It’s a funny thing that marketing is responsible for providing the voice of the customer within a business, when often the marketing team has less contact with customers than customer services or sales teams.
But in so many other ways it makes complete sense: marketing departments are better placed to gather impartial customer feedback than front line staff, and across a broader range of subjects.
Marketing are also concerned with the external market view; it’s this piecing together of the bigger puzzle that provides truly actionable insight for a business. It helps to steer longer-term strategic direction as well as fixing parts of the customer experience that might not be working as they should.
So what’s the CMO’s role?
It’s more vital than ever before that the CMO actively places customer needs at the heart of business culture and values. B2B is all about people: we meet with our customers, they have named contacts for sales, service and beyond. For me, it’s part of what makes B2B exciting; our customers are tangible and our interactions are relationship-led.
In order for businesses to thrive in this ‘personal’ environment, the CMO must find creative ways to engage staff in all things customer. They need to ensure front line staff don’t lose the bigger picture, and that back office staff understand customer needs as intimately as their colleagues do.
Marketing and the customer
“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”
If we consider customer requirements first of all, it’s a remit that is broad-reaching – from delivering products that make your customers’ lives easier to providing accessible and effective communication channels. It should also include emerging market trends that are likely to impact customer requirements, and in the current climate, digital trends are likely to top the list.
It’s the marketing team that designs, develops and delivers the crucial insight that enables a business to make decisions around brand, channel, product, strategic opportunity, and market approach. It’s responsible for uncovering customer wants, desires and disappointments.
Done properly, marketing should be capturing regular feedback from customer-facing teams to track changes in sentiment as well as identifying any issues that need tackling quickly. And in my opinion, in a B2B environment there’s no excuse for not meeting with customers and developing relationships directly.
Keeping the voice of customer
"[It's] smart to add a professional marketing expert to the board who could raise questions about whether the company is paying sufficient attention to the changing customer, channel and competitive needs and trends.”
All of the valuable customer insight that the marketing team is gathering must be viewed in the context of wider market insight.
- Which areas of the market are growing or shrinking?
- Which channels do we think will take prominence in coming years?
- What’s our strategy to deal with emerging competitors?
- Where will our next competitive threat come from?
- How do we differentiate our brand and market proposition?
The CMO must translate this blend of market and customer insight into competitive advantage. They must make strategic recommendations that span not only marketing activity but what the brand stands for, and the internal practices, mindset and culture that underpin that.
One of the reasons it’s so important to embed customer-centricity within an organisation is because customer experience is so visible to your customers, stakeholders, and prospects.
In today’s connected society, where 60% of a buyer’s decision-making process is completed prior to engaging suppliers, a positive customer experience is everything. Poor reviews can badly affect your brand reputation and effectively hand a gift-wrapped edge to your competitors.
For organisations operating in a B2B environment this issue is exacerbated, as so frequently businesses work within a relatively small community of buyers who know one another, so word gets around quickly.
In measuring, tracking and influencing customer experience, the CMO stands to hold far greater control, protecting brand reputation and ensuring any negative issues are dealt with swiftly.
There are a whole host of ways that customer needs can be brought to life for staff. This could be immersion sessions that enable employees to spend time with customers and see how products and services form part of their working life. This could also be interactive insight sessions on-site. Playing audio or visual clips of customers talking about your business can be really impactful and help people see things from a customer’s perspective more easily.
Whatever the means of gathering and disseminating information, insight will be the heartbeat of any successful organisation, with the power to make confident decisions about the direction the business takes and the ability to influence culture.
For more tips on how to embed a customer-focused culture see: Placing customer experience at the heart of your marketing strategy.
