigns to our customers, so I believe in the direction the entire industry is taking.  Always start with the customer.  It will lead to creating better experiences and more profitable results.

 

Shoot for the Stars! 4 Ways to Bring It with Your Marketing Automation Platform

...marketing automation is an all-in-one marketing powerhouse, allowing you to generate leads, follow up with consumers, and even demonstrate return on investment. Think of your marketing automation platform like it’s a video game. Lead scoring and personalized email campaigns are just the first level. As you move up through the levels, you access more gold coins, superpowers, and additional lives until you are a powerhouse marketing machine! Below are four ways to move on to the next plane of marketing automation…and you don’t even have to battle the boss to win the game!

Many companies who purchase a marketing automation platform are doing it with a few use cases in mind, but embracing your marketing automation platform can change the way you do business.  Because these platforms can take in data, segment, manipulate and target communications, while also writing out to databases, these tools can enhance many business practices in the organization.  

Your marketing automation platform allows a change in thought process of what a communication is.  For instance, you might have an email marketing team, a mobile team, a social media team.  Well all of these are channels of communication and your marketing automation platform can manage a lot of the content being driven through these channels, while maintaining a consistent message to the customer.

3. Real-time Personalization

Imagine this for a moment: what if everyone who visited your website received a personalized experience? Let’s say you serve a number of different industries. Using a marketing automation platform, you can set up your website so that when someone in the manufacturing industry visits, she sees a different set of content, calls-to-action, and web copy than a visitor in, say, the finance industry. Each visitor has different needs—period. So, giving each individual a targeted experience, whether that’s providing him an industry-specific case study or inviting him to an industry-specific event, makes the information more relevant and encourages conversion.

Most organizations would never consider using their "email marketing system" they just purchase to delver personalized content to their website in real-time, isn't marketing automation an outbound tool?  Not necessarily.  Because marketing automation tools can listen for events and trigger a realtime campaign for 1, and then deliver results through web services, it allows for ultimate customization, even for inbound.

4. Go Mobile

Mobilization is becoming increasingly necessary. According to Nielsen, the average consumer spends more time online via mobile devices than she does via a desktop or laptop computer. And the majority of that time is spent on apps—not the mobile web. All-in-all, companies need to go mobile, but without the right tools, it can be difficult. Not only do you need a strategy, but you also need to work with much more data. But with the data from marketing automation platforms combined with mobilization strategies, companies can effectively implement mobile campaigns, whether that means a native app or an optimized page.

I'll continue to harp about the mobile strategy.  This is a channel that needs to be targeted to customer behavior, however it will be the ultimate channel when used properly.  The marketing automation tool can listen for cues, such as geo location and deliver a customized mobile experience for the customer, whether that be in-app content or push notifications, the marketing automation tool should be at the center of your mobile strategy.  

How CMOs Can Make Sure Their Companies Are Customer-Obsessed

CMOs are charged with making their companies customer-obsessed — so they can win in an age where customers are highly empowered. But the irony is that many marketing shops themselves are not customer-obsessed.

I am continually thinking about the customer-centric approach and who should own it in the organization.  The CMO is the obvious choice, however are they the best choice?  I have seen where organizations have a C-level position, something to the tune of Chief Customer Officer.  This is also thought because it ends up being another level in the organization, another potential touchpoint in the organization that has to bring different groups in the organization together around one common goal.  I think it comes down to having the right person.

Marketers are predisposed to think about the market first. So why are marketers not naturally predisposed to be customer-obsessed? The answer lies in gravity — the gravity of the P&L and the associated product, solution or service performance.

It's always about the customer.  Everything should come back to customer analytics.  I think Finance departments have too much power in some organizations where high-level KPI's are all about a product or a service.  The problem with these KPI's is they don't go far enough down to the "people" who are driving those metrics.  It is similar to fixing a symptom instead of the actual source of the problem.

For example, the company sells 1,000,000 widgets and they want to grow this by 3% in the next quarter.  This is the entire wrong approach to the problem.  Widgets don't grow by 3%.  3% more customers buy widgets in the quarter.  It is imperative to start with the customer because they are the ones that are purchasing these widgets.  So to grow those numbers, marketers need to embrace the customers to grow their numbers.

I have spoken with many CMOs — across industries and geographies — and this common theme has emerged: Marketing’s relevance and performance is now predicated on putting the customer at the center of the universe. This is neither elective nor minor surgery. Most believe an overhaul — not a simple refinement — is needed to make marketing customer-obsessed and truly able to drive growth.

Changing to a customer-centric organization is a complete change in culture.  This does not happen overnight.  It takes a dedicated team with a singular focus many months to accomplish.  I once read to change a culture, a great organization with amazing focus will take 18 months.  There are not that many of these organizations out there.  The average is 4 years.  So organizations need to start their culture change today.  There is no time to waste.  The customer-obsessed organization will be the most successful in the new customer empowered buying dynamic.  

Best Buy Wants to Build a Differentiated Customer Experience

During Tuesday’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call, Joly said he believes a differentiated customer experience can happen at Best Buy.

“We are pursuing a strategy that is focused on delivering advice, service, and convenience at competitive prices to our customers,” Joly said, according to Seeking Alpha. “Within this strategy, we are focused on driving a number of growth initiatives around key product categories, life events, and services. To drive these initiatives, we are pursuing and investing in the transformation of key functions and processes. We will also, in fiscal 2016, be facing industry and economic pressures on our business related to deflationary pricing and weak industry demand in certain product categories that we discussed last quarter.”

There's that new buzzword, customer experience.  What I find fascinating is why a market leader like Best Buy hasn't been trying to differentiate customer experience for years?  Amazon has clearly hurt their business and low-price alternatives like Walmart have been coming after them for years, why all of the sudden is a differentiated customer experience important now?

I know personally I try to never step foot in a Best Buy.  I used to be a very loyal customer, however there were a few experiences that made me so upset, I never went back.  These experiences were anti-customer experience moments.  They were trying to up sell so hard, it made me uncomfortable, to the fact they were trying to make me feel stupid for not getting the protection plan.  As a customer, I didn't like the feeling and stopped going back.  

They will have quite the challenge to create a differentiated customer experience in the stores.  Their salespeople, in general, have not given me great customer experiences in the past.  Whenever I have had the opportunity to engage and ask questions, they have read the stickers and told me what was on their brochure, like I already didn't do that.  

What I would like to see in Best Buy is the days of the "old" Home Depot model.  Home Depot used to pay its employees top dollar for their expertise.  The idea was that a plumber who was tired of working in less than stellar conditions would work at Home Depot and they would be able to give expert advise to customers looking to do home improvement.  Over the years, to save payroll, Home Depot went away from this model and most of the staff can't help you with great advise.

If Best Buy softens the sales approach and becomes more of an expertise experience, I could see wanting to shop there again in the future.  When I am shopping for a camera, I want the salesperson to be able to tell me about why this camera will be better for me than another camera.  I want them to ask me questions and figure out what I need instead of reading off of a price ticket at the features of a camera.  This would be a great experience and something Amazon could never match from an online perspective.  

The one reason I don't believe this will succeed are the words coming out of the CEO's mouth about this change.  He talks about "growth initiatives" which is not a customer-centric way to speak about the business.  Customer experience is a culture change, not an initiative.  

The Messy Business of Reinventing Happiness - Fast Company

Austin Carr wrote a fascinating piece in Fast Company about the behind the scenes struggles to implement Disney's MagicBand at Disney World.  It details the infighting and politics at one of the most revered brands in the world.  The MagicBand is a new innovation to Disney Theme Parks (only at the Orlando Disney World Theme Park at this time) which brings NFC technology to life in a 40 year old product.  The ideas behind the MagicBand were well thought out and they were trying to solve real problems at Disney World, but they couldn't deliver on the entire dream and it proves that Customer Experience is a cultural change more than an initiative which I have been writing about for a few weeks now.  

The article is very in depth and I think points out a few mistakes in launching an initiative this grandiose.  The main point it proves is how hard it is to change a culture when it comes to customer experience, because so many people in the organization want to eep their points of power rather than thinking of the customer.  It is human nature to be scared of technology that may serve the customer better, it puts people in a defensive mode.  Even when a company as big as Disney commits $1 Billion to the initiative, without the cultural change it makes it near impossible to create magic.

Dream Big, Implement in Stages

The dream was large for the Next Generation Experience (NGE) team at Disney.  They wanted to solve the real world problems that were influencing customer satisfaction at the park.  Long lines, juggling multiple pieces of paper and keys were bringing down an experience that is supposed to be one of enjoyment.  One of the main issues is they were trying to bite off more than they could chew with their implementation.  At one point they were trying to change the airport arrival and had meetings with TSA on airport security procedures.  I understand controlling the entire experience, something Steve Jobs has taught all of us, but at some point these types of distractions take away from the big picture, which is implementing and iterating.  

The biggest problems Disney was trying to solve was long lines and handling of multiple items (tickets, Fast Pass tickets, money, hotel room keys, etc.).  The team was 2 years late delivering on their initiative because they forgot what the main goal of the project was.  The team was distracted with all the technology could do, instead of solving the immediate problems and then iterating on the technology to enhance other experiences.  Always handle the low hanging fruit first, then iterate to enhance the next set of opportunities.  

Keep the Team Small for as Long as Possible

Once the team grows to include more people to implement, projects start spinning out of control.  Change is very hard for people and they will fight it especially when it comes to areas they control within an organization.  Because the plan was growing larger than solving the immediate problems, more people from the organization had to be brought in which slowed the project down to a crawl.  The leaders of the areas being affected wanted control and they wanted a say in the development of the technology.  Embrace the leaders of the areas that will be affected and make sure they are represented on the early small team.  If they embrace the change and feel they had a part in the development, they will get the troops aligned once implantation begins.

Clearly Articulate Goals

The goals of the initiative in my eyes were to enhance the customer experience at the theme park.  What happens in these large initiatives is the organization gets hung up on the technology instead of what the technology is trying to help solve.  Technology in and of itself is worthless, unless used for a purpose to solve a real world problem that cannot be solved another way more efficiently.  NFC technology in a bracelet does not solve any problems by itself, it is the implantation of this technology that is the magic.  Always keep the goals, which is enhancing the customer experience in this case, front and center.  Never start from the technology and work backwards, start from the problem and work forward to how the technology can help solve the problem.

I am fascinated how organizations behave.  Each culture is very different, but they all tend to have the same issues.  The bigger the organization becomes, the harder it is to accomplish innovative change.  Politics and human ego can be the death of innovation.  The Disney project succeeded through sheer will to get it done, but proves that even throwing money at something doesn't guarantee success.  The culture of the company has to be customer-centric before it can solve the problems of the customer.   

Becoming Customer Centric is a Journey not a Destination

A very insightful article from Timothy Smith of Tahzoo.  Becoming a customer centric organization is not achieved through initiatives, it is achieved through a culture change.  

From my perspective, too many of the current efforts in financial services are internally focused, and are being solely thought about as technology projects. As I pointed out in my webinar, technology is only one part of the solution. Companies need to be thinking about transforming their business and marketing approaches in addition to their technology infrastructure. If companies don’t invest in these other transformations, they may not ever deliver on their customer centricity goals. Time and money needs to be spent on creating organizational alignment, understanding the customer journey, and deploying marketing strategies that reward, recognize and respect customers.

Companies tend to look at their technology in terms of deficiencies instead of what a technology will allow.  Technology should never be purchased until there is a specific business need the technology will solve.  If your company isn't ready to evolve beyond their current technology platform, a better tool will not help your company evolve.  To become a customer centric organization, the culture needs to evolve first and then technology can support the organization as the needs arise.  It should never be the other way around.  Customer centricity does not happen through more data about a customer, it happens when all decisions are focused on the customer.

Great Brand Apps Create Loyal Happy Customers

Mobile apps are the way we will interact with all of our loyalty programs in the digital age.  Smartphone apps can do so much more than a piece of plastic or punchcard could have ever imagined, yet so many companies have built half-baked, poorly thought out attempts at creating a customer experience.  But the good news is there are some leaders that are nailing it.

The 4 qualities a mobile app should possess are:

A mechanism to capture transactions 

At the heart of the mobile experience should be the mechanism to capture data about the customer.  This data should feed into the loyalty program of the brand.  This should come in the form of transactional, interests, surveys and geo location data.  Data is the building block for a loyalty program to succeed.  

Frictionless transactions

A mobile app has the ability to eliminate the frictions of the transaction.  For example, at an Apple Store the customer can enter the store, open the app, scan the item they would like to purchase and then leave the store, all without having to interact with a human or wait in line.  That is eliminating friction.

A mechanism to communicate with your customers

Mobile is a channel.  It is perhaps the most important channel in the new digital marketing era.  The phone is always on your customers body and that will soon include wearables.  The ability to push messages to your customers through this channel is extremely important.  The ability for your customer to open the app and see their loyalty program details makes communicating with your customer more personal than ever before.  This includes beacon support to guide the customer through the offline experience as well.  This should be the channel that receives the most focus in the coming years.

An engaging experience without a transaction

Mobile apps hold a space on the customers phone.  If you make your app engaging, even when the customer is not making a transaction with you, you may keep a good position on the phone.  Think of it as search rankings, the more prominent position, the more engagement with your brand.  Get stuck in a folder on the third page, you will only be utilized as a mechanism for transactions which is not the worst thing in the world, but doesn't drive behavior. 

Starbucks has been on the forefront in the mobile app space since it introduced its mobile app in 2011.  Starbucks took the approach of creating an app that engages customers when not in a Starbucks, along with making the transaction process frictionless.  Starbucks has long partnered with Apple by giving away free music and apps, but they also moved this functionality to the app.  By doing this, Starbucks has been able to engage their customers with their application outside of the brick and mortar stores.  I consistently look at my badges from Starbucks to see what free apps or music they are giving away this week.  Most of the time I don't get the freebies because they are not to my liking, but every once in awhile I do.  But it also has trained me to constantly go to the app.  I check my points and how far away I am for a free award and I am not even a big free award kind of a guy.

Starbucks has also made a frictionless payment process that also tracks my behavior.  I always received gift cards from Starbucks and had them strewn all over the place.  Some made it to the wallet, some were in drawers, but they were never consolidated.  Starbucks also had a loyalty program that was tied into a gift card, but it was confusing on how to interact with the program when I wasn't using that particular gift card.  Plus having to manually add money to the specific gift card was far from frictionless.  So I never really used the loyalty program and I was going to Starbucks less.  The app has removed all of this friction.  It is easy to transfer gift card money to the main loyalty account, which was a main pain point for me.  It also allowed for easy addition of funds into the card through the app.  These two items made using the program much easier.  

The other app that I have been very impressed with is the Chipotle app.  This app is a little different from the Starbucks app because it is just solving one problem, waiting in line.  The app allows you to place a Chipotle order and skip the line to pick it up at a designated time.  Now I don't know if any of you have been in a Chipotle and have to wait in the line to order, but it could be a fifteen minute exercise in browsing Twitter.  The app saves your favorites and recents so it takes approximately 20 seconds to place an order.  Pay online, just walk to the cashier and they hand you your bag of goodness and you are off.  Simple, frictionless and awesome.   

Improvements can be made in both of these apps to include more of the 4 qualities.  The Starbucks app nails 3 out of the 4, but can do a better job at using the app as a personal, targeted channel.  Right now the offers they have are not very tailored to my experience.  This is a big opportunity to make the app even more engaging.  For Chipotle, they only possess 1 out of the 4.  They might be monitoring my transactions, but they don't have a loyalty program tied to the app, so I am not sure.  The app is a great start, but they could hit a home run with the addition of some functionality.  Either way, I will still use it weekly to avoid the lines.

Keeping Up With Today’s Loyalty Demands

Originally posted on IBM’s Smarter Commerce blog:

Loyalty marketing is more and more prominent in today’s retail landscape. It is becoming common knowledge that customer acquisition costs are increasingly rising, and data-driven customer retention is a key area filled with untapped growth potential. But loyalty marketing is evolving and is more intricate than just offering discounts to existing customers. As many marketers realize, there are three common problems that they run into when trying to implement an effective loyalty program:

1. They often feel stuck offering dollars-off discounts and are losing their margins without sustainably changing their customer behavior.

2. Personalization is not going further than using much more than a first and last name, and is not connecting to the customer and building customer relationships.

3. Their loyalty members are not actively participating and being engaged, and consequently not influencing long term results.

It is a buyers market as they would say in the real-estate business.  Customers have the ability to buy from a multitude of companies with fairly frictionless transactions.  Years ago, a customer would be limited to their location to buy many of the items they can now purchase online, which makes loyalty marketing a much harder task today.  If the customer does not like an experience they have with your company, the friction to switch providers is much easier than in the past.

This has led to a race to the bottom with most companies.  Instead of competing on differentiation, companies rely on sales and discounting to compete in this new world.  Relying on discounts is not differentiated at all.  Any competitor can match a price or beat the price if they are willing to decrease their margins for the business.  As I wrote in Busy is Not a Strategy, many of your competitors will look at metrics like volume as their key metric which will force them to decrease margins and hurt your business.  

Increasing Self-Identification

Loyalty incentivizes customers to provide more information about themselves and engage across channels, which leads to a richer understanding of your customers and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised how many of them are open to providing information about themselves in order to receive more relevant communications and offers.

Spending most of my time in the casino industry has shown me that consumers willingly give away information in return for a richer experience.  In the case of the casinos this comes in the form of comps, but in other industries this does not have to be a giveaway.  This could be access to sales, in the case of grocery stores.  Find out what your version of the comp is to increase customer self-identification.  It may start off as a giveaway, but don't let it drive the future customer experiences with that customer.  

Taking Personalization to the Next Level

In addition to increasing customer self-identification, you should track and analyze metrics such as order frequency, average order value, and from which channels customers are purchasing. Modern loyalty programs gather this customer data and provide a centralized hub which is used to personalize meaningful incentives and rewards for higher customer redemption and satisfaction, and also to send personalized messages. These messages can be targeted towards specific actions and customer segments, and are used to maintain relevance and build upon customer-brand relationships by making customers feel like you are paying attention to what they want.

If you aren't tracking the purchases of your customers then you aren't going to be successful in loyalty marketing.  Creating meaningful customer experiences relies on gaining insight to the behavior of the customer.  By getting the customer to opt-in, it allows the business to create the true value from the loyalty program as I wrote here.  Targeted content will create meaningful customer experiences and this rich data is at the core.  

Cohesive Omni-Channel Capabilities

With today’s consumer having the ability to interact with your brand across all channels, it is essential to have cohesive communication, connectivity of data, and customer access to your program and rewards at all touch points. Different consumers like to interact with brands through different channels – whether in-store, social media, or email – and your program should be available in their preferred channel.

Providing the same experience for the customer, no matter what channel they are using, is the key to creating meaningful customer experiences.  This is the hard part of the new customer experience paradigm.  Keeping the content and messaging across channels in an online and offline world can be complex, but is very rewarding.  Customers don't care that different divisions in the company have different responsibilities and the online team doesn't communicate effectively with the operations team.  Customers expect their experience to be seamless across channels and it is imperative that businesses adjust to create this seamless customer experience. 

DIB Digital Trends Report 2015_EMEA

I'm reading through the DIB Digital Trends Report for 2015 and there is some interesting tidbits.  For one, on Figure 5, what is the most exciting opportunity in 2015 vs last year.  Customer Experience has jumped into a huge lead, while Mobile and Social have fallen.  Why is this?  I believe organizations are starting to realize that both of those decliners are just channels.  Channels for your content to create great customer experiences.  Mobile shouldn't be your strategy any more than email.  I view content marketing and personalization as the same thing.  If your content isn't personal, then work needs to be done on your content.  However, I understand why they are separated here.  I believe multi channel campaign management needs to rate higher on these lists.  This is the engine that will run most of this,

Another interesting section is asking what companies plan on how they will differentiate themselves from their competitors within the next 5 years.  The report states they are surprised that price is only 5%.  I believe organizations will try to differentiate through customer experience, and maybe there is some bias in the respondents, because these companies are probably a little more innovative than the typical organization.  I believe companies tend to fall to price differentiation because it is the easiest way to gain sales and market share.  

Number 1 and 2 are intrinsically related.  As I wrote here, companies that focus on design will constantly look to improve on 1 and 2.  A design first mentality puts the experience and the quality ahead of all else.  Companies who are answering these questions should be looking to change their culture to a design culture before tackling these differentiators, or else the strategy may fail.

Strategy does not work without the culture to back it up.  The fact the respondents have listed strategy before culture leads me to believe these initiatives have a higher chance of failure.  If the culture of the company does not support the strategy, it will take too large of an effort to accomplish being customer first.

These are my thoughts halfway through the document.  Tomorrow I will comment on the next piece of the document.  Very interesting stuff.  Organizations are saying the right things, but with anything, it is all in the implementation.  The next 5 years will be very exciting indeed.