“Customer obsession is something we hear a lot about in marketing,” David began. “Maybe obsession is too far… but why is it so important for marketing to be customer-centric? Is this an entire shift in marketing mindset, or is that a stretch?”
For Dayle, customer obsession is one of those things that marketers have been speaking about for years, but very few of them have actually delivered anything close to it.
“I think people talk about it a lot, but, to some extent, marketers are still wrapped up in customer acquisition,” Dayle claims. “And look, a big part of my job is pipeline – it’s what I feed to the sales team and it’s what we close, so obviously I’m very focused on it, but it goes way beyond the customer acquisition piece.”
Customer obsession should not just refer to an obsession around acquiring new customers, Dayle claims. Rather, it should extend to obsession around your existing customers, too. For instance, once they’ve been onboarded and are using your product or solution, how are they finding their experience? What tools are they using? Is there any telemetry data that demonstrates what your customers are using your product for?
Once marketers are doing this, and looking to optimise the CX, they can rightfully say that they’re customer-obsessed. Just being obsessed about acquisition, however, is not enough. After all, how can a marketer reasonably tell themselves that they’re customer obsessed if they don’t pay a blind bit of notice to their existing customers!
So, why aren’t enough marketers customer-obsessed?
“Because it’s really hard,” Dayle said bluntly. The reality is that marketers are often held so accountable to the top of the funnel and to the acquisition of new customers, that all of their energy, time and money goes there.
As if that weren’t enough, Dayle adds that it’s extremely difficult to know how far you should actually go in terms of working out what customers are doing. At what stage do you cross over from ‘marketing’ into a different discipline altogether?
For Dayle, this is a marketing responsibility, however. His product marketing team looks at what their customers are using in the SnapLogic platform, which helps companies integrate their applications and data. They look at things like:
- Are we linking customer service requests back to the customers we acquired over the last 12 months to know if they are happy with the product?
- Do we know why they’re making service requests because they need other products to solve their use cases?
- Are we tracking product telemetry to know if they are using everything they bought?
These are by no means easy things to do, Dayle explains, but they will help you to truly understand your customers, and, by default, how to keep them happy. If you can do that, well, it’s inevitable that you’ll be able to attract more customers at the top of the funnel anyway.
The shift to digital and the impact on customer relationships
David went on to ask Dayle about the role of pandemic: “The pandemic has obviously caused a big shift in the marketing landscape (everything going digital, no more live events, etc). Do you think these uncertain times can create an opportunity for marketers to strengthen their relationship with customers and, if so, how?”
Dayle responded by saying that, at SnapLogic, they certainly didn’t change their marketing mindset, because they were already heavily focused on existing customers. However, he admitted that some organisations probably did have to undergo a pretty dramatic shift in terms of how they conduct business. With the pandemic came the notion that it was going to be a lot harder (or nigh on impossible) to acquire new customers. With that in mind, it was only natural that some acquisition-focused marketers were going to have to change tack, and focus their efforts on keeping their existing customers happy.
Whilst SnapLogic have always tried to focus on customers, there’s always more to learn and there’s no doubt in Dayle’s mind that the pandemic acted as a catalyst for some marketers placing greater focus on their existing customers.
360-degree view of the customer: Everyone wants it, but what even is it?
“I think a lot of organisations talk about a 360-degree view, but I also think a lot of organisations don’t know what that means,” Dayle claimed.
For Dayle, it comes down to having a real view of what the customer is doing even after the purchase. As he discussed earlier in the interview, it’s about learning what your current customers are doing. What tools are they using? What tools aren’t they using? Are they happy? Are they loving life and likely to renew, or are they dropping off in terms of usage and ending the contract seems likely?
“When you already have a customer, do you understand that there’s other parts of that organisation that are coming in that aren’t your core contact?” For instance, are there 10 other people aside from your core contact that are engaging with your content? If so, what are you doing to identify and help those people? That’s a 360-degree view.
“What I do in my product marketing team is to get one person who is focused on that. Someone who knows what our current customers are doing – making sure they have that connection with our CSM team. If anything starts to go wrong with a customer, she’s the fulcrum. Also, I make sure she has access to inbound prospect reports, so she can identify if we’re getting new names from current customers. For me, it still takes that individual to work with it, but, at SnapLogic, we’re trying to automate that – making sure that data from all different places comes into one report that this individual can see.”
Cloud technology – a better way?
So, how does the cloud enable this better view of the customer, and a better all-round CX? For Dayle, it’s a simple case of allowing easier access to data by the people that need it.
“A lot of on-premises work is controlled by IT,” Dayle says. “As we know, IT pros are inundated with requests from all lines of the business. So, what we want to do is enable IT to help the business to be more responsive. This is what the cloud enables. You still have that security and control [that you have with on-premises data storage], but the people that need the data to make faster decisions can get access to it quicker.”
Crucially, Dayle claims: “As a marketer, if you don’t have quick access, then by the time you run the data and analyse it, it could be three months down the line. That’s why moving to a cloud-first environment enables sales, marketing, HR and everyone else to make faster decisions.”
In turn, it’s only natural that the ability to make faster decisions will enable marketers to have a better view of their customers, and ensure a better CX. After all, if a bad CX is only being dealt with weeks after the problem first emerged, well, the CX is destined to only get worse.
In this sense, cloud technology is not just a case of putting everything online for the sake of it – it’s genuinely about enabling marketers to make faster decisions and, as a result, giving their customers a better all-round experience. Everyone’s a winner.
Cloud data alliances could be the key to great CX
So, how will the cloud data space evolve? Well, for one, it’s certainly not an arena that’s losing any momentum and, according to Dayle, there are hundreds of new companies trying to break into this space.
“Now, obviously, some of that is not integration that we do,” Dayle said. “Some of it is simple marketing tool integration. But think about it! But think about it! Hundreds of companies that do something similar, but more focused. Why are there so many new companies? Because there’s more applications being born in the cloud; there’s multiple data sources.”
“So the opportunity is still growing,” Dayle continued. “What I think you’re going to see is some of these other adjacent categories that rely on the cloud come together […] I can see some of these big vendors like Salesforce making these acquisitions, but I think you might also see some alliances being built for companies that can still operate separately, but they know that in order to truly take advantage, they’ve got to be more lockstep with certain technologies. I don’t see this slowing down.”
And this won’t be without its benefits, Dayle says. Theoretically, if more vendors work together, they’ll start integrating their technology and data more seamlessly. If all goes well, we could truly get to a point where customers genuinely feel like they’re getting what they’re looking for in the cloud data space: the ability to manage their CX; the ability to manage their own customers better.
