Getting closer to your customers: How consumer goods brands can take their engagement to new levels
As businesses work to keep pace with the rapidly changing needs and expectations of consumers, many are calling the customer experience the next competitive battleground. This certainly rings true in the consumer goods (CG) industry where success begins and ends with the consumer.
Earlier this month, sales, marketing and IT thought leaders came together at the annual Consumer Goods Sales and Marketing Summit to explore strategies for making impactful customer connections. On the agenda was technology and consumer-facing initiatives including digital marketing, big data, trade promotion optimization, consumer & market insights, and sales force effectiveness. And there’s a very good reason for this.
Today’s technology innovations and capabilities like big data and analytics, and accelerated by the Internet of Things, are providing a powerful opportunity for CMOs and marketing leaders at CG brands to take their engagement to a new level by truly understanding what drives customer behavior and how to make connections that instill brand loyalty.
Speakers at the Summit talked about the increased focus for direct-to-consumer marketing and the need for the industry to become ‘phy-gital,’ as Douglas Stephens, the founder of Retail Prophet termed it—the combination of physical and digital. Although it’s easy to assume that in today’s digital world more customer interactions are happening across channels, 90 percent of retail sales still happen at the store-level, according to A.T. Kearney’s Omnichannel Shopping Preferences Study.
As consumers move from social networks, to online stores, to in-store experiences, there is the need to connect processes in a way that builds value throughout their interaction with your brand. So how can CG organizations use today’s technologies to up your customer engagement in a seamless, relevant and consistent way?
Connecting marketing, sales, service and data
There are a number of game-changing technology innovations for customer engagement and going direct. The first is a customer engagement solution that follows the customer journey from marketing to sales and through service.
This is a strong focus area for Microsoft, and our Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution was built to do just that, enabling one-to-one engagement and service across all channels, including social engagement and eCommerce. To make it even easier to get started, we recently released a Connected Marketing, Sales and Service Template for Microsoft Dynamics CRM for manufacturers.
Big data was another big topic on the Summit’s agenda and one of the biggest opportunities to get closer to your customers. This is where the power of analytics comes into play. You can’t unleash the value in big data without sophisticated analytics and machine learning capabilities to connect the dots and turn that raw data into patterns, trends, and correlations.
And this is where Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite services, connected to Dynamics CRM, excel, with powerful capabilities to connect systems and devices, capture the voluminous data they generate, integrate and orchestrate the flow of that data, and manage, analyze and present it as usable information to the people who need it to make better decisions.
This brings me to a third key area: employee productivity. At the Summit, CGT Magazine released its 2015 Sales and Marketing report with IDC Manufacturing Insights which showed that increasing productivity was back on top as the number one business priority driving IT investments.
An important ingredient in delivering personalized and proactive customer experiences across marketing, sales and service is extending those analytics through everyday tools and powerful data visualization to anyone in the CG organization to make it easier for them to spot trends and take quick action.
To help with that, Microsoft released a sales productivity solution that combines Dynamics CRM Online with Office 365 to help people become more productive, especially on the go, and integrates with Microsoft Power BI for some pretty amazing visual capabilities to proactively improve and predict sales and campaign performance, service metrics, and customer satisfaction.
And for further advancing personalized marketing capabilities through mobile devices, Microsoft’s data-driven Azure Mobile Engagement platform enables marketers to get in touch with their customers at the right time, in a personal, contextually-aware, and non-intrusive way.
Earn customers for life
When your employees can use relevant information—from both inside and outside your business—throughout your customer’s shopping journey, you can boost productivity to deliver the kind of customer engagement that differentiates from the competition and builds lasting brand loyalty through experiences that are personal, relevant and timely.
If you’d like to learn about additional opportunities of data-powered, insights-driven innovation for CG brands, check out my last blog here. So, how are you using technology innovations to get closer to your customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougcay
Twitter: @dougcay
