Customer World

Transforming marketing data to enable decision management

Here's an interesting presentation my Jamet on using marketing data for decision management. Take a look:

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Planning for Enterprise Marketing Platform - Forrester's prescription

Suresh Vittal of Forrester released a report on successful implementation of Enterprise Marketing Platform couple of months ago. It had some interesting learnings for any enterprise planning to get this going in their organization. Here are some highlights:

• Pre-implementation planning should include a full data profiling exercise. Many marketers stop after a cursory audit of their potential data sources. But a basic data audit misses most of the data issues that marketers will encounter during the implementation. Profiling data early helps identify key data inconsistencies with sufficient time to solve them without any delays to subsequent phases. These inconsistencies stem from issues associated with data cleanliness, rapid acquisition of multiple data sources, and data-software incompatibilities. A leading retailer told us, "Our campaign management system likes data to be set up in a certain way. We spent one year structuring the tool to fit our data mart and then switched to organizing our data mart to fit the tool.
• "Major process and workflow revisions are par for the course. By their very nature, marketing automation tools make some processes obsolete and require the creation of others. As one large bank told us, "Marketers must realize that with automation they are capable of planning and executing 50 campaigns instead of three. This means that they will need to pay attention to workflow and analytics."
• Increased demand for analytical skills after rollout requires upfront planning. Traditional marketing practices place little emphasis on deeply understanding one's data — a required skill for using an enterprise marketing platform. As a result, the skills mix of most teams shifts after implementation, and on some occasions teams even undergo a complete reorganization. One large financial services institution found that, "The bulk of requests moved downstream. Marketers who originally dealt with campaign execution are now requesting campaigns and defining segmentation and offer requirements, with the production happening in the background."
• Technology support organizations are essential. Enterprise marketing platforms are complicated enterprise software, which require a technical background to install, configure, and maintain. Marketers should secure advice and assistance from their technology support teams for planning and defining requirements and dealing with integration issues and software upgrades post-implementation. One large insurance organization had its IT department write a portion of its request for proposal (RFP), while a large high-tech firm found great success in partnering with both finance and IT. In both cases, marketing retained ownership of the final decision, but it brought in experts for advice as needed.
• Change management and on-boarding takes longer than anticipated. With changes to process, technology, and skills, most marketing teams need time and resources to adjust. One enterprise-level, high-tech firm told us, "Don't try to shortchange the effort. Refresh it and keep it moving by focusing on process, culture, rewards, and behavior management." A large brand manufacturer told us "Scoping support was a challenge. We were taking a core tool used daily and completely replacing it with a new one. The team was busy just keeping up with campaigns, and now they have to make time to sit with the project team and learn the new tool."

Personal recommendations are more authentic

As many channels start to converge, the chatter among customers about products, benefits, uses, problems, referrals is increasingly gaining a lot of attention. It's so easy  today to get on to the web and know what customers think about your products. The ability to fuse this data along with your transactional & attitudinal data that lies within your organization and doing analytics on this information is going to be the next inflection point for marketers.

Here's a presentation by Paul Isackson that brings out the power of this chatter and influence on customer behaviour.

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Lead management - Involve before you start!

A recent study from the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA)  shows that many companies are ignoring their sales lead management.

Their 2nd annual Sales Lead Management Study, conducted with 144 businesses in Southern California, revealed the following results:

• 68.8% don’t qualify leads before sending them to their sales teams
• 52.4% have no formal process for compiling sales forecast reports
• 82.8% don’t track ROI for lead generation investments
• 55% rated low satisfaction with their SFA/CRM system, at 5 or less on a 10-point scale
• 52.1% use no SFA/CRM system to track the lead process

My View:  The gap between sales & marketing departments has only grown over the years.Sales has had a siloed process in enterprises and in my experience getting sales to see & appreciate good quality leads is always big problem. On the other hand, I have always found, lack of understanding what a good lead is the problem of most lead generation programs. Often there is a mix of science, logic and an intuitive feeling in the salesperson's mind which a software or a process cannot replicate. But, my belief is that right at the inception of a lead generation program, you need to have the buy-in of the sales team. The lead generation team must be 'considered' a part of the sales team and may be that's the reason there's a term coined as 'inside sales'! Nevertheless, the lead generation team, the software and the process must be seamlessly integrated to succeed. It has to start before the program is implemented and announced. That's the key to its success.

Personalized communication - Is it lack of data or resolve?

The CMO council in its new global survey, "The Power of Personalization"  has some interesting pointers on potential opportunities that enterprises have in exploting this approach and strategy.

According to the survey:

• Inadequate customer data is the key obstacle facing top marketing executives in their adoption of personalized communication techniques.
• Many CMOs feel the process of developing individualized marketing messages is still largely under-utilized and under-tested.
• More than 55 percent of respondents plan to allocate 10 percent or more of their marketing budgets towards personalized communications, despite their reluctance to declare their personalization efforts successful in the past.
• Many marketers' programs have been deemed unsuccessful because of a lack of actionable customer data used in campaign planning -- as well as because of inadequate analytics used in assessing post-campaign effectiveness.
• 55.1 percent of respondents plan to increase their 2008 marketing budget allocations for personalized communications by more than 10 percent.
• 49.1 percent of respondents blamed "inadequate systems and infrastructure" for limiting personalized communication initiatives.
• "Lack of customer data and insight" and "cost and complexity" were also cited as major contributing factors by 46.2 and 43 percent of respondents, respectively.

My View: I personally believe that many marketing departments in companies are struggling with this new order of availability of customer information, left-brain marketing techniques(viz. analytics) and competency to leverage technology tools. Earlier they had to just "inform", now they need to use customer information to "interact". The traditional job roles and responsibilities need changes, as marketing departments need to have people who understand data, technology and interpret individual customer behaviour.I think marketers must learn to use simple tools, extract whatever data is available and show quick-wins rather than wait for technology infrastructure to be perfect to adopt this approach as they scale-up this kind of marketing. Also, product managers must also have under them customer information managers/ executives who could effectively lead this process. It is also important that the silos in organizations have to be brought together by the CEO to ensure information is used effectively for the enterprise rather than a particular line of business. May be new accounting methods of attributing income, because information of a line of business is used for the other, should be designed for wide adoption of such practices in enterprises.In my opinion, personalized marketing is more than just the 'intent', it is the 'intensity' that can make the needle move!    

Do you onboard your customers?

I am not always excited if somebody tells me I have acquired a new customer. I always look at what is in the plan of the marketing & product teams to make these customers use all the features and benefits of the product, so that these customers can be with them for life. Not too many companies pay attention to onboarding customers. They acquire and forget. Or they pay a lot of attention to how to acquire customers but not do enough review of what is done to keep and grow these customers. Kevin Zimmerman, Sr. Editor, at Peppers & Rogers writes:

Consumer electronics companies and retailers are finding out the hard way what happens when you don't educate customers. Take, for example, the recent situation involving the purchase of popular high-definition televisions (HDTVs). According to Forrester Research Analyst James McQuivey, 20 percent of the sets sold have been returned in some U.S. regions, in large part by consumers who didn't realize what they were buying. Per an ESPN/Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research Inc. study, only 64 percent of homes with an HDTV have HD programming via broadcast or cable, and 13 percent of people who own an HD set do not know if they receive an HD signal. McQuivey forecasts the 20 percent figure will drop moving forward, as more retailers see the need to educate customers about the format if they want to avoid such massive returns.

Who's responsible for customer education?

Henry Choy, senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research says ""The store should do a better job of educating customers, the documentation inside the box must be better, cable companies can get more involved,"..

For a moment, if we as marketers think like customers, then count the number of times we would have read an operating manual, the number times we would have used the features that we primarily bought the product for, the number of times a company that we bought the product from, called to tell you if you have understood the features and used them. In my case, it is close to zero. That's the opportunity waiting to be tapped - Onboard your customers and you will realize there's profits to be made for life.

Why developing customer relationship is so hard

Ron got my attention with a lovely post on this topic. He has some very thought-provoking points on various facets of building customer relationships. He picks-up a quote from John Gottman who says:

“Good relationships aren’t about clear communication — they’re about small moments of attachment and intimacy.”. He gives an example of  a 'small moment' that built a relationship with  a customer -

An IT executive traces his loyalty to USAA back to a single phone call. He called the firm to cancel a credit card and insurance policy. The rep said “I hope I’m not overstepping my boundaries, but we’ve found that many customer often cancel products because of events that aren’t related to USAA like a divorce or other family matter. We’ve set up a special department to help customers with these kinds of matters, is this something we might be able to help you with?” Since he was in the middle of the divorce, he took USAA up on that offer and has been a loyal customer since.

He further writes, Gottman also says that:

“Successful couples look for ways to accentuate the positive. They try to say ‘yes’ as often as possible.”

He writes - Gottman’s comment echoes my sentiment that building a relationship isn’t simply about saying “trust us” but saying (and demonstrating) “we trust you.”

How can one institutionalize this process? - My view:

Companies don't necessarily disagree with this philosophy but the truth is getting it working in the trenches(in the marketplace across channels) - that's always the challenge. Companies need to build a robust Customer Interaction Architecture (CIA) that can capture this "pain point' and 'enable' it with tools and triggers to make a difference. I certainly believe every  transaction or complaint or query is an opportunity to build a "Small Moment Customer Interaction Architecture (SMCIA)'.

To make this happen, there is a need to increasingly integrate technology with every marketing processes.

Forrester's ladder of participation and impact on marketing

I was reflecting over the weekend about Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder of Participation. While it was focussed on emerging social technologies, I felt there were some trends, learnings and practices that can be applied from here to refresh marketing thinking, practices, evolving needs to embrace technologies that can make some changes happen and thereby make marketing more relevant to enterprises and CEOs. Let's take a look at this Ladder of Participation first:

I see the marketing eco-system too, taking a very similar shape(with either customers or prospects) in the years to come. The need to 'engage' and run marketing campaigns across a similar ladder is bound to become increasingly important. Marketing will need to 'bucket' its segments of customers or prospects across the spectrum of Inactives to Creators. The 'old world marketing' practice would have stopped with collecters - who I would define as repeat purchasers. Normally, marketing practices would have stopped there.

But, in the 'new world of marketing', customers will be more involved, participative and conversational. Thereby, customers will leave a 'trail of information' behind, in enterprises. For an enterprise, the creators will be the most loyal and demanding. They need to be recognized, valued and encouraged to converse. The ones who do it, will become identifiable and the most important. Also, products/brands will have to become 'information platforms' in such a world. This will also lead to customized design of products and services for them.

The critics are the ones who will have to be 'listened' to. With emerging channels or touch points, the enterprises must open a channel of communication to hear and rectify their problems. They are the ones who can potentially move-up the ladder of participation.

The collectors need to be 'prodded' to talk rather just buy again and again, get them to share their experience and frustrations with the product. And the joiners will have to be moved to become collecters.

This kind of marketing will combine a lot of information, analytical insights, real-time marketing automation to talk to customers in different behavioural states and stages in the ladder. And when enterprises talk of millions and millions of such identified customers or prospects, the need for marketing to deliver scalable, real-time, right-time marketing will only become sacrosanct. The ones who will practice it, will have the ear of CEOs/CFOs and the rest will be left behind.