How to Master Customer Signals in the Experience Economy

It has never been more important to harness customer signals and turn them into personalized experiences.

On August 6^th, Rob Tarkoff, EVP, Oracle CX and Data Cloud, delivered the keynote address for the Oracle CX Cloud Virtual Summit on personalized marketing that addressed this very topic. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major changes in both businesses and personal lives with business travel and consumer spending going down and remote working and unemployment claims on the rise.

As a result, Tarkoff thinks, businesses should seek to become more agile and react to customer signals faster by relying on real-time data to create satisfactory experiences. This, in turn, helps strengthen both customer loyalty and retention.

Experiences are everything

In the Experience Economy, Tarkoff says, the customer experience is everything.

What is the Experience Economy?

It means that the experience and what you sell aren’t separate from each other. In fact, a customer’s experience might be more important than your actual products. Customers expect personalized experiences on the channels of their choice and at the times they prefer, and digital marketers only have microseconds to make the right impression and capture their attention. They strive to provide the types of interactions customers prefer, be they more natural conversations, videos, visuals, or something else. Then on the customer journey, one channel must lead seamlessly into the next. Any friction or issues gives the customer the chance to drop off and turn to another brand.

Tarkoff believes that a period of uncertainly calls for superior marketing execution with three things to focus on:

• Brands must be customer centric

• Understanding customers better in order to earn and retain their loyalty is of critical importance

• Marketing teams might have to do more with less

Bearing that in mind, CMOs and other marketing leaders should rethink the experiences their teams create, and ask themselves:

• What kind of experiences are they delivering?

• Are they helping future-proof the business?

• How can they make every customer interaction matter?

How can embracing the Experience Economy help during such a volatile time? Tarkoff thinks that:

• Brands should listen to their customers and take a hard look at the data to create personalized experiences for them

• CMOs and marketing leaders should think beyond just sales and marketing, and empower whomever engages with the customer first to start delivering on an experience that wins them over

• Marketing leaders should make marketing the change agent to help drive future business and their brand

Customer signals tell the tale

You’ll find customer signals in your data. What are customers responding to right now? What emails are they clicking on? What assets are they downloading? What virtual events do they sign up for? They’re telling what they’re interested in by their actions.

Listen to your customers as to how they adapt to the world and interact with your brand. Use that valuable customer data to tweak and revise your marketing personas and campaigns.  Put your customers at the center of all your marketing activities, with your analytics telling how well you are doing and where you might improve.

It’s the time to think differently about how you go about marketing. By differentiating your approach based on customer signals, you can stand out more from the competition.

For more information on how marketers can deal with periods of uncertainty, please read:

• 5 Ways an ABM Approach Can Help Marketers During a Crisis

• 5 Ways Marketing and Sales Should Align During a Crisis or Disaster

• Content Marketing During a Crisis or World Event

• 4 Ways Marketing Teams Are Adjusting to These Times

• 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis