The CMO Council just released a report on how companies are losing opportunities to turn customer pain areas into new business opportunities. The report highlights the following facts:
There are critical deficiencies in the way companies measure, optimize and leverage customer experience to drive loyalty, improve brand value and increase business performance and growth, including:
- Insufficient availability and aggregation of real-time customer experience data across touch points that should be shared across the organization
- Poor use of customer interactions to collect insights and intelligence or maximize up-sell and advocacy opportunities
- Lack of Internet processes and systems to track online word of mouth and drive customer advocacy
- Intermittent or deficient monitoring of customer experience that fails to provide true and timely insights into problems and opportunities
- Too few compensation programs tied to customer experience, loyalty and satisfaction gains
CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May says "CMOs must assume ownership for the customer experience and establish enterprise-wide measures and disciplines to ensure continuous improvement. We are missing a major opportunity to turn customer pain into competitive gain at every touch point through better use of web and contact center technologies and processes."
My view: This has been an area of intense focus amongst the marketing community for the last couple of years. I am always surprised to see that there is always insufficient customer experience data across enterprises. This is one piece of data that does not seem to have changed for quite some time now. For example, the report highlights that only 38% of companies gather insight from customer engagement situations! It always makes me wonder where is the gap between intent and execution. I believe the best way to do this is to start small. Don't start with a big bang approach. Pick-up areas for quick win, show to key stakeholders that it works and there is business impact. Expand as you get a lot of stakeholders buy-in, as this is very critical in making customer-centric programs successful in enterprises.