Marketers need to champion customer experience (CX), but for an organisation to be truly customer centric the whole business needs to be driving these initiatives forward says the chair of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI), Andrew Thornton.
Thornton was speaking at the AMI's CX Marketing Summit this morning and he outlined that customers today have never been more savvy and better educated, so in order for businesses to differentiate themselves they need to have customer experience management processes in place.
“In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, effective customer experience management is a critical differentiator for any business – large or small,” he says.
“Done correctly, it will deliver tangible business value through repeat sales and referrals from satisfied customers – the type of word of mouth advocacy that marketing budgets can’t buy - resulting in increased revenue and profit for your business,” he added.
Thornton defined customer experience management as understanding and reacting to all of your customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations; the aim is to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and ultimately advocacy. In turn, this results in measurable outcomes to the business and a win-win for both the customer and the business.
Adding that marketers play a key driving role in customer experience management – but there must be a whole of business approach to truly succeed.
As well as being chair of the AMI, Thornton is co-founder and director of The Customer Edge, a business that focuses on CX strategy and during his talk he outlined a framework that his business uses when trying to understand how ready a business is to become truly customer centric.
The framework centres around if a business is in the right mindset, if it knows it customers well and the processes it already has in place to support the delivery of great customer experiences.
“Many of the customers we engage with are doing well in some aspects of the framework, but not in others. The aim is to get to a position of balance and consistency across all critical facets of the framework,” he says.
Late last year, The Customer Edge undertook a survey of business owners and leaders that revealed that, whilst 100% of respondents said that a business would be more successful if it consistently met customers needs, only 30% stated that the business they worked within actually did so.
Speaking with his AMI chair “hat” on, Thornton also outlined that it's never been a better time to be a marketer, noting that the reach and scale of marketing continues to grow.
Research indicates that one in two adults in the working population state that they have at least one aspect of their role related to marketing, with 16 out of 25 jobs advertised on LinkedIn are marketing related.
“The status of marketing as a profession continues to increase as more marketers move into C-Suite and CEO positions or take a seat at the board table. Given this, the Australian Marketing Institute – as Australia’s peak body for professional marketers – is more relevant than ever before,” he added.
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