Scott McCorkle, Salesforce
Last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual tech conference in San Francisco, Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Scott McCorkle gave a lot of insight into how global brands are using automation to improve their relationships with customers and ultimately boost their business.
During his keynote, McCorkle went into detail on how brands like McDonald’s, Mattel, AT&T and Luxury furniture retailer Room & Board are using data and tech to personalize their marketing messages and tie together all the interactions customers have with their brand to create a single “whole lifecycle” journey.
His central message: customers don’t care whether they’re being handled by a marketer, salesperson or service centre — to them it’s the same brand and the same experience. The role of automation platforms like Salesforce is to make it easier to keep that experience consistent, no matter when or how a customer chooses to engage with the brand.
Marketers have to take the lead on holistic customer experience
Thanks to the latest generation of marketing tech, the lines between marketing, sales and service are blurrier than ever. CRM platforms bring together all of the data that different teams use, so whether a rep is working on a marketing email, sales call or a service case, they have access to everything the company’s learned about the customer up to that point.
Salesforce envisions the marketers as the conductor, charged with the task of orchestrating this new whole-lifecycle customer journey. Central to Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is an app called Journey Builder, where marketers map out automated journeys that can include customer communications like emails, targeted social ads or messages and SMS. But, journeys can also be set up to do things like trigger a sales call when an upsell opportunity arises, or open a new service case when a customer gives negative feedback after a purchase.
“How many times have we said or heard that our brands are the sum of all the interactions our customers have with us?” McCorkle asked the audience. “That’s true. Now we have the tools to actually manage it.”
Personalization needs scale to matter
For companies that operate at the scale of AT&T, which has 10 distinct marketing teams and manages 140 social media profiles, providing personalized customer experience is a pretty big challenge. Assistant VP Kim Keating said to be able to manage customer issues live on social media, AT&T was faced with the prospect of doubling the size of its customer service team. But she said with automation, they were able to scale their existing operations without increasing costs. Actually their strategy reduced their costs by 35%, while customer satisfaction increased 5% year-over-year.
Scale is the limiting factor on personalization, McCorkle argued, because global brands simply don’t have the manpower to tailor their messaging to each individual the old-fashioned way. After all, that’s the reason audience demographics exist; because in order to create messaging that’s effective for thousands or millions of customers, marketers have had to reduce those individuals to what they have in common.
Automation lifts those constraints, and makes it possible to target individuals as individuals. As an example, McCorkle showed off the personalized product recommendations Room & Board uses in its emails, which dynamically swap in different content for each user based on products they’ve looked at and purchased in the past online. It’s not new technology, but the point here is that on the scale that Room & Board is selling, there’s no way it could send individually crafted emails to every customer without automation. And those personalized recommendations have boosted the brand’s business. Since adopting the technology, average order values have increased 40% online and 60% in-store.
Customer relationships are a two-way street
Something that often gets overlooked in all this talk of customer-centricity is that customers need a compelling reason to form a relationship with your brand. All the seamless integration in the world won’t drive engagement if the customer doesn’t see value in the kind of actions you want them to take.
Predictive product recommendations that customers actually find useful are one way to drive engagement. But brands that can’t really go that route, like McDonald’s, have discovered that content can be a powerful way to appeal to their customers beyond everyday transactions. Saleforce’s McCorkle said a big driving force behind McDonald’s CRM success has been their build-your-own-meal website, which gives them a starting point to reengage visitors via email and social.
Or take Mattel, which put a big focus on connecting the toys kids buy from them to much richer online experiences, like stories and games. “You have to think about what will create the engagement, what will be interesting enough to the customer to even warrant them having a relationship with you,” McCorkle explained. The way Mattel creates that appeal is by offering new ways to play – safely and privately, across both digital and physical spaces. That’s enough to get their customers to connect physical to digital, and help Mattel start building a bigger picture of who that customer is and what they’re interested in.
