Celia Fleischaker is Verint 's Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing the company's global marketing, customer experience improvement programs and sales opportunities.
In the past, gathering marketing data and marketing techniques was the primary activity of marketing professionals, including marketing managers. Today, it's important for marketers and businesses to think differently about the data that's critical to achieving revenue goals, growth, and customer experience.
Anyone who contacts a company can provide information about its marketing strategy. However, this information is often outside the scope of the marketing function and may not be available. As black swan events and seismic shifts in buyer behavior force marketers to rethink their strategies and the technologies that support them, this laser data focus on customer interactions has recently become critical.
Today, marketing leaders increasingly need to "see" the entire organization to understand and improve the customer experience. As the customer journey crosses digital, physical, online, in-store, call center and other channels, we have the ability to better understand the customer experience across multiple touch points, including no longer participating in Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. , which tells us only about 3% of customers. Modern technology allows us to understand these processes comprehensively, everywhere, simultaneously and individually, so that we can identify problems or frustrations through digital channels and proactively solve them in near real time.
According to our company's latest State of the Digital Customer Experience survey, 34% of customers surveyed choose to do business with a company through a digital channel, a 16% increase from 2022. With more digital experiences and channels, the amount of data is now available to guide strategy and improve performance. Huge. But you need the right solutions to combine this data with artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to uncover trends and insights.
Marketers traditionally talk about "demand generation" and "demand generation," where the goal is to create the necessary demand and improve response speed. Today, that approach has changed, and control now belongs to the customer. Marketers need to understand customers, how they go through the buying process, and second, how to use technology to find people in that buying cycle. It's hard to do, but there are AI-based solutions that can help you understand intent (like who's in the market by their behavior). To understand customer data, their intentions come down to: "This is my market, this is my strategy, and I'm going to make people come to me."
Today's customer enjoys a personal journey, and AI-powered technologies and capabilities make it easy for marketing leaders to understand where they're going. To get the right experience management tools, you need to be more strategic and look at the experience more holistically.
Today we are witnessing great success. Third-party intent data is used by marketing teams to understand which companies may be in the buying stage for certain software. Marketers also use digital behavioral analytics solutions to turn digital experience data into actionable information in a number of ways. Heatmaps show areas where customers are struggling to provide marketers with insight, opportunity to improve their experience, understand customer feedback, and make immediate changes to gain deeper context.
In addition to these solutions, there are often other solutions that can benefit marketing and are implemented elsewhere in the organization. Marketers can better understand the consumer by using data from applications such as engagement analytics in their marketing strategies. Engagement analytics evaluate voice and digital conversations with consumers, allowing marketers to learn about customer behavior and gauge sentiment to better understand customer needs. Traditionally, this type of technology was kept outside of marketing departments and remained another source of information, but marketing is increasingly breaking through these barriers to deliver superior customer experiences.
Here are some easy ways to get started.
• Understand the feedback data collected. Take a cross-agency inventory of traditional processes (such as surveys) used to gather customer feedback. Choose testimonials that can help shape your marketing strategy. Make sure you have an ongoing plan to review and implement.
• Intent data usage. view first-party intent data from your channels (such as websites), third-party intent data from other organizations (such as TrustRadius), and third-party intent data. Once you know what you have, decide how best to use it to improve the effectiveness of your marketing and sales activities.
• Analyze your digital experience. If you don't already have one, consider adding a tool to analyze your digital experience. Create a plan to view and use this information.
• Access to relevant interaction analyses. Find out how teams are using engagement analytics to gain insights from customer conversations in sales and service. If so, how can you access and use this data to make changes to your marketing communications and customer experience?
Customer experience is the new battleground for brands, and marketers are increasingly stepping up to help companies anticipate and respond to changing customer preferences and needs. Today's new generation of marketers must be equipped with data and technology to understand customer intent.
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