Data-driven marketers of the future must improve CX to generate revenue and lower costs
Data is marketers’ and customer experience (CX) professionals’ most important asset to deliver hyper-personalized, meaningful, and transparent customer experiences that improve engagement.
Companies need to know their customers in order to grow their business and meet their goal to deliver experiences that result in repeat and enthusiastic customers. But that’s no longer enough. Marketers are now facing pressure to not only meet or exceed customer expectations, but also drive growth and generate revenue.
A CMO Council global marketer survey revealed that 91 percent of marketers said senior management and board members expect them to drive measurable growth. One in three said their business leaders felt that driving this growth was the primary mandate of marketers today.
The role of marketers is rapidly changing from improving the customer journey to using data to foster growth, improve ROI, minimize customer churn, and improve customer lifetime value. “In other words, success all comes down to leveraging data effectively,” according to the CMO Council.
Solving marketers’ top data challenges
Marketers know their strategies must be data driven. The challenge isn't a lack of data—more data from more sources is available than ever before. It’s not because of a lack of Mar Tech tools—there are more of those on the market than ever. According to the CMO survey, the main challenges to realizing greater value from internal data assets were:
- Gaps in technology systems that fail to connect data into a single customer view
- Inaccessible data trapped in individual touchpoints and platforms
- Team lacks skills to fully unlock data and apply intelligence
A solution to these and other pain points is a modern data platform that brings together all available data. For example, a product like Teradata Vantage™, the cloud data analytics platform that is built for a hybrid multi-cloud environment, unifies data lakes, data warehouses, analytics, new data sources, and data types. This gives marketers a complete customer view across all touchpoints.
Understanding customers and using behavior data to personalize and establish relationships, and deliver real-time experiences, can be a differentiator in the consumer economy. As the CMO Council noted, “…marketers believed that leveraging data more effectively would lead to engagements and organizations that are more collaborative, customer centric, efficient, connected, responsive, and profitable.”
Overcome the data silo problem
Data and analytic silos continue to plague companies. Various individuals, departments, analysts, and others want to use their own data or shadow IT to get what they need quickly. Businesses and users know this limits insights, relies on partial or outdated data, and does not provide a single source of truth, yet the problem persists. Silos continue to pop up and defy best practices for data.
“These data silos are often found in multiple technology stacks, cloud platforms, departments, and customer facing channels with varying levels of data quality,” according to the CMO Council. It says a unified data foundation is needed to turn customer insights into action.
That unified solution is available for marketers. Teradata's hybrid multi-cloud approach solves the problem of data analytic software existing in multiple places as separate silos. It enables an integrated ecosystem that brings together 100 percent of data across the enterprise for easy accessibility. Each part of the ecosystem works together seamlessly for an integrated, complete view of the business, including marketing.
With this platform, isolated channels are brought together for frictionless integration. Each channel knows the customer interactions across the other channels. Marketers are able to deliver consistent customer experiences, regardless of channel.
Improving CX requires a cloud first mentality
The future of business, and marketing, is in the cloud. A cloud-first data analytics platform offers the levels of speed, ability, flexibility, and innovation to answer any question against any data.
Marketers and CX professionals of the future will need this type of platform to bring together more data from more sources to engage customers. Engagement won’t happen at a segment of many customers or even a segment of a few. It’ll happen at a segment of one level, with individuals receiving personalized interactions.
A cloud-first data analytics platform with hyperscability meets the marketing needs of global companies. For example, a telecommunications company with 20 million network subscribers has 5,000 interactions per day and more than 100 billion data points. It executes trillions of interactions per month, runs 100 million queries per day, and has millions of models mostly running in real time to better understand consumer behavior changes and preferences, among other insights. A platform that can handle these massive workloads allows marketers to optimize data as an asset to see, understand, and plan not only for what customers want now, but what they’ll want next.
The CMO Council says the current mandate for marketers is to leverage data in real time across channels and touchpoints in a way that feels personal, relevant, and even anticipatory. Marketers can accomplish this with Vantage CX. It offers the autonomy, visibility, and insights needed to keep pace with ever-growing and changing customer demand. It also delivers the critical capability to turn customer data into insights, and insights into action.
Surprisingly, the CMO Council found that only 3 percent of marketers believe their organization is exceptionally effective in turning data and intelligence into actions. “Delays in insight gathering can mean the difference between failure and success,” the Council points out.
This highlights the need for a solution designed for the unique needs of marketers and CX professionals. A short demo shows how Vantage CX predicts customer needs and optimizes end-to-end customer experiences to help marketers get more value from their data and be more effective at their jobs.
Moving to a cloud-first analytics platform is easy with Teradata Vantage