When customers know what they want, companies must figure out what it is. However, according to Gartner, CMOs only invested 29% of their budgets in new technologies to meet their needs.
Probably marketing specialists do not have the appropriate technology or the technology they have isn´t enough. However, often marketing departments do not have full knowledge of the capabilities of the technologies they have paid for and consequently, do not take advantage of them.
To guarantee a high return of the investment for the business (ROI) the marketing specialists should start by auditing their technological ecosystem in their organizations to finally set the best ROI strategy.
However, the assumption that having a specific technology will guarantee to make money, is a common mistake. According to a survey conducted by the consultant company McKinsey, the technological gap between leading companies and others staying behind is growing. This means companies that make data-driven decisions will make the difference as compared to the rest of companies that are still struggling for basic data analysis and technology.
For both, innovating companies and the ones lagging behind, data analytics emerges as an opportunity to offer better insights, in other words, having a healthy data culture. Some will implement it and others will not. Therefore, some will obtain a higher ROI at the expense of companies that will lag behind as they will not implement a data-driven culture.
Once a healthy data-driven culture and appropriate technology are implemented, the time to listen to customers has come. As said before, the more consumer’s attention is captured, the more customer’s personalization will grow. The marketing departments invest around 14% of their budget to achieve the so long waited for personalization, very little in return for what it offers.
AI-based Customer identity
The need to know customers opens the adoption and use of AI not only at marketing scale but also at a broader and general level in the organization. The survey conducted by McKinsey Global Institute containing more than 3000 companies called “Artificial Intelligence: The next digital frontier?” shows that the first AI users are closer to the digital frontier. It´s precisely at this frontier where the leading companies in each sector are found. AI is present in all the groups, at the core business of the value chain, it is used to boost revenues, reduce costs, and has total executive management support. The companies that have not adopted AI technology at a certain scale or at the core business, are not sure of the revenues they could expect with such an investment.
Innovative companies know that existing and future customer personalization is achieved by customer’s knowledge. Here is where AI is introduced completely, and marketing specialists are trained to identify each one of them and personalize their actions.
One of the key elements of the customer’s identity techniques is that it allows us to characterize actionable concepts. These actionable concepts are the result of incorporating the business expert knowledge to the AI, also called Intelligent Observation Systems. The result is a set of concepts providing a broader customers perspective.
Therefore, customer’s identity techniques enable companies to obtain, for instance, better insights into consumer’s habits. Once they are identified, the different areas of the organization have enhanced the ability to make personalized offers leading to a greater benefit while delivering greater levels of customer satisfaction. For example, churn may be avoided once the customer’s satisfaction is analyzed. Additionally, price predictive models for certain products can be set.
Innovative companies are the ones able to respond to the classic questions: How do my customers behave? What value of information can I obtain from their habits? How can I improve the companies´ revenues? Partly, it´s due to their capacity to be always at the state of the art.
