Webinar Report: “How to Optimize Omnichannel with Future Ready CX & MarTech Strategies”
We live in an era where the customer calls the shots and businesses need to keep up with their increasing demands and dynamic preferences. If one brand is unwilling or unable to meet these expectations and demands, surely enough, its competitors will. When brands can no longer create differentiation on the basis of price and quality, what will determine its success is the Customer Experience (CX) delivered!
On 11th January 2019, Paul Writer in association with Oracle hosted a webinar about “How to Optimize Omnichannel with Future Ready CX & MarTech Strategies”. The speaker panel included Ajit Belani, AVP Marketing, Aricent, who shared a practitioner’s viewpoint on CX and Naval Khosla, Sales Consulting, CX, Oracle India, who addressed the challenges faced by organizations and the chasm of expectations that exists today.
During the first session, Belani, rightly captured the essence of CX saying, “Customer Experience is all about creating a ‘custom’ experience”. He spoke about the five essential steps to kickstarting your CX journey:
- Mapping out your customer journey: To manage CX you need to understand your customer journey. Create your customer journey-map and identify the channels that your customers are present on
- Work with your key internal stakeholders: Apart from marketing, there are other stakeholders that deal with your customers on a daily basis such as sales, customer support, delivery, etc. It is important to ensure that all the stakeholders understand the entire customer journey and the impact of the interactions at different touchpoints.
- Create appropriate content for each step of the journey: Once you have the journey mapped out, create relevant content to influence the customer journey and help them progress by engaging your potential customers at every step
- Technology: Understand your technology requirements and invest in appropriate tools and technology to manage your CX
- Privacy Laws: In a changing environment today with stricter data privacy laws like GDPR, you need robust technology and tools to ensure compliance
Belani concluded his session saying, “70-75% of the sales cycle is completed by the customer before they reach out to your organization with a sales inquiry. The campaigns that we run have changed from broad-based campaigns to focused and incisive campaigns based on insights into customer behaviour. Tools and technology available today has not only led to better engagement and increased response rate but also provides metrics that allow us to measure customer experiences.”
Naval Khosla took the discussion forward by addressing some of the challenges businesses face such as: Connecting Disparate Interactions to one customer, adapting to changing customer behavior, offering personalized content and keeping up with the dynamic digital ecosystem. He said, “Customer experience will positively impact your organization if you could connect data, adapt & leverage that connected intelligence to offer connected experiences, personalized to your customer needs.”
During the session Khosla also addressed the chasm of expectations and shared a few guidelines on how to create a connected experience across the customer lifecycle:
- Identify Business Transformation Area: Identify the various painpoints that require transformation, adopt the right technology solutions and select the right IT partner.
- Connected Data: In order to recognize your customers anywhere, modern businesses need to connect data collected from various sources to a particular customer.
- Connected Intelligence: Having connected data alone is not sufficient. Innovations through AI, Chatbots, and IOT help generate automated insights and actions involved in servicing and retaining customers.
- Connected Customer Experiences: This connect data and intelligence is critical to the delivery of irresistible, data and insight driven, connected customer experiences
The lively session concluded with a Q&A session with the audience.
