Beth Schultz of Information Week recently wrote, “If you’ve taken a look at the latest A2 infographic, Listening to the Voice of the Customer, you know of the disconnect between marketing’s desire to become customer-centric and its ability to get there. Heck, even if you’re not in marketing, you can well imagine the challenge. Marketing has to be in charge of the customer’s digital experience, yet digital life is changing at a rapid pace. While the customer voice grows ever stronger, it’s coming from many directions and in many forms. Marketing’s view remains largely channelized, and rather myopic as a result.”
Schultz continues, “The answer is simple — on paper, that is. ‘We need modern marketing and modern selling, both of which put the buyer front and center. To achieve this, you’re going to need an aggressive focus on data, on content, and on the competencies of using these new digital channels,’ says Kathleen Schaub, vice president of IDC’s CMO Advisory Service… In 2014, IDC predicted, ’80 percent of customer data will be wasted due to immature enterprise data ‘value chains.’ ‘ That has to set CMOs to shivering, and certainly IDC found it surprising, according to Schaub. ‘Clearly, the attention to the data within companies is growing, but given what we think is the impact of it, there wasn’t enough attention’ in IDC’s technology marketing benchmark, she said.”
She goes on, “Preventing such waste will take initiative within marketing as well as in IT — and she pointed to four categories.” The first is missing data: ” ‘Marketers need to think about what it means to know everything about customers, then identify the most valuable pieces and figure out how to get them,’ said Schaub. She used the sales dialogue as an example, with the idea being that phone calls and meeting notes get transcribed and used with semantic analytics. ‘It’s a future view, but at least companies need to be thinking about this’.”
Image: Courtesy Information Week
