“Customer is The King” recites an ancient mantra that never seems so true as it does now, with the customer experience taking center stage. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed expectations, habits and buying behaviors: consumers, even those most reluctant to digitization have, in fact, discovered and appreciated its full potential, finding in the Web not only a channel to buy, but also to educate and entertain themselves. Many of these changes are sure to remain, and as companies grapple with a hiccuping economic recovery, marketers have an opportunity to bring to fruition a momentous transformation that sees the redrawing of the interplay of forces in the relationship between brand and consumer, a relationship that becomes true value for the company itself.
Customer experience and data analytics: thinking about the customer, knowing the customer
Although the concept of customer experience has become part of the everyday life of many corporate entities, so much so that they consider it the main factor in their digital transformation, according to a study conducted by Forrester Research, only 1 in 5 customers consider themselves fully satisfied with the experiences offered by organizations, although in 84% of cases, they claim to be leaders in this area.
User experience, customer care and more: it is clear that on the corporate side there is still a strong tendency to simplify the concept of “customer experience“, relegating it only to certain areas and forgetting how instead it calls into question the entire customer journey in the different physical and digital touchpoints and the interactions that are generated in each of them with the resulting emotional, cognitive, sensory impacts. In such an articulated framework, complex challenges arise for companies that can no longer disregard putting in place levers and skills and strategic as those related to data analysis (data analytics). Opportunities and points of encounter between consumer and brand are multiplying, digital and physical channels are seamlessly alternating: knowing how to collect, normalize and analyze data becomes essential to fully understand customers’ characteristics and interests, but also to stimulate their needs even before they manifest themselves. All this translates into the real possibility of personalizing the customer relationship, with obvious positive impacts on the engagement with the company and its loyalty.
From the 4 P’s to the 4 C’s: the evolution of the marketing mix
In the era of customer experience, the theoretical model of the marketing mix also changes its guise, and the traditional 4 P’s model (product, price, place, promotion) is supplemented by the 4 C’s model that preserves the focus on the customer. Let us briefly summarize the variables involved:
- Customer needs i.e., customer needs and wants
- Customer cost i.e., monetary and non-monetary costs that the customer incurs
- Customer convenience i.e., the convenience of having a particular customer in a portfolio
- Communication with the customer throughout the life cycle (Customer LifeTime Value)
All of this is, of course, to be observed and estimated in the different touchpoints of the customer journey whether they are company-owned (imagine, for example, the physical store) or not (imagine, for example, social channels).
Personalizing the customer experience: the importance of a customer data platform
Personalized communications, the ability to switch between channels, an agile approach to data and audience profiling, real-time engagement, and more: taking a customer centric requires the implementation of technology platforms and solutions that can enable centralized management of data inherent in customers and prospects from different online and offline channels.
This is precisely the case with Blendee: due to its nature as a customer data platform, they enable the collection and normalization of data from different channels at the level of single customer view. No more many silos of data and a compartmentalized management of them, but a single environment where to read and analyze master data, information on buying habits and behaviors, level of engagement of each individual customer, collected from different channels, both physical and digital.
Collecting and normalizing data but not only that: thanks to the contribution of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Blendee transforms data into real wealth by personalizing content in real time: from the website to email, from social networks to SMS, to push notifications and point-of-sale communication.
It is easy to see how the contribution of a customer data platform with marketing automation capabilities such as Blendee is remarkable for implementing a strategy focused on personalizing the customer experience:
- In-depth knowledge of their audience
- Real personalization of the relationship and communication with the customer
- Increased customer loyalty over time
- optimization of investment and acquisition costs
