The pandemic has been a primary driver in disrupting digital marketing. Today, consumers look for highly-personalised content. Right on cue, businesses are upping their game to keep up with the shift in consumer behaviour.

“The need of the hour for marketers is to key out every possible information that is at their disposal and reach out to customers with a customised message. Now, this is not easy to do,” said Somashankar Ghosh, VP, Consumer and Commercial Analytics Practice at Genpact. Along with his colleague, Pramit Dasgupta AVP, Customer Experience Analytics Practice at Genpact, Ghosh delivered a talk titled “Unification and transformation of customer experience and targeting” at MLDS 2021.

Customer Experience

Customer experience has become the place where the functions of marketing, sales, and customer service converge. As per Ghosh, by 2023, 25 percent organisations will integrate the three areas into a single function. That said, currently, 42 percent organisations find working across silos as a significant barrier to streamlining their functions.

“Because customers are always on an anytime/anywhere, digital transformation and in-moment interactions are imperative. Enterprises need to imbibe this in their omni-channel strategies. These channels need to be connected and not merely kept there for the customers to access. The customer experience today depends on the end-to-end touch experience and not just on the end product. In-depth understanding of the customer becomes a key differentiator,” said Ghosh.

Apart from the first-hand knowledge marketers gain on customer behaviour based on customer interaction with the company and other sales data, they must also consider third party data. This helps in understanding what exactly the customer is looking for.

‘Inside-Out and Outside-In View’

“From a customer perspective, the product utility, surrounding experience, and access to support whenever and wherever needed are part of a singular journey in customer experience. This determines a customer’s affinity towards the product, the stickiness to the relationship and brand perception. Unlike traditional marketing functions, nowadays all of these affect profitability. In the inside-out part, these factors operate in silos from a strategic and technical standpoint. Customer experience can only come to life when capitalised through such integrations of data augmented practices,” said Ghosh.

He said the unification of sales, marketing and customer support will depend on three main pillars–data, augmented practices, and agile operations.

Data: Data needs to be managed, understood, and analysed to know whether it is reliable. These days, marketing organisations are particular about accuracy, timeliness and trustworthiness of data.

Data is collected from multiple sources. Data needs to be managed efficiently for it to be effective. Collecting data and aligning them helps in understanding the customer.  It requires optimal usage, measurement and analysis of relevant data from sources coming together in an assimilated data queue — this is how efficiency leads to effectiveness. It is a mammoth task. However, when data does become truly effective, it positively influences the outcome.

Augmented Intelligence: This has more to do with AI’s role as an assistive technology in enhancing human intelligence and insights. “The use of human judgement to enable the best possible decision at the right time to improve the decision-making process using technology is Augmented intelligence,” explained Ghosh

Agile Operation: Agile operation helps to transform data into insight and make it more consumable. This includes the execution of lean six sigma. In terms of customer experience, it addresses the need for a system to adapt to changing and uncertain environments. With newer technologies emerging, it is imperative that operations remain open to changes.