International pop singer, Ariana Grande, may be known for her catchy tunes on the radio. But did you know, one of her lyrics wraps up customer experience (CX) in a nutshell?
Sing it with me now – “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.”
Doesn’t that just sum up the buyer’s journey, nowadays? You see an ad for a product, you recognize the need for that product, and so you go out and buy the product. While I would personally love to take credit for recognizing this as the “theme song” for CX – this was recognized by the talented, Chief Experience Officer at the American Medical Association, Todd Unger. “Why this song? It’s the best explanation for what CX is that I have ever heard. If you think about the role of customer experience, it is to unify all these elements” Todd shares.
Todd recently spoke at the GDS Group CX Innovation Summit. In his keynote presentation, When Marketing Met Experience, Todd explores how marketing and CX fit together in today’s digital world.
Marketing + CX = Growth
With a background in marketing himself, Todd has come to think that CX could use a little marketing flare and vice versa. “When you talk about experience, we think about actual live experiences such as Starbucks or a cruise…People are like, ‘I had a good experience, or I had a bad experience’ and it was a lot about feelings.” He says that CX can also refer to customer service. However, there needs to be a partnership between marketing and CX for organizational growth and change.
According to LHH a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is responsible for “overseeing the planning, development and execution of an organization’s marketing and advertising initiatives. They play a vital role in a company’s growth and have important responsibilities that range from creative influence to business strategy.” Yet, Deloitte uncovers in several interviews with C-suite executives that half agree having an enterprise-wide mindset is a critical factor in a CMO’s success. However, only “6% of CMOs described themselves as actively working on growing revenue across all global business activities.”
“No one spends enough time on resistance which holds back growth. CX is a lot about thinking through the resistance up front and eliminating it, predicting it, and avoiding it.”
-Todd Unger, American Medical Association
The Wall Street Journal reports that the average tenure for a CMO holds steady at 40 months, the lowest level in over a decade. “The CMO has not been focused enough on growth. CXO & CMO need to focus more on that – how to grow the business,” Todd shares.
Tips for Growth
Digital has transformed the buyer journey and sped things up dramatically. What used to be a slow process of creating awareness of a product, gaining interest, peaking desire, and sparking action – has now become something that happens within seconds. You want to show a customer an ad and instantly drive them to purchase. Back to what Ariana Grande sings, “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.” Because if you don’t get the customer’s attention right off the bat, they are back to scrolling on Tik Tok & Instagram.
This is not an easy feat, but it can be done if you align several teams. What teams need to come together? Todd breaks it down:
- Marketing
- Product
- Commerce
- Service
“It involves marketing people so that the message gets before the right audience. It involves product to make sure you have a great product that delivers. Then commerce, that gets people through that decision to execution and all along the way service, because people need it!” The alignment of these teams will reduce friction, improve the customer journey, and overall lead to growth. The overall job of CX is to predict and of course, avoid that friction. Unfortunately, many businesses still live in silos and find it difficult to align these teams…especially at some global organizations.
Customer Listening Works!
Where’s a good place to start reducing friction? Customer listening can work. Todd shares that AMA moved from a ‘fix it’ to a ‘prevent it’ strategy. They started with customer listening, realizing the problems they were hearing were repetitive – and created action.
“We started an operation called ‘CXOne’ which was rooted in the belief that if there is one problem with one person, there are a lot more that we can fix…as we think about predicting and avoiding friction.”
GDS Summits are tailored 3-day virtual event conferences that bring together business leaders and solution providers to accelerate sales cycles, industry conversations and outcomes. Regarding the CX Innovation Summit 86% of Delegates said the overall experience of Digital Summit they attended was either Above Average or Excellent and 71% of Delegates said the Digital Summit provided them with actionable outcomes to support their current initiatives.
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