The need for consistency accompanies us throughout our lives and it is critical in helping us to build relationships of trust, says Paula Sartini, founder and CEO at BrandQuantum. Sartini says that this is demonstrated in all facets of life — right down to the brands that we purchase when shopping. 

Business confidence across the country declined throughout 2019 on the back of the tough economic climate which is expected to continue in 2020. The need to win customers and gain their trust against increasing competition is a key challenge for most companies, as such, customer experience is growing in importance as a key differentiator for companies to attract and retain customers, particularly within a tough economy.

To meet customer expectations, IT needs to be included in the marketing department’s plans and aid in delivering the customer experience at every touchpoint along the customer journey. However, while there is much hype around the benefits of technology and marketing working together, there continues to be a great divide between these departments.

And yet when marketing and technology come together to achieve a common goal they can achieve great things and drive business success.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MELDS MARKETING AND TECHNOLOGY

Customer experience has previously been the marketing department’s responsibility, however, new technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence can transform the delivery of customer experience.

This creates the opportunity for the IT department and marketing department to work together to achieve a unified goal of delivering customer experiences that meet and exceed tech-savvy customer’s expectations.

Both departments offer a diverse range of strengths to organisations. Marketing departments bring a creative and customer-focused approach, whilst IT provides both a technical and problem-solving perspective.

At the same time, marketing is often seen to want to adopt the latest technologies while IT is focused on governance, security and enterprise architecture.

Both of these are critical to the success of a company. As customers are starting to hold companies accountable for keeping their data secure, the role of IT and marketing need to align to meet customer expectations in terms of customer experience as well as in keeping their personal information secure from potential data breaches.

SURVIVING A RECESSION WITH THE HELP OF TECHNOLOGY

The role of technology continues to grow in importance across organisations of all sizes. However, while companies recognise the benefits that technology can bring to various departments, the organisation and the customer experience, in many instances, adoption of these technologies has been slow.

Yet, technology is a critical component to helping companies to overcome several business challenges including helping companies to overcome the impact of a recession.

According to research findings published in Harvard Business Review, recessions can create performance gaps between companies, but investing in digital technology before a recession provides analytics and agile business practices to help companies better understand the threat they face and respond more quickly to market changes.

Based on the findings companies that invested in technology outperformed those that did not during a recession.

There are several factors attributed to the role technology plays in helping companies overcome the impact of a recession.

Firstly, technology provides access to data that gives companies the ability to make decisions to meet their customer’s needs. The technology solutions also provide companies with the flexibility they need to adapt to the environment and respond to their customers with tailored solutions. Technology also aids in cost-cutting which helps the company to save money when it matters the most.

Many of these benefits can spill over into marketing departments, for example, giving marketers access to the right data enables them to make decisions to meet their customer’s needs. They would also benefit from the flexibility that technology allows in adapting to the environment, helping them to develop or change campaigns according to the market.

However, in many instances, marketers have collected customer data for several years, but have not had access to the tools needed to extract and interpret this data. This is where marketing and IT should be working together more closely to improve marketing insights and close the loop on the customer experience.

DELIVERING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The customer experience is a key focus for the marketing department. However, marketers are unable to deliver customer experiences in isolation.

With tech-savvy customers, marketing departments are becoming more reliant on IT departments to develop technology solutions for customers to interact with the company at a time and on a platform that is convenient to them. This experience needs to align with the overall brand experience and requires insights from the marketing department to achieve this.

More broadly, marketers require the support of the entire organisation to meet customer expectations at every touchpoint across the customer journey. This means that the marketing department needs to implement technology solutions that help employees to deliver experiences aligned to the brand in every customer engagement.

According to a report from Forrester, businesses often deploy technologies that aren’t aligned to their business strategies and do not understand how these technologies affect customer journeys. Ultimately, the consumer experience strategy should be central to technology purchasing decisions. The marketing department needs to implement solutions that will help employees across the organisation to deliver consistent brand experiences in every customer interaction.

This will remove pressure on the marketing department to play the role of brand police, give marketers peace of mind that the correct information is being sent to customers and empower employees to meet customer expectations in every interaction. However, marketers also stand to benefit from implementing automation technologies to streamline their functions and help improve efficiencies.

AUTOMATING MARKETING FUNCTIONS

Marketers have a strategic role to play within organisations but are often chasing the next deadline or working on name tags and invitations for an upcoming event. These repetitive tasks can keep marketing departments bogged down in the finer detail and detract them focusing on the broader strategy of the department and the organisation.

In some instances, marketing departments have started implementing automation software that enables them to automate time-consuming repetitive tasks. By implementing these software marketing departments, which are usually made up of a small team of marketers, are freed up to focus on strategic elements of the business while delivering on the brand and marketing elements beautifully without investing a significant amount of time and effort on the delivery.

Marketers are already starting to recognise the value that automation software can bring to their department with the Digital Marketing Institute finding that 44% of marketing leaders believe that automation software will become more important in 2020.

While some strides have been made in terms of bridging the divide between the marketing and technology teams to meet customer’s expectations and deliver consistent customer experiences, in most cases locally marketing and IT continue to work in silos.

However, globally technology and marketing departments are working together more closely and reaping the benefits of this relationship that has a direct impact of improving customer experiences and increasing company profits, helping them to adapt to a customer-centric environment and weather the storms of the tough economic climate.

Brand value can be compromised in a matter of minutes and negatively impact the brand and company, says Paula Sartini, founder and CEO at BrandQuantum. Sartini says that, as such, brand security is an issue that needs constant attention from many departments — including the C-suite — to minimise possible reputational damage.

SECURING YOUR BRAND IS A C-SUITE CHALLENGE

Brand value is a key component to a company's success and it takes several years to establish by implementing a brand strategy that supports the business. However, data hacks are happening more regularly today.

These incidents impact brand reputation and safety and highlight the need for companies to take privacy issues more seriously. The repercussions of not doing so carry serious reputational damage for brands.

According to the IBM 2018 Cost of Data Breach study, if a data breach causes an organisation to lose just 1% of its customers, it will cost the business on average $2.8-million (£2.1-million), and if it loses more than 4% of the customer base the cost is closer to $6-million (£4.7-million). The costs associated with a data breach are made up of lost business, negative impact on reputation and employee time spent on recovery.

As such, companies cannot afford to ignore the reputational risk of a data breach and need to have measures in place to maintain trust with customers.

THE ROLE OF COMPLIANCE AND REGULATION

Customers are often required to provide personal information to companies for a variety of reasons and expect companies to have stringent measures in place to protect this information, as well as mitigate possible risks of data breaches and hacks.

This is supported by findings of a recent study by RSA Security, which identifies that more than 57% of consumers blame companies for data breaches rather than hackers.

Further, the study states that a loss of customer trust is the biggest risk associated with data breaches and hacks. This should be a key concern for every organisation, as once trust is lost, it is near impossible to win it back.

To alleviate some of the risk, countries have introduced regulations such as the local Protection of Privacy (POPI) Act and Europe’s GDPR, to ensure companies operate with transparency, while protecting customer privacy and using data responsibility.

While South Africa is yet to indicate the fines associated with breaches of the POPI Act, the GDPR has announced two tiers of administrative fines for non-compliance: €10-million or 2% of annual global turnover — whichever is higher — and €20-million or 4% of annual global turnover—whichever is higher.

In many instances, this fee is equivalent to the 2-3% marketing budget that organisations assign annually. While this should be a concern for companies, the reputational damage of a breach should be the biggest concern for organisations as it is far greater than the value of a fine.

While government compliance and regulations should be adhered to, companies also need to implement their own compliance and risk standards internally to keep customer data secure from possible hackers and third parties.

For example, marketing departments often use website tools to target customers online and share customer details with third-party companies to create personalised campaigns. Both of these examples expose customer details to third-parties and increase the threat of customer data being hacked.

To combat this, companies need to remove the segregation of duties from a single department and combine the expertise of the marketing, legal and IT departments to build brand trust and mitigate possible brand risks at all times. In doing so, they will be adding additional layers of security to prevent data breaches — both within the company and via potential hackers.

Internal standards

While marketers are generally familiar with the threat of data breaches, in many instances they do not have insight into the particular vulnerabilities associated with marketing data and how to safeguard it. This requires the expertise of both the legal and IT departments to put measures in place to counter the possible risks.

To improve brand security the marketing, IT and legal departments need to work closely together to combine technology, data management, content and customer experience.

In larger organisations, brand security officers have been appointed to focus entirely on protecting the brand reputation of the company. This role is charged with assessing, mitigating and managing marketing risks, while looking at issues such as fraud, viewability and transparency. In essence, this role is responsible for guiding the organisation in terms of data security and customer privacy.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN BRAND SECURITY

While technology is a key challenge for data breaches and fraud, it also has to be part of the solution. Governance, risk and compliance software offers companies a solution to address several of the challenges that they face by automating mundane reporting tasks and providing a single view of the requirements.

However, companies need to also gain visibility into the compliance environment of the future if they are to limit potential risks and threats. Companies cannot rely on a single solution to address potential issues.

They need to safeguard their customer data by implementing solutions that provide internal security standards and equip their customers to prevent possible data hacks and breaches.

Customers are less likely to fall victim of possible phishing scams by using automation software solutions. These solutions help companies deliver consistent brand experiences and provide verification tools.

However, beyond this, the company needs to also have measures in place to prevent, for example, fraudulent emails from being sent from within the organisation, and minimise the possibility of identity theft.

CONSISTENCY AND AUTHENTICITY BUILD TRUST

While marketing departments are faced with the challenge of capturing the imagination of the customer — and ensuring data privacy at the same time — brand consistency and authenticity should be the foundation on which customers establish a relationship of trust.

This is achieved, for example, by using primary fonts that can be harder to replicate, email signatures with built-in verification tools and documents that meet compliance standards — such as correct director details and company addresses.

To achieve this, technology should be implemented to not only automate repetitive tasks, but to ensure that the company is able to establish trust with customers in every interaction.

In addition, technology should be used to provide a layer of added security to the organisation, while providing data and analytics to determine possible risks, mitigate fraudulent activity and gain visibility into how its brand is being used to engage with customers.

Customer trust and a company's reputation is too important to be left to a single department. To be successful in safeguarding customers' details, companies must tackle the challenge from various angles and implement several solutions that make it more challenging for hackers to access their information.

At this time, technology-savvy companies that implement solutions to safeguard their customer data are putting themselves at the forefront against the competition. However, in the future, this will become standard practice to protect their customers and meet their expectations. 

Customer experience is a growing priority for organisations, says Paula Sartini, founder and CEO of BrandQuantum. She says that customer experience is becoming the most critical factor for customers when selecting a brand over others.

Companies need to implement measures to meet customer expectations and deliver consistent customer experiences at every touchpoint. However, this can seem like a monumental task — particularly for organisations that work as silos, assigning specific responsibilities to specific departments.

In today's environment where the customer is king and should be central to every business decision, customer experience can no longer lie on the shoulders of a single department. It needs to be the top strategic measurement for the entire organisation.

To be successful today, companies need to develop a customer-centric strategy that is built from the customer's perspective and designed to meet their specific needs. Companies are adopting technology solutions that aim to delight their tech-savvy customers and enhance customer experiences.

While companies may be keen to adopt technology solutions, often knowing which solutions to select can be a challenge on its own. In addition, legacy systems can also hamper companies from implementing technologies that could potentially be key in improving customer experiences.

Companies should start by putting the 'I' before the 'A'. This means implementing information automation, which utilises intelligent automation. Once this is in place, only then implement AI.

AUTOMATING FUNCTIONS AND HUMANISING INTERACTIONS

Some technologies can sound like the silver bullet that your organisation needs to improve customer experiences and drive company success, but companies should not adopt technology for the sake of technology.

Rather, solutions should be used to enhance the customer experience and assist employees to meet customer needs. Even though customers are tech-savvy and accustomed to using technology solutions to meet their specific needs, technology cannot replace the human touch.

Automation can enhance customer experiences by improving self-help functions that require limited involvement from employees. At the same time, by automating tasks that take time and resources but add little value to the client, employees are freed up and empowered to focus on high-quality, lasting customer engagements that delight the customer.

For example, if a customer is looking for a statement, rather than placing the customer in a queue to speak to an employee, the customer is able to help themselves to access the information they need.

However, if the customer has a query on the statement, it would be more appropriate to have an employee handle the sensitive issue and spend more time meeting the customer's needs and making a difference where it matters the most.

MAKING MAGIC WITH DATA AND AUTOMATION

Automating repetitive tasks can have a significant impact on improving customer experiences. Automation removes repetitive tasks and empowers employees to give customers the personal touch they seek in specific instances. In addition, it can reduce costs and help drive sales and growth.

These benefits alone present a good case for companies to adopt automation technology. Companies would benefit even more so from it if they used data to firstly determine what tasks should be automated and then understand how customer data can be used to enhance experiences.

At the crux, automating repetitive tasks has a significant impact on driving employee satisfaction, which directly impacts on customer engagements. Customer data should be used to add personalisation into your customer engagements.

By understanding your customer behaviour, you are able to target them with offers and deals that are specific to their previous behaviour. You are able to engage them when it matters most and enhance the customer experience beyond the standardised content companies have traditionally relied on to reach out to their customers.

The Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report says that "by transforming big data into customer and market intelligence, [companies will] be able to align their analytics strategy with their business strategy. [They will be able to] design personalised experiences that proactively address customers' needs — using self-service and automation at the right time in the customer journey."

IGNITING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Although technology is able to increase productivity and drive cost-saving, customer experience is about more than the technologies that companies implement. Customer experience is about creating a customer-centric business where the customer is at the centre of everything the business does.

So while there is a benefit in giving customers the tools they need to access self-help services at their convenience, employees need to be given the tools that empower them to deliver high-touch customer experiences at critical times.

To ignite customer experiences, the customer needs to be at the top of the agenda in all boardroom discussions. Additionally, solutions need to be developed and tailored with the customer in mind.

Only when the customer is central to the business strategy and employees across the organisation are equipped with the right tools to meet customer expectations, the company be able to create meaningful customer interactions and enhance the customer experience that drives business success.