Brands are continuing to focus on customer centricity and the strategies to gain share in the market. Whether it is organizing data around customers, anticipating the customer journey, or implementing addressability at scale, putting the customer first is an integral function for future growth.
Customer centricity is more than a marketing trend. Moving toward customer centricity isn’t just a shift in focus from targeting cookies to real people. It’s a different marketing mindset that will transform brands’ internal processes and business models.
Salesforce Research recently surveyed 600 consumer products and retail marketers to learn how they responded to these industry changes and the challenges. Three key findings include:
- Top consumer products and retail marketers collaborate across business units to deliver personalized, omni-channel customer experiences. They’re 22x more likely than underperformers to say they are excellent at creating personalized omni-channel customer experiences.
- 62 percent of top consumer products and retail marketers said they’ve integrated systems to create a single view of the customer compared to only 1 percent of underperformers.
- 89 percent of top consumer products and retail marketers believe that a customer journey strategy is critical to the success of their overall marketing strategy, compared to only 46 percent of underperformers who share the same belief.
An underlying theme of the Salesforce research key findings is that an effective customer-centric strategy demands internal transformation. DESTINATION CRM outlined some important trends that speak to a needed shift:
- Department silos will continue to fall. Traditionally, sales, service, and marketing have acted independently. “The megatrend of customer success is breaking down the barriers between sales, marketing, and service,” explains John Ragsdale, vice president and research director at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA).
- Technologies will converge. Businesses will grow weary of so-called best-of-breed solutions that present integration, implementation, and deployment challenges. This is especially important considering that most companies still buy their CRM technologies in separate pieces for each individual department.
- Knowledge sharing and collaboration will increase. Data must be readily available across department lines. “The transition we’re seeing is that [businesses are] realizing that the way to really move with the customer at scale, and with the speed of the customer journey, is to look to systems of insight rather than information,” says Jeff Nicholson, vice president of CRM product marketing at Pegasystems.
Interested in learning about more marketing trends and predictions? Read our white paper, People-Based Marketing: CRM in the Digital Age.
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