The most successful brand marketers understand the power of creating engaging positive experiences for their customers during all interactions with their brands. Think of how Disney creates the experience of the most wonderful place on earth in their theme parks and how Apple creates a unique hip and engaging experience within their retail stores even when dealing with customer issues by utilizing their genius bar. Every interaction with a customer, positive or negative, is an opportunity to create a great brand experience. Technology is a key enabler in driving these great brand experiences.
Las Vegas casinos spare no expense to create an incredible service experience for their highest spending patrons through free travel on private jets, free stays in the best suites, and the best entertainment that money can buy. These elite patrons, known as "whales," are served by casino handlers who ensure that every need of a "whale" is met 24x7. But it is impractical for the casinos to extend this level of service much beyond a very elite set of patrons. This is where the role of technology can be utilized by brand marketers to create individualized experiences for the patrons who can only dream of having the means to become a "whale." Just like the "whales," the average patron ("the guppy") is looking for a unique experience and wants to be treated to the highest level of customer service so they can feel like a "whale."
In order for the brand marketer to create this experience for millions of patrons, they must know and understand the unique needs of millions of customers and communicate to them in a relevant and timely fashion. Technology gives the brand marketer a way to greatly increase the velocity of marketing communications and to greatly increase the scale of customers and prospects that can be reached and served. This velocity and scale is what gives the brand marketer the ability to create unique relevant personalized experiences for millions of customers on demand in a cost-efficient manner.No single software package, cloud based or not, can meet all of the complex requirements needed to create the marketing velocity and scale necessary to serve millions of customers. Instead, a complex ecosystem of solutions that are seamlessly integrated is required. This ecosystem of solutions must meet some of the following complex requirements.
- The ecosystem must be able to perform data collection at scale. This data collection capability must be able to collect information from every client interaction across every customer touch point (in-person, web, mobile applications, call centers, service kiosks, etc.). The data collection capability must be able to ingest this massive of amount of data in near real time, and it must cleanse, validate, and integrate the raw data in order to create a complete view of the activities of a customer.
- The ecosystem must be able to process and analyze huge amounts of interaction data, but also additional information about the customer in order to provide insights to the brand marketer. These insights are used by the marketer to develop unique and relevant messages for each client. The analysis must also give the brand marketer the information to know which messages are resonating with customers and which are not relevant in real-time customer exchanges
- The ecosystem must be able to create and store a huge amount of marketing content and collateral. This marketing content must be interesting, compelling and relevant to each customer. This content management capability must provide the brand marketer the ability to create conversations and experiences for each individual customer and interaction scenario.
- Finally, the ecosystem must have a marketing nervous system that links all the customer touch points with the relevant customer conversations and experiences. The marketing nervous system needs to be able to react to customer inputs and deliver relevant content and messages to that customer. This is very different than traditional marketing techniques that are campaign based. The marketing nervous system reacts to inputs from the customer and responds back with the relevant conversations, messages and compelling content.
Brand marketers can apply an individualized and highly valued experience to each and every customer every day by leveraging this integrated ecosystem of technology-based solutions.
