There is so much talk about Customer Experience (CX) – it can get confusing. It’s rapidly becoming one of those terms you hear about so frequently that it loses its real meaning.
For me, its one of the most important terms in our business today: here is why.
For me, Customer Experience is not only about processes, people and technology. It is about feelings and perceptions. More importantly, it’s about your customers’ feelings and perceptions about your brand. Customer Experience has the power to differentiate you from your competitors in either a positive or negative way.
As the world heads Social – this is what is being shared by more and more people. What they love, like or hate, is driven by their perceptions and often shared on a whim, on a bus, to people who trust them.
So what has this got to do with Marketing Automation? Well, platforms like Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud have the ability to transform your Customer Experience.
Here are a few examples how:
Don’t you remember me?
A centralised preference centre and profile helps to manage what people like and how they would like to be communicated to. This is virtually impossible to do in spreadsheets and with silos of information. Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud helps you to pull this information together and increase its depth through progressive profiling (think LinkedIn or Facebook profile completeness).
Knowing your customers is a great platform for providing exceptional customer service and improving their experience.
You forgot my renewal. I thought you cared about me?
How many times do you hear “the only time we hear from ACME is the week before we are about to renew”? I’d go so far as to say that if you are focused on the renewal, you are focusing on the wrong part of the experience completely.
Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud enables you to develop a series of personalised and tailored communications for each stage of the buyers cycle from the first touch, through education, on boarding, regular touch points and renewal reminders. The renewal date may be an important milestone to you, but it is one of many in your Customers’ Experience.
How did you do that?
Visits to various web pages, emails opened and viewed, landing pages visited and forms submitted, survey responses, and even Social media interactions can all be brought together (we call it Digital Body Language) to form a rich picture of a prospect or customer’s profile, preferences, and engagement. It can give healthy clues to what they may be interested in, and where they are in the sales cycle.
This can help you determine how best to engage (are they ready for a sales call or just learning about you) and what with. We all love timely relevant contacts, and we all hate irrelevant ones. This can have a profound influence on how people feel about your brand.
So why is this important to our business? Well I heard something at the Oracle Eloqua Road to Revenue recently (thank you Michel van Woudenberg) that resonated with everything that I believe in :
“The secret to profitable and organic growth? Provide a Customer Experience that your competitors cannot match”.
Leveraging Marketing Automation to do this is what we are passionate about.
