For customers, they only see you as one company. They don’t see the separate departments that make your company what it is. You need personalized experiences to help keep your customers in business with you. You need to look beyond marketing teams to drive superior engagement across the entire customer experience. The strategies we will go into can be integrated across all functions of your business. Below are a few strategies to streamline your customer experience.
Sales
Delivering a connected consumer experience can be a challenge for companies with a large sales organization or partner networks. While corporate teams deliver well with on-brand marketing campaigns, they often fail at scaling to the “last mile” of personal engagement. Local partners and teams are able to deliver on this because they manage their consumer relationships. When you fail to scale to the “last mile”, it can lead to disconnected experiences. This can result in customers feeling as though two different companies are engaging with them. With strategies such as distributed marketing, your marketing teams can empower your sales organization to build 1-to-1 messaging experiences. They can share these with partners and help close deals fasters.
Information Technology (IT)
As brands add more technology to their mix, they need to employ a new layer of staff, such as systems administrators. It’s critical that every organization has a power user and someone who is keeping a watchful eye. They need to be treated with proper management and oversight. High-performing IT and marketing teams collaborate to ensure they unlock new opportunities that will engage their users and drive demand.
Merchandising and Commerce
Robust decision and message orchestration tools will enable marketing, merchandising, and commerce to work cross-functionally to help you create individualized experiences for your customers. Team can leverage the decision engine to create a consistent and relevant experience for each customer. This can happen in real time and doesn’t matter what channel or device they are using. Your customers, budgets, and organizations are able to benefit from having these teams closely aligned on these efforts.
Human Resources (HR)
HR has evolved from a hiring and firing focused position. They have a huge impact on the employee experience. Your HR department needs to embrace technology to help expand its role in your organization. Internal data is now available on just about everything, from how employees are performing to how often they visit certain areas of the office. Leveraging tools like the customer experience can help assist the HR team in making strategic decisions. With this, HR can leverage a robust marketing strategy to design personalized and meaningful experiences for employees.
Bringing it All Together
Marketing is a part of every step of the modern customer experience. Your “customer” can include your corporate partners and colleagues, as well as your end-user. That’s why it’s your choice which marketing strategies should be integrated across your business to help support the customer lifecycle. Now, it’s no longer just a marketing strategy, but a customer experience strategy.