Marketing in the new world – Part II

As if dealing with the plethora of new age marketing paradigms wasn’t complex enough, marketers now have to grapple with another benchmark called DQ or Digital Quotient. DQ is nothing but a benchmark which determines how robust the company’s digital marketing strategy is and how it is implementing its information technology roadmap effectively. A company’s digital quotient (DQ) is a function of how well defined its long-term digital strategy is, its effectiveness in implementing that strategy, and the strength of its organizational infrastructure and IT. So if you aren’t thinking about DQ today, chances are your marketing is bereft of a very potent and catalytic process that could break or make you. In my journey in understanding how to quickly get on the road to building an effective digital quotient, here are a few thoughts that I have gathered along the way:

• Take that leap today: The Universal Customer Footprint is still some dreams away. If we wait for a streamlined framework to spring up, be able to consolidate all the data and actually be able to create very structured customer patterns, then it will take many years to put this together. Instead what I would recommend is taking small steps, what is the data required for that instance, can we access that from the digital initiatives we have ongoing currently? Does it throw up instances that we can collate?
• Monitor the journey: Eventually the customer’s journey has to integrate- i.e how do they access information, their buyer’s online preferences, their in-store experiences, all this will start overlapping over a period of time. The ability for the digital marketing arm of the enterprise to capture all the milestones in the journey means a very strong collaboration with the CIO and technology arm.
• Start small: It’s the best way to pick up gaps in strategy and execution, and also allows regional and central teams to sift through the maze of corporate policies, regional cultural nuances and preferences.
• Culture matters: I recently spoke to the global digital leader of a very well- known cosmetic brand who mentioned how they sell in Latam is radically different from Russia or India where the buying and paying preferences range from instalments to credit purchases for their very niche range of products. That also has a profound impact on the way you create your digital marketing and ecommerce strategies in country.
• Be Smart and Prioritize: Let’s get this one right. Tools and fancy systems can’t beat smart decisions, and a thought through process design that is aligned with the business imperatives.
• Get Leadership to adapt: See, digital won’t go away even if you wish for it. It’s not just another channel that you can tell the CMO to budget for. Its radical, its different, it has the potential to change the way we operate because it just means decisions are now more and more about data, more and more about dynamic customer preferences. And that means we don’t have too much time to sit back and allow the data to befuddle us.
• Enable Collaboration: It always was key to success- just that it has become mandatory now. How can channels interact, how can I create collaborative patterns for my product, regional, sales, delivery teams. Well, the problem just gets more complex because the data is getting complicated too. How can I enable information to flow faster, how do I create better cross functional collaboration. That is the key.

Let’s see how you build your DQ today!

Through the looking glass

The digital revolution has forever changed the balance of power, putting customers in control. They confuse us with their digital choices, tease us with their online preferences and flummox us with their ability to make instant buying decisions online. In the digital age, marketing initiatives must be backed by reams of relevant data about customers. Data that must correlate dynamic customer choices, map their digital choices and create digital heat maps almost instantly. Are CMOs equipped to run this fast with the dynamic landscapes? Big Data, Analytics, Cloud, Social Media – these words have ceased to be mere buzzwords and now find a huge mandate in the CMO’s playbook, as key to staying relevant. Age old media ratings have given way to unique digital footprints.

The CMO imperatives have changed around- how do you work with the CIO to determine what technologies you need to invest in now.? The CMO needs to find answers to these questions to continue to stay relevant.

So is technology here to stay? What does this mean us as CMOs? How do we brave this whole new world? How do we market in the technology era? For a marketer who straddled the pre digital era and is still unravelling the digital technology maze, I can tell you it pays to:

Be Aligned.

How closely the CMO is aligned to the larger business goals, determines to a large extent investments in marketing technologies that impact funnel management, employee productivity and customer connect. It is not a question of whether you need X technology or Y application. It all depends on the business objectives you are trying to achieve.

Be involved.

Many CMOs continue to focus on overall marketing budgets and leave the technology decisions to the CIO. Technology is imperative but not at the cost of understanding how our differently our customers respond to technology. For instance when our company’s agents, interact with our customer’s customers, the younger set consumers can readily accept non -invasive technology intrusions in their interactions, whereas some of our customers who are in the middle age bracket still prefer a voice based interactive communication with a real person behind the phone. Understand where your customers are. Understand how they like to be sold. That is critical and it brings me to another interesting aspect of selling in the digital era- culture

Know your audience.

Very often CMOs tend to get swayed by the glamour of new technologies or the latest “cool app” to have. While the age of the digital marketer means CMOs need to always be one step ahead as far as technology adoption goes, it cannot be at the cost of ignoring what our customers want. Different strata of internal and external customers use technology differently or respond to it differently. Often cultural preferences, choice of interaction channels and ease of technology adoption varies across a global customer base. It will be suicidal to paint them all with a single brushstroke. Different strokes for different folks is often the rule of the game provided CMOs have enough insights that their big data and social media engagement channels throw up.

Make the CIO your tech buddy.

Let me admit it – I am not the most up to date when it comes to the latest technology advancements. But I know my CIO certainly is. It pays to have a CIO on your side who understands your imperatives and is able and willing to help you navigate the maze of apps and infrastructure world to help you achieve your goals.

In this age of collaboration, CMOs who earlier worked closely with the CEO and CFOs must now make time and space for their latest ally- the CIO. Technology has become the looking glass through which CMOs view and gain many insights-customer behavior, preferences, choices, and of course the cost of providing those choices. Let us not allow technology to scare or scar us. Technology is what will help us get to that somewhere else. Let’s run.

Balancing Technology & Business

Recently, there has been a lot of ocean churning over whether it is the CIO or business that has control over technology spend. Much of this has been due to a wide gap between the promise and actual realization of business potential by technology. For a better part of the last half decade, CIOs have seen their budgets squeezed to the bare minimum, innovation initiatives sandboxed, very heavy cost cuts and micromanagement of IT departments. To add to this, new age digital technologies, including the big three of Cloud, Analytics and Mobility have given businesses more control over IT Department’s business and technical context.

But as to whether businesses simply do away with the CIO office, the answer is a resounding no. While businesses and end users are increasingly recommending and buying technology, they simply cannot handle complications beyond a certain point. Not to mention addressing inter-departmental dependencies and shared technologies.

Gartner predicted that by 2017, businesses will largely control the technology spend of an enterprise. However, CIOs are undisputed owners of a huge chunk of an enterprise’s technology resources, given the context above. Therefore, while the CIO will still control the IT spend for the immediate future; the above-mentioned factors have made it inevitable for CIOs to close the gap between the promise of technology and delivery by technology quickly.

The new business-led enterprise has thrown up some critical areas for the CIO to address. First, where businesses make a find of a particular technology that can be rolled out across the organization. Second, security around new technologies introduced into the organization. Third, the incubation and acceleration of technology ideas independent of businesses that are relevant to the larger enterprise. These, in addition to meeting all the current budgetary and headcount straitjackets dished out liberally by the enterprise to the CIO organization.

The new CIO organization of today will have to be a completely different animal to bring about the Technology-Business balance. It has to change from being largely a reactive Keep-The-Lights-On (KTLO) organization to being a proactive Driver-for-Growth organization. It must put into place processes to balance demand and supply, ensure enterprise agility, while keeping a tight vigil on business impact, risk management, and cost to serve. It must also prevent uncontrolled IT activity. And to do this, it has to evolve real world strategies – technologies, processes and practices, to meet future realities and expectations, and especially the increasing clamor for digital technologies. It must also make an effort to understand the requirements of businesses to achieve this balance. A prudent approach would be to initiate “Internal Partnerships” with businesses.

Clearly, the CIOs have their task cut out and a clear mandate on hand for what and how things have to be done. A good starting point for this would be to look at new technologies that could be brought in, getting rid of obsolete ones, modifying and continuing to use what can be used, and dumping random suggestions for the so called “New and Excellent” technologies. CIOs currently focusing on Integration, Orchestration of Information Technology, Information Systems to keep the lights on, have to quickly get in the Business Relationship Managers in their group to balance between Business and Technology.

Securing the winds of change

The current meteoric rise in BYOD (Bring You Own Device) has clearly shown that it is on the expected trajectory in the process of delivering on its promises of better innovation, mobility, finer work-life balance combined with significantly improved productivity. There is a clear and strong desire for BYOD programs, resulting from an increased BYOD mandate led by large enterprises. However, like any other new technology or process that is implemented, security has become a prime and critical aspect in implementing BYOD in any enterprise.

Inevitably, the onus of ensuring this security falls on IT, and specifically, on the CIO in every single organization that is adapting BYOD. This increasing pressure to manage and secure devices and data is having an impact across the IT organization, from Application Development to Support to Security and Compliance. In addition, there is a collateral effect on budgets and network performance as well. Till now however, much of apprehensions around costs, privacy and data security have been pushed under the carpet giving way to convenience instead. However, given the gaining momentum of BYOD in the enterprise, it is getting difficult to ignore these security concerns any longer.

IT organizations must pick up the mantle of balancing the benefits of BYOD with the onus of mitigating increased security threats. This must take into account the inherent users’ desire to choose their own device versus the CIO’s mandate to secure enterprise boundaries. Just beginning to get out of its nascence, some initial BYOD security aspects revolve around separate personal and company smartphones, and signing off of some privacy rights. However, this is simply insufficient.

In the last couple of years, new vendors for Mobile Device Management, or MDM, have been mushrooming across the globe. Millions of dollars has been invested in MDM start-ups. These vendors offer a huge choice of pre-packaged, integrated and standalone tools and solutions to manage sandboxed enterprise applications, corporate data containers and secure Web browser environments. While this has extended options of security, costs and technology to the IT organization, this very choice has led to confusion in the enterprise market, especially the CIO decisions.

The challenge of managing security for a BYOD environment is a massive one. Apart from costs, the CIO has to take into consideration multiple other aspects from the business perspective including Security Monitoring, Device Management and Vulnerability Management. It therefore becomes crucial to have a realistic, balanced and mature view in place to help evaluate and decide on the technology risk while taking all the above-mentioned factors into consideration. Specific policies help, but what enterprises need is a matured and stable partner who can ensure end to end security – preferably a Security Operations Centre…that can integrate MDM or security for BYOD mobile devices with the security strategy of the company.

Marketing in the new world

The marketing landscape has changed more over the last five years than it did over the last 50. Social media has crunched the change in marketing tools, systems and the whole playing field by about a century, it would seem and changed the communication industry beyond recognition.

No one can really claim to understand what social media is about. Today it is the biggest area of excitement, concern as well as awe. For marketing professionals, the new media is a paradox, great power but with great responsibility. Though it is merely a medium, the communication opportunities and insights it can potentially provide can make or break in equal measure. A couple of things deserve special mention in this new business paradigm.

Firstly, till a few years ago, messaging was completely dependent on what you wanted to tell the market. But social media has turned that upside down. Today, it is the customer who validates the message, decides the effect and reacts accordingly. In addition, social media gives the customer the ability to derive real time insights and even amplify those insights in the market. We marketers need to be extremely wary and quick on our toes. With negligible control over the effect of our messaging, there is no option of unreal information or overrated claims.

The biggest challenge facing marketers is- how do I give my client a personalised experience while offering the advantage that mass production creates?  Today, organisations that can effectively use social media to understand what the customers want and provide the exact fit are the successful ones. Increasing mobility has added real time knowledge sharing to the existing networks and the oceans of opinions is going larger through social media. This also warrants quick responses and quicker utilization of opportunities that are thrown up.   The individual’s group connectivity is another factor that marketers have to learn to utilise effectively.

Added to these is the fact that the new generation is wired for technology, making old communication techniques redundant. Theworldwide web has made the whole world a teeming marketplace where all the wares and their sellers are trying to outshout each other in a bid to be heard. In the meantime, this is also a hotbed of customer information, and in fact there are agencies that are using analytics applications to churn out data on what customers want.

There are newer tools to determine the customer preferences. Increasingly demanding preferences are being efficiently met. Tools that impart the ability to churn a lot of that information into actionable products are cutting a clear path through the chaos.

Technology thus helps make sense of the new upside down world, where customer is not only king but also the state, and sellers need to work on a completely gutted playing field.

How Big Data, smart Analytics is reducing subscribers’ churn

Today, even a small reduction in subscriber churn can result in millions worth of benefit for service providers. Studies have shown, acquiring new customers’ can cost up to five times more than satisfying and retaining existing customers.

In the past analyzing reasons why a customer has decided to stop being a customer used to be a straightforward task because the data was limited, but in the era of Big Data, a host of data dimensions are given due consideration that can no longer ‘just be ignored’, making it a much more complicated task. With Big Data, we can now gain deeper and more relevant insight into customer behavior, enabling companies to providing better customer service and increasing revenue significantly.

Aware of the potentially huge financial impact of subscriber churn, and the advantage of operating in an environment with abundant customer data, most of the providers traditionally, have invested in human capital and technological infrastructure to enable the use of this data to understand customer churn & tried to predict the same using predictive statistical modelling. The process and methodologies adopted reveal a right mix of variables to predict churn.

How then does big data help us in variable selection and transformation? Let’s visualize the unstructured big data. Visualizing the data takes fraction of time it would traditionally take to identify not so obvious events & patterns. Natural Language processing & Sentiment analysis can reveal consumer’s emotional gradient as expressed in speech, social media, emails and other unstructured forms of data. Employing big data techniques coupled with sharp business acumen, reveals event and even sequences that lead to churn, that in turn can be transformed into variables that feed back into our traditional models.

Integrating new data about customers from emerging contact points gives much more meaningful insights into customer behaviour that can in turn be tested and closely acted upon. These inputs not only give us more in-depth understanding of customer behaviour but also help incrementally update the methodologies for churn modelling while increasing accuracy of existing models that have been traditionally adopted.

The service providers can accurately predict on basis of customer behaviour, likelihood of the customer to churn, if they know which customers are at high risk of churn and when they will churn, they are able to design customized customer communication and treatment programs in a timely efficient manner

BYOD – Freedom and Responsibility

Mobility is a multi-faceted asset, but some of the value it adds may actually be a cause for concern, especially in terms of the fine balance between rights and freedom.

This would hold especially true when it is about mobility at the workplace. So one of the biggest challenges technology teams in any enterprise face, is how far to go and where to draw the line.

To ensure a good work-life balance, enterprises today are definitely allowing personal spaces to encroach onto the office time, and in many cases that is unavoidable- just as office work almost always takes up personal space as well. The flexibility to carry personal mobile devices at work will to some extent send out a message that the organisation does appreciate the concept of work-life balance. But while we do believe in allowing mobile devices at work, there are a number of issues that need to be resolved at the end of the day. Common knowledge is that security is a big issue with the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) policy. But we believe the solution is not getting rid of it altogether, but actually setting processes and policies in place that will control the usage and definitely the malpractices or security risks.

The big concern that global companies face is that employees are averse that their personal devices are being monitored and controlled.

While security policies may be effective enough for the present, the proliferation of mobile applications in every sphere of activity leaves constantly evolving gaps in security. What then is our solution? Obviously, as a team that supports the IT and IT security policies of the organisation, we need to ensure complete awareness of the risks involved, and the procedures that will keep enterprise data safe, even in personal devices. They may go beyond the mobile phone or the laptop. The issue of all around holistic security is always a challenge. Enterprise control on corporate data residing in the mobile device will always be the requirement with a BYOD policy in place. But while enterprises have the potential to access personal data; they may not enforce scrutiny,  as a mark of trust.  It is time that employees also have a deeper insight about the balance of BYOD with their corporate responsibility, and a commitment to keeping enterprise data uncompromised. Every employee also needs to feel responsible for the security of corporate assets and information. We bank on this sensitivity, but keep policies in place.

That is the only way to truly have equilibrium between work-life balance, and the responsibility of enterprise security.

Ultimately, the balance has to be about responsible ownership, both by enterprises as well as employees. And in this, enterprises may be more inclined to have some clear policies in place…and also not be shy of enforcing them.

Evolving the model of next generation customer engagement

Who is the Boss? Customer is the Boss.

We hear this all the time. There is a lot of research on the topic of customer engagement but little has been done to adapt to the new ways of engagement using newer technology channels instead of the traditional old ways. This mindset will require a paradigm shift from the marketing, sales and support functions in any organization, to realign their actions and engagements around Engagement, Experience and Value.

Engagements must move from content-aware to context-aware models; services mindset will need to move from quantitative to qualitative experiences. All of this will result in moving to Volumetric to Value-metric customer engagement.

With this basic dynamics in place, we can clearly define three elements that identify differentiated delivery in the current dynamic and often volatile business environment.

A.  Customer engagement re-defined: The transition of communication means that the right type to touch connectivity and hereafter even virtual presence, has forced businesses to relook at how it interacts for every purpose. Simple communication is almost deceased, and when it does take place, it is in a whole environment of interactivity. There is a cluster of co-current communication taking place in the various means available at any given point in time between teams, between clients, and even between support and client organizations. The means of communication has changed irreversibly and unrecognizably, presumably for the better. The outcome of the whole new environment is that this universal interaction paradigm has created the need for context-aware engagement. Social media plays a very significant role in this brave new world of multi-tiered communication and interaction. The environment is almost defined by the various social media applications and thus sets the parameters for customer engagement as well. We need to be mindful of this.

B. Support purpose re-stated: The second element of significance is that a support center is not assessed in terms of numbers, issues resolved ,or services extended in tickets. Today, it is extremely important that the scope of the servicestransforms from being a quantitative cost center to a competitive and qualitative experience function. This move from quantity to quality is what will define the business metrics of efficiency going forward.

C. Volume vs. Value: Client organizations are today looking for better support for the same dollar. In a nutshell, organizations need to push the service process growth from being volumetric to value- metric. This transformation will also offer a tremendous window of opportunity that will present the support side of the client organizations, an opportunity to engage with the end consumer. Awareness of that end of the support will be a source of extremely valuable insights. Riding on this, the industry needs to introspect the current engagement models, redefine customer support and thus create the superlative experience for them.

The added advantage of this kind of mutually beneficial engagement is that it will help a new  operational  paradigm to emerge –  a support model  that adds value as it matures, and that should be the measure of a ‘superlative ’experience.