The importance of channel surfing
Q&A with Carsten Thoma, President of customer engagement and commerce for SAP, the leader in enterprise applications, who explains the importance of understanding the customer journey.
The customer journey today is almost always a meandering one, taking them from one channel to the next, sometimes in minutes. If brands aren’t following those customers across those channels, smarter, more digitally savvy competitors could steal their business, says Carsten Thoma, president of customer engagement and commerce for SAP.
Q: Can you explain how the omnichannel reality of today has changed the game for marketers?
A: Today, as a customer, when you wake up in the morning, you probably have your iPad next to your bed and you can look for a product. You get up, put the TV or radio on, get your coffee, then you take the bus to work. Maybe on the way you see an advertisement on the street, and at the same time you get a promotional offer on your cellphone and might do some more research. Then you get to the office and you use your desktop PC to do additional research. Then, eventually, you go home at night and place an order on your laptop in your home office.
Across that journey, you may have actually changed your channel seven, eight or nine times. So that’s the challenge for marketers today: how can we identify our customer before we even know them and keep them close to what we offer across their journey? You have to be able to offer brand and message consistency, and a context-based experience to the customer across all channels and verticals no matter how complex and disruptive their journey may be.
Q: Because the danger is if you’re not, then a competitor might sneak in somewhere along that journey and intercept your customer?
A: Absolutely. If the consumer has some sort of a digital footprint and you can identify why they’re like you or why potential customers visit your store, you have an opportunity to track down that customer afterwards — it makes a huge difference. The risk from a competitive perspective is that highly automated, electronic, digital-only vendors take your customers away from you because they just know more about the digital footprint of the customer and they offer a better, personalized and context-based experience to the customer.
Q: What would you say if a marketer asked, ‘How do I know CXM isn’t just the latest industry buzzword?’
A: In the end you have what’s called the customer experience, but it’s a result of all the things that I described. It’s fostered by processes, it’s fuelled by data and it gets formed out of the requirements that the customer basically imposes on you. It’s probably the most important point that businesses have to take care of, otherwise they lose the business, it’s that simple.
Q: You’ve already mentioned the significance of the customer journey. But it seems a lot of businesses still talk about the sales funnel. Why should marketers be focused on the customer journey instead?
A: The sales funnel to some degree can only embrace and reflect what you could collect from an identified customer and customer demand, right? But these days, the more customers change their behaviour and know how to navigate their customer journey in an unidentified way, the less complete is the sales funnel. So you really have to basically identify your customer before you know who it is.
The sales funnel is still important, you still have to have it. But as much as the industry shifted from physical to digital, it will shift from a funnel approach to a dynamic journey where you have to identify your prospects.
Q: CXM technology seems to be about data management efficiencies and business processes. How do marketers use these kinds of efficiencies in their processes to build a brand?
A: First and foremost, it would be totally boring if emotions were out of the game. They will always be a factor and this is why brands will always play a role, and why brands have to take over more of the outreach to their potential customer base, because services and products get more comparable. Consumers can get more content and do more analysis on a product and that ability to compare and do that deep research based on product and consumer generated content, it will for sure increase the pressure on brands in general. So it’s even more important that you reach your customer target group and create a customer relationship that is emotional as well. Not only in terms of the product and the brand awareness, but also the journey itself, because I think competition and the risk are increasing year by year.
