We all want our marketing to be more customer-centric. Of course we'd love every message to be personalized. Of course we'd love to offer the perfect journey that ticks all the boxes and leads to rave reviews and forever loyalty. It's not difficult to theorize about it, but putting it together and making it work in practice — for hundreds of thousands or even millions of individuals — well, it's complicated. So this eBook is all about how to start small, deliver quick results, and scale your customer journeys. In other words — it's a practical, approachable method.
Traditional organizations across the globe are transforming to compete against digital-only players and restructuring to put the customer first. The world’s buying behavior — and consumer behavior in relation to technology — is quickly changing with the rise of online distribution channels, smart devices, and their interplay with offline touchpoints. Siloed business systems and their old reporting lines need to shift and synchronize — fast.
Terms like "omnichannel" and "customer-centricity" have been buzzing around long enough now that you would think these practices would be second nature for businesses. Yet 87% of customers still think brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent experience.
Why are businesses hesitating? In our experience, there two common myths holding marketing teams back:
Setting up for customer-centricity is a journey in and of itself, but we believe the best approach is to start by creating incremental, valuable interaction sequences, rather than start from scratch.
And it’s about maintaining a vision for the future that you can build upon — one that goes far beyond the limits of a few customer channels, and into the territory of trying new technology as it becomes available.
In this guide, we’re covering three crucial ingredients that will help you align your customer-centric goals within your organization and start tailoring your customer journey across all of your channels.
Great things in a big company often start with a small, hands-on, cross-disciplinary team that's ready to learn, accelerate and improve fast. From there, you can work with technology to prove value in your new, agile marketing approach. It takes curiosity to understand and map customer movements, plus a technology solution to deliver on their individual preferences across their landscape.
Start with a simple set of KPIs you can continue to achieve, and build on. This is how you can begin to create buy-in across your marketing team — and your entire company.
Learn more about our work with Mazda here
Make bigger business objectives into manageable micro-journeys
Being completely customer-centric straight away may sound like a lot to take on — and it is. But by translating specialist knowledge into practical reality, your team of explorers can dive into a single simple hypothesis by using technology to deliver incremental business value and serve your valuable customers relevant content. Then you'll be ready to move towards your bigger goal of complete customer-centricity.
It pays off to have always-on experiments that tackle customer journeys in smaller pieces. Besides getting results, this strategy nurtures your team’s innovative mindset and keeps them focused on evolving their experiments. But what about the bigger picture?
By working to identify steps towards maturity month by month, along with the broader factors you need to consider within those steps, you can take your journey orchestration project to the next level and deliver a long-term plan for your organization as a whole.
This goes all the way from starting as an explorer — starting simple by using your agile platform to follow existing data trails and unpacking straightforward hypotheses, to becoming change-makers who define the strategy that will help you to become — and remain — a brand your customers love.
And it reaches all the way through to cross-organizational collaboration, to shape an entire business that's driven by the everyday journeys of your customers. All it takes is a holistic approach that combines marketing, customer service, data, and technology.