How do marketers spend their day at work? They would like to spend a lot of time engaging with their customers and prospects. The reality is a bit different. Paul Writer spoke to some of the leading marketers in India, and found that they end up spending a lot of time in collaborating and negotiating with their colleagues and partners. As one marketer at our recent CMO Roundtable put it, I’m communicating upwards, downwards and sidewards all day long. Is this the best usage of valuable marketing time?
Marketers have been successful in creating seamless omni-channel experiences for their customers. Most customer-facing processes are pretty smooth or in the process of getting there. But omni-channel also means a huge increase in the number of agency partners (typically one per channel) and number of seller partners (at least one per channel) and digital has led to a lot of geography expansion which also increases non co-located colleagues. Since omni-channel happens in (or near) real-time there is also a greater need to collaborate and keeping communication and updates on real time becomes imperative.
The important functions for marketers are alignment, resourcing, communication and progress review. However, organizational priorities mean that in reality marketers end up spending their time in preparing reports, trying to slice and splice data residing in multiple locations and in various formats. Other time-eaters are issues like divisional silos where each department is not connected to the other in real time. So even as the client receives an omni-channel experience the internal communications are only multi-channel as the different elements are tied but requires patching to synch.
To make their lives more productive, marketers need to use the appropriate tech to make internal communication as seamless as the omni-channel customer experience they envisage for their customers
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