Mastering Adaptive Customer Engagements

Today’s modern marketer has the opportunity, if not the responsibility, to become the change agent that is working to establish a “customer-intuitive enterprise.” This intensely customer-centric view will require organization-wide alignment around the customer engagement strategy, with each function and each employee understanding and upholding their role in delivering an optimized customer experience. But it will also require a new view into the customer: one that goes beyond the aggregation of marketing or even transactional data to incorporate all points of insight and intelligence, including tapping into data repositories from across the organization as well as from external, unstructured and even third-party resources, to understand the future needs and desires of the customer.

Customer influence, voice and power are increasing, fueled by digital channels that can carry the voice of customer far from the comfortable controls of yesterday’s largely bi-directional push-and-pull marketing strategies. According to Forrester, 73 percent of customers trust recommendations from friends and family, but only 19 percent trust direct mail sent from companies they already know and do business with. To stay connected to these trusted networks, customers have placed even higher expectations on digitally connected experiences, assuming that channels of interaction and transaction will be available when and where the customer chooses. 

The CMO Council and its special interest network, the Customer Experience Board (www.customerexperienceboard.org), partnered with SAP to champion a new executive-level conversation focused on the success of the modern customer-centric enterprise. As today’s organizations strive for customer centricity as a key differentiator and business performance optimizer, far too many organizations fail to fully embrace the need to transform its people, platforms and processes to become truly customer-intuitive organizations. This thought leadership initiative—dubbed “Mastering Adaptive Customer Engagements: Driving Business Performance Across the Customer-Centric Enterprise”—includes audits and assessments around customer centricity, as well as a roadmap for embracing the journey toward developing a more connected and engaged customer experience model that can be embraced across the enterprise on an operational, cultural, organizational and IT structural level.