A nimble way to innovate, test and learn
In the recently published ‘The Path to 2020. Marketers seize the Customer Experience’ by the Economist who surveyed 499 senior marketing professionals more substance is given to how the role of marketing is changing, mainly how to drive personalised engagement at scale as a driver of customer loyalty and value.
86% of those surveyed believe they will own the end to end customer experience by 2020, enabling them to deliver their marketing everywhere, anytime and across platforms BUT the key to driving performance with this new found mandate will be delivering a contextually relevant customer experience consistently across the diverse channels used by their customers with 63% of them expecting social media to be the primary channel.
This shift requires different capabilities but also a new approach to how to organise the business around the customer and use insight intelligently to inform strategies and measure outcomes. There is help at hand. It comes in the form of Customer Hubs. A nimble new working structure which puts cross functional teams together to engage and respond in real time to how customers search, review and act on content, products and how they are delivered across touch points.
For those of us who have the battle scars from trying to convince internal constituents to invest in new innovations, Customer Hubs provides tangible evidence for what is working and how customers are responding to new ideas in preparation for full market roll out and investment.
The Hub is Real-time. It uses insight and data to provide a theatre of engagement for the Hub team and those in the organisation to ‘see for themselves’ how customers are responding to initiatives.
The Hub puts the right people in the same space. Facilitating alignment between marketing, sales, customer service, analytics and change management a select group of colleagues from these disciplines are brought together, working seamlessly in one common physical space with one agenda.
The Hub creates a shared consciousness. With a common charter and standard ways of working, the hub soon becomes a magnet for the best talent and an opportunity to work in a high performing team tasked with innovating, testing and learning.
The Hub is practical yet robust. Using an approach created by experienced practitioners and a tool set to enable speed and effectiveness, teams can get going with their Customer Hub quickly and start learning by doing.
