Chief Marketing Officers today are faced with a problem. A shift is occurring in the marketing universe – a shift away from the traditional funnel and towards a holistic view of the customer journey. The answer to this problem is to operationalize the shift and create a new scorecard to measure the new results.
We recently conducted a webinar, Quantifying the Customer Journey, that addressed this very problem. At the beginning of the webinar, we conducted the following poll:
Do you have customer journey maps that are operationalized and institutionalized across all customer-facing functions in the company?
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- 12% — Yes
- 54% — No
- 31% — Working on it as we speak
- 4% — What are you talking about??
Clearly, we can see from the results of this poll that the customer journey is a very important part of the CMO’s job today.
Digital customer experience is an exciting business opportunity that pays. Econsultancy conducted a survey for Digital Marketing Trends, asking companies to state the single most exciting opportunity for 2018. Customer experience (CX) came in first, beating out content marketing and mobile marketing!
How do we go from an exciting business opportunity to quantifying the journey/customer-centric approach? What is standing in our way?
Our current view of the marketing world, the traditional funnel, is holding us back. While at one-time groundbreaking, traditional funnel marketing is now a limited view of the marketing universe. It does not take into account the entire customer journey.
We need a larger, more realistic view of the customer journey. In today’s customer engagement economy, you need to shift to a customer-centric view. A new view requires new metrics, so how will you quantify this shift?
Operationalizing and quantifying the new model can be done in three steps. First, ensure the mind shift. Next, nail the tactical shift. Third, collaborate on the MarTech shift.
1. The Mind Shift
Often, the greatest challenge to operationalizing and quantifying the shift to customer centricity is the mind shift because it is dependent on a C-level shift in business strategy – from acquisition of new customers to retention of existing customers. Once this occurs, everything in the business shifts, from sales strategy to customer service to marketing strategy.
The mindset shift occurs in two ways. First, the executive must lead, mandating customer intimacy as a go-to market differentiator and the company must adopt this new strategy. Marketing must then help operationalize customer centricity for the entire company. What does this mean?
Start with the end in mind. How are you going to measure the mindset shift? How does the CEO see it? How does marketing see it? How does sales see it? There should be a top to bottom customer-centric MBO. Sales might measure cross-sell rate improvement. Customer success might measure a decrease in customer complaints within the first 60 days.
There are two things marketing needs to do in order to make the shift. First, define and institutionalize the customer journey; then measure the desired outcomes. To define and institutionalize a holistic customer journey, first document and define the customer lifecycle stages. Next, educate your organization. You must be able to create cross-functional collaboration on steroids. Finally, create customer-centric SOPs for customer service and support, sales and marketing.
Second, you will measure the desired outcomes by adding new items to your scorecard. You will be able to measure the adoption of your new customer journey model by adherence to the new SOPs. Enact training and certification programs, and make sure that customer-centric MBOs are in place.
2. The Tactical Shift
Nailing the tactical shift in marketing involves adopting new tactics and adjusting current tactics. Marketing will now own a significant piece of the customer journey. Marketing will need to perform in-depth customer analysis based on the entire customer journey as well as engage in cross-functional collaboration with new groups (including customer service, customer success and services).
Adjust your current tactics to reflect your new shift. Your content should reflect the new stages of the customer journey. Your campaigns should be focused for cross-sell/up-sell and should be centered on customer on-boarding, renewal and loyalty. Events should center around customer loyalty and customer conferences.
This tactical shift will also add new things to your scorecard. You will be able to establish and optimize a set of predictive customer metrics, VOC metrics and loyalty/advocacy metrics.
3. The MarTech Shift
The MarTech shift involves cross-functional collaboration with all customer-facing functions to build an extended ecosystem. You will want to focus on how you buy MarTech, who uses it and how it’s used. New things you’ll add to your scorecard include technology buying SOPs, adoption metrics, data governance SOPs and connectivity.
A New Scorecard
The new scorecard includes metrics from all stages of the customer journey. Below is an example of possible tactics. With a model that takes into account the entire customer journey:
- There is more to measure.
- There are new things to measure.
- Working with other functions on measures.
- How all the measures work together.
There’s no doubt that customer journey work is hard – it’s a team sport, and it forever changes the role of marketing. Check out the recording of our webinar, Quantifying the Customer Journey, to learn more about how you can shift away from the traditional funnel and towards a holistic view of the customer journey.
