customer experience management15 Mar 2023
As a marketer, you already know the importance of data and how it can better improve a business’ growth curve. Today, given the implausible degree of interactions that happen every second, the data generated due to it is colossal.
For a marketer, this data holds the potential to work wonders. The fact that even the majority of the data is either fragmented, incomplete, or available in a form that’s gibberish for a marketer brings big data to the table.
Big data, simply put, is a collection of data sets available in larger volumes, greater varieties, and more velocity. These massive chunks of data sets, when fused with big ops, i.e., cutting-edge AI/ML algorithms, automation tools, analytics software, etc., foster insights which can boost most, if not all, business processes.
Today, in this article, we will focus on how big data & big ops can help marketers optimize their efforts to bring new customer experiences.
Firstly, let’s learn about the data types critical to upping the CX game before we lay down the perks of big data.
Let’s roll.
This data primarily comprises invoices, payment options & channels, payment timings, and other related data that reflects a customer’s transactional behavior with a product/service. These subtle insights help improve the financial aspects of your product/business so it appeals to your audience.
Better customer experiences can be highly attributed to the collection and utilization of behavioral data. How a prospect interacts with your brand across touchpoints, what they do post those interactions, and what triggers them to move a little closer to conversion—all these qualify as behavioral data.
All these insights, when fused with AI/ML and other cutting-edge technologies, help serve personalized experiences to leads, thus easing the way to conversion.
As the name suggests, any insight collected from a person’s social media activity is social media data. Given the soaring use of social media, the data collected may be hard to analyze and draw insights from, so it becomes critical that you employ sophisticated analytics tools to cut through the chunks of data you gather and bring you the insights that lead to clear improvements in customer experience.
Customer service data is not just beneficial for your sales and customer success teams; your marketing team can leverage it, too.
How, you ask?
More often than not, customer service data is brimming with personal information such as email addresses, job profiles, addresses, mobile numbers, etc. All these valuable insights often remain in CRM, untouched by marketers. However, if marketers have this data, they can use it to drive CX to great extents.
First-party data is not something you acquire from only one particular interacting medium with your audience but rather qualifies as everything you collect from direct interactions. It may include behavioral data, transactional data, and other forms of data.
Quality is the most crucial part of first-party data that determines its usefulness to your marketing efforts. The quality of the data can be defined as its organization, free from silos and redundancies; the better the quality, the better would be your marketing efforts, and thus better CX levels.
The more the data, the more challenging it is to have a comprehensive, transparent view of your customers. To get past this hurdle and have an accurate idea of your customers, having a data hub or center that serves as the single source of truth for your entire organization is imperative.
Victor Cobo Ramirez, Director, Customer Portfolio and eCommerce Product Owner at Manulife, during the Global Virtual MarTech Summit - APAC, says, “Size of a business doesn’t matter when integrating big ops. Small companies with relatively smaller data assets need big ops to generate better CX and enhance business processes. What matters the most is how a company gathers, organizes, and integrates its data.”
A data center is a perfect answer to the above requirements. Not only it empowers your teams with real-time and accurate insights, but it also ensures you exploit staying within the boundaries of data regulations applicable to your business. So, your CX shoots up, your compliance is on point, and your brand hops by leaps and bounds.
Once you start fueling your customer interactions with relevant audience data, you immediately forge a link with your prospects. From now on, what you collect from the further interactions with your audience is more relevant & specific insights, advancing your CX to new levels.
This creates an ongoing data circle and empowers you with the customer-centric mechanism. With the data hub we discussed, you exponentiate the power of this big data to unfathomable levels, creating a commanding force of personalization.
While market research can provide you with insights needed to improve your product/service by unraveling the emotions behind customer decisions, it still struggles to bring you new product opportunities.
Big data, however, help you identify market gaps where you can push completely new products. Given the immense volume of big data and the predictive analytics capabilities of the big ops tools, businesses can very well unravel where their audience (and even the respective vertical) is heading, thus earning a competitive moat for themselves by creating a brand new product that thrives without any rivals in the immediate future.
Akanksha Rastogi, Head of Data & Insights at foodpanda, during the Global Virtual MarTech Summit - APAC, says, “Big ops can be integrated into applications and websites to drive personalization and enhance the CX levels. This helps increase the stickiness of platforms, acting as a subtle marketing move.”
Your target audience is scattered all over the web, so truly understanding the entire buyer journey is growing more complex by the day. To stitch all these little yet significant crumbs of data is a pre-requisite to creating an omnichannel experience and orchestrating each part of the journey.
Big data is the solution to this seemingly daunting task.
Big data captures the various interactions of your audience across the web, organizes them into a single place, pinpoints the touchpoints where you need to focus most of your efforts, and even the loopholes that make the customers ditch the journey.
All these intricate details reveal the true nature of a lead's journey and the hurdles that keep them from converting; now, you can create a fully integrated, data-driven omnichannel mechanism that eases the path from awareness to conversion.
To make the most of the overwhelming amount of data, you need to first equip your business with fitting applications, IT teams, and people who have a working knowledge of the data and apps they lay their hands on. Once all these requirements are in place, you can effectively utilize big data to gather customer-centric insights and leverage the same to deliver tailored, real-time customer experiences, forging a unique marketing move altogether.
marketing9 Feb 2023
Organizational shifts are happening at an alarming rate nowadays, as data-driven demand generation practices are replacing traditional business tactics. Organizations are striving to meet the demands of their customers, while an increased emphasis on technology is pushing new tactics in their businesses. In 2022, 69% of marketers indicated their demand generation budgets will increase between 1% and 20% (Demand Gen Report). At first, demand generation covers the initial efforts designed to get your target audience to join your mailing list. It also encourages your audience to interact with your content, attend events, etc.
Demand generation aims to guide the target audience through the buyer’s journey until they are considered qualified leads. To accomplish this task successfully in a paced way, here are the top trending demand generation strategies to implement immediately!
One of the most critical aspects of demand generation is the personalization of content. 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides a personalized experience (Epsilon). This report backs the statement that consumers are more inclined toward personalized services and communication. Consumers tend to engage more with businesses that attend to their needs and choices. This demand generation strategy will break the barrier of simply sharing content with prospects. Businesses will soon crack the preferred content formats and the type of device that consumers use. This understanding of content will be useful in optimizing their content to approach consumers on their preferred platforms.
Conversational marketing is one of the most interesting demand generation tactics for the future. Customers want their queries to be addressed and resolved quickly, or else they move on to some other option.
To avoid this situation, businesses have adopted conversational marketing and chatbots. 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they provide instant responses (Salesforce). The AI chatbots thoroughly understand user behavior, communication patterns, and intention. It also adopts their communication patterns, responds to them, and aims to resolve queries in minimal time.
Account Based Experience is referred to as ABX. While ABM primarily concentrates on marketing and sales, ABX also focuses on the customer experience. It ensures that consumers’ journeys are smooth once they become your clients. ABX is not replacing ABM; rather, ABM is evolving towards ABX.
ABX is a fundamental, customer-focused reimagining of how businesses approach their target markets. With a strong foundation and focus on the customer at every point of the purchasing cycle and the use of intelligent insights to determine when, how, and what to speak to each account, it combines the manageability of inbound marketing with the accuracy and targeting of account-based marketing.
Intent Marketing has worked miraculously in contemporary times. It helps in upskilling the accuracy of your marketing campaigns and connects you with the right buyers. Almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase Intent Marketing provides several benefits, and some of these are as follows:
· Create more relevant content: after understanding where targeted customers are in the buyer’s journey, you can gain the information you need to create content according to their preferences.
· Bringing more qualified leads: after gaining potential customers, the sales team can engage with these leads with the trust that they have already shown their interest in the services, qualifying more leads.
· Enhancing content marketing campaigns: With the intent data, marketers gain the advantage of learning about the content types that users find interesting and engaging. This helps in devising better content marketing campaigns.
Voice search strategies are bringing a revolution in the methods of people searching for products and services. It gives users the leverage of speaking rather than typing the entire question to find answers. 90% of people think voice search is easier than searching online and 89% also think it’s more convenient, and 87% think it’s faster (PWC). Voice Search has the potential to become a massive part of every B2B demand generation strategy. There have already been a large number of voice search users, and the number keeps increasing daily. Marketers are optimizing their websites for people who prefer voice search.
Prospects are eager to read information and fully comprehend your product and service. When individuals are interested in learning more about your company, free content resources work like a charm. They can make better decisions if they have more information at their disposal. Make sure to offer them high-quality material that satisfies their needs. They might do their research first, then get in touch with your sales team.
It is evident that demand generation will become more data-driven and customer-centric. The usage of technology will expand at an exponential rate. Organizations must adapt their old business strategies to incorporate technology and focus on improving customer experience.
Want to know how to correctly implement these demand generation strategies to boost your business?
ecommerce and mobile ecommerce28 Dec 2022
From monolithic systems to microservices, we have come a long road & explored a variety of architectural patterns that have both benefits & drawbacks. Composable commerce aims to minimize the downside by shedding the ‘sizeism’ of a particular vendor.
Composable Commerce is not just a factor that differentiates the frontend and backend elements of a commerce platform, but it is also helpful in adapting to the various market dynamics essential to keep the business updated and running. Moreover, it utilizes modern technologies like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, and Headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) to adapt to the volatile marketing dynamics.
Did You Know?
Gartner coined the term “composable commerce” in research from June 2020. That was how it all began. (Source: Gartner)
Now let’s delve into an insightful idea of composable commerce.
B2B is evolving, and it needs a mechanism that can be molded according to the needs to provide the utmost performance and upgraded functionalities.
Composable commerce is the right strategy that can enable a B2B organization to constantly upscale digital commerce experiences by combining numerous best-of-breed providers into a full, business-ready solution. Here’s why!
Better Customization: Composable commerce provides you with the freedom to design your platform as per your unique needs and create a unique solution that would help you maintain the top position.
Greater Customer Experience: 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a firm that offers personalized experiences (Source: Epsilon). Composable commerce becomes a perfect platform for your customers to access their accounts and orders as well as receive personalized offers.
Low-code Capability: Low-code feature diminishes the obstacles associated with integrating various technologies, and enterprises may interface with various software silos more effectively and efficiently.
Unlimited Scalability: Without being updated with the proper and latest solutions, there is a high chance for your website to slow down or crash due to limited capacity. Composable commerce has the upper hand in ensuring infinite scalability using cloud-based architecture.
Things to consider while creating a Composable Commerce strategy:
· Business architecture may be used to foster innovation while transforming the business and operations.
· Utilize adaptable working habits and co-creation methods.
· Use the power of information to make better decisions and provide innovative services.
· Modify the digital and technological platforms to allow for transformation and rapid deployment by integrating current with new and emerging technologies.
Composable commerce provides you with a platform to boost your growth curve on an economical and developmental scale. After switching to and adopting a composable solution, your B2B business experience will get even smoother.