SINGAPORE – Amidst entirely new levels of complexity, marketers are absolutely critical to
business recovery. So what do we need to know, and where do we go from here?
Customer experience has never been as significant as it is today. In a Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report, 84% of customers said the experience a brand or business provides is as important as its products or services.
What does this have to do with marketing? A lot, in fact. In high-performing organizations, marketers lead customer experience initiatives.
Another recent Salesforce report — the sixth edition of State of Marketing, a study of almost 7,000 global marketing leaders early this year — revealed 69% of marketers believe traditional marketing roles limit customer engagement. This is because they focus on a specific stage of the sales funnel, or on specific tactics such as social or email, rather than working across the entire customer journey.
The time has come for dramatic change, and State of Marketing offered an image of what that change might look like.
In the Philippines, marketers told us their number one success metric was customer satisfaction as opposed to revenue, which is what most other territories say they focus on. This demonstrates an exceptional level of maturity and vision in the Philippine marketing space.
Philippine marketers also said their top priorities were to improve their use of tools and technologies, which in turn will help them to work across the entire customer journey and therefore boost customer experience. Many other territories around the globe instead reported their focus would be on innovation.
What types of technologies? Philippine marketing leaders said virtual reality and voice technology would likely have the greatest impact over the next decade. AI will also be used to improve customer segmentation and lookalike audience modelling, as well as personalising the customer journey.
These priorities and technologies will no doubt help with the biggest challenges perceived by Philippine marketers, which are the unification of customer data sources and the sharing of a unified view of that customer data across business units.
This all represents excellent thought leadership and best practice strategy as businesses enter a difficult period of recovery. It will help businesses to keep up with customer expectations, which has doubled down on empathy. That will be important in the Philippines, where the research told us just 67% of marketers share common goals and metrics with service teams. This was the lowest figure of all countries in the study, with most in the 80% to 90% band.
“Just as businesses do, customers feel shaken and uncertain during the post-COVID period,” says Jess O’Reilly, area vice president, Cloud Sales ASEAN at Salesforce. “Empathy is what they’re experiencing from the best-performing businesses, and so it’s now what they expect from all businesses.”
These trends, customer expectations and much more will be discussed at Salesforce Live: Asia, a free virtual event, streaming live on Wednesday, July 8. Customer Trailblazers successfully navigating today’s complex business landscape speaking at the event will include ABS-CBN, PLDT, Globe and Meralco.
For more marketing insights download the sixth edition of the State of Marketing report.
