The Growing Pressure on Customer Experience: Practical Insights for a Seamless Customer Journey
End-to-end customer journeys are still the exception, but likely not for long. The pressure to deliver a positive customer experience is increasing.
At the Swiss Customer Relations Forum — together with our partner Bloomreach and two keynote speakers from Mammut and Blacksocks — we examined the various dimensions of an end-to-end customer journey. We worked to provide workshop participants from a wide range of companies and industries with proven approaches.
Here's a summary of the workshop takeaways.
Workshop focus: Technology, speed, organization, and customer-oriented thinking
During the workshop, we delved into:
Technology: What is a CDP, and how can companies integrate and leverage it?
Speed in campaign creation: How do organizations avoid the interface-based issues that lead to delays and frustration among marketing employees?
Organizational change: How can agile working serve as the basis for marketing — and interdisciplinary collaboration?
Thinking from the customer's perspective: How can brands think about the customer journey as a whole, from the customer's shoes?
CDP 101
During the workshop, only four of 20 participants said they were already using a customer data platform (CDP) or were currently in the process of implementing one. Clearly, adoption isn't yet widespread (for more, see our study on the top trends in customer management in the DACH region).
The following is a brief overview of different types of CDPs that can currently be found on the market:
Unterschiedliche Arten von CDPs (https://www.cdpinstitute.org/learning-center/what-is-a-cdp/#section2)
The customer — whether they're known or anonymous — is at the core of a CDP. This tool collects marketing-relevant data that can be used in real-time campaign implementation. In addition, some CDPs — like the one from Bloomreach — have a natively integrated execution layer for deployment into all possible channels.
Bloomreach architecture
gateB supports customers in evaluating, implementing, and using a CDP. Learn more in this interview with Robert Schumacher, Director at gateB.
Johannes Metral, Consumer Engagement & Loyalty Team Lead at Mammut Sports Group, and Tobias Flückiger, Online Marketing & E-Commerce Intrapreneur at Blacksocks, shared their experiences in the workshop.
The two use cases from Mammut and Blacksocks clearly demonstrated that an integrated CDP delivers a massive advantage in creating campaigns quickly. Before, the teams had to painfully adhere to multiple processes in different departments. Now, per Flückiger, the Blacksocks team can quickly and easily design and test new campaigns within half an hour. At Mammut, using Bloomreach's CDP for the past year has greatly simplified what used to be a complex process.
Flückiger showed "live" in the workshop how easy it is to create new campaigns and to get real-time performance measurement. With an SMS campaign built during the workshop, all participants received a voucher from Mammut and Blacksocks.
Real-time campaign reporting
Organizational change
Throughout the discussion, many participants stated that technology can only be part of the answer. The way companies work also needs to change.
In enterprise-level companies, interdisciplinary teams are a guarantee for success. This way, all the necessary competencies are available, allowing the technology to be used effectively to achieve business goals.
The interplay of teams and disciplines
Organizational change also requires a shift in the mindset of management up to the C-level. The opportunities for reporting will continue to exist, of course, but the teams need to be given freedom. This is often difficult to reconcile with hierarchical companies.
Thinking from the customer's point of view
The mindset should not only change within the company, but also toward the customer. An outside-in view — i.e., thinking from the customer's perspective — helps to identify relevant use cases, or at least initial hypotheses about them. Here, too, it can help to start small with an initial use case and to operationalize it from A to Z throughout. Then, companies can use these initial journeys to further develop systems and processes. Over time, that development becomes more complex, delivering improved personalization and, as a result, greater relevance for customers.
It is then a matter of testing, measuring, and continuously optimizing these journeys — with the "Test, Learn, Optimize" approach. Again, a system like Bloomreach that allows possible optimizations to be made "live" very quickly and easily helps. This way, you can significantly accelerate the learning process. This is one of the most important recipes for success when dealing with new technology: to learn and optimize quickly!
The limitations of classic CRM systems quickly become apparent, especially in large companies: they usually cannot be used to map end-to-end customer interaction. Only one in six companies in the DACH region already uses a CDP. For all others, the topic of CDPs will become increasingly important in the future.
Robert is a pioneer in data-driven marketing with over 20 years of experience in direct marketing. A lecturer at multiple universities, he specializes in digital and data-driven strategies. Since 2015, he has led business development for intelligent customer engagement at gateB, helping companies leverage data to enhance customer relationships, optimize experiences, and drive profitability.
Real-time is the most important function of a CDP - this cannot be emphasized enough. Customers today are very erratic and attention spans are short. Therefore, interactions need to be responded to immediately. A unified system, from feeding the interaction to driving the message out to the customer, is an essential part of a modern martech stack.
Marketing Automation & CRM
Manuel Tönz
Director of Client Strategy at Bloomreach | MACH Alliance Ambassador
Real-time is the most important function of a CDP - this cannot be emphasized enough. Customers today are very erratic and attention spans are short. Therefore, interactions need to be responded to immediately. A unified system, from feeding the interaction to driving the message out to the customer, is an essential part of a modern martech stack.
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