While 39% of marketers say they’re getting more value out of technology that analyzes data about campaigns and other programs they run, they’re still missing pieces that will have to come from outside their departments, according to the latest CMO Council report.
The San Jose, Calif.-based association released Context, Commerce and Customer: Best Practices to Exceed Expectations, based on responses from close to 200 U.S. executives who were polled over the first quarter of this year. After years of exploring products like marketing automation and customer relationship management, the effort appears to be paying off: 52% said technology and processes are working together at least “moderately well, with some being seamless, while another 21% said all processes are working together most of the time.
On the other hand, 55% said they are working on strategies that would bring in data from other points along the customer journey, even though 17% said that kind of holistic perspective may not be possible.
Liz Miller, the CMO Council’s vice-president of marketing, told Marketing the research showed a need for more CMOs and their teams to start weaving in supply chain information, data from the help desk or in-store insights if they want to have true analytics.
“We’re only going back to our marketing and sales database to aggregate data about the customer,” she said. “Where we lack is looking outside of marketing’s comfort zone to get an understanding of how the customer is engaging with our company, when the reality is our strategies connect all those points of engagement.”
The report suggested there would be considerable operational hurdles for CMOs to jump even if they started monitoring data from more areas of the business.
“Not only are data and intelligence sources limited in scope, but the data that is being aggregated is not being fully utilized,” it said. “Thinking of the totality of data that is being collected across the organization, 24% of respondents estimates that only 25-50% is being leveraged in real time for actionable customer insights. The data utilization leaders (only 13% of respondents) say that 75-100% of their data is transitioned to real-time intelligence.”
Miller gave an example: a company could have a fantastic pre-sales experience and an effective suite of drivers from marketing that leads customers to make a purchase. If the product then arrives four weeks late, however, there’s a laundry list of things that CMOs and their teams should explore, but it won’t be found in the marketing department’s data sources alone.
“We get really excited because the promise is there that we can finally be where the customer is, we’re not there five minutes later,” she said.
So far only 4% of those surveyed said they believed their organization was delivering contextual experiences to customers in real-time. That may not sound like an encouraging stat, but Miller suggested the progress in adopting technology had been considerable.
“There is a level of excitement around predictive and batch-based analytics because in many cases we were starting at a point of bad data, and so we were not getting the results we wanted.
“We went out like kids with really sharp scissors. Everything sounded great,” she said. “If you think back in that time period of even 10 years ago, we were announcing we knew what the customer wanted based on focus groups of 100 people. We have an amazing opportunity to not only gather reams of insight about customers, but also to automate and create processes on how to reach them in a far more intelligent manner.”
The CMO Council report was sponsored by SAP.
