For executives with a customer focus, the multitude of touchpoints and their orchestration remain a critical challenge, especially since both the number and the popularity of the online contact points increases year in and year out.

Companies are trying hard to meet their customers wherever they are - on the smartphone, desktop, or tablet – it’s simply not that easy to be respected as service-oriented in today’s digital world. The gaps in the holistic point of view of the customer often stand in the way of a seamless customer experience.

On the one hand, this can have an impact on the customers’ satisfaction who want to be recognized and seamlessly cared for. On the other hand, companies are not benefiting from the degree to which digitization would enable them to obtain a much more detailed picture of the customer, allowing them to offer significantly more suitable products and services. Not to mention that the importance of the digital channels increases massively compared to the physical contact or the telephone. This is particularly evident in the self-service channels (customer portals, mobile apps), as well as social media or the huge number of emails, real-time media chats, video chat, or SMS and Whatsapp.
The advantage for businesses is clearly the easy reach of their customers as well as the possibility of co-creation, as well as in general the fact that their customers take over many tasks and maintain their data in self-service.

Overrun by digitalization

Anyway, the advancing digital transformation is increasingly posing new challenges for marketing and changes the job description of the CMO decisively: The ability to adapt technological developments and sustain the company's competitiveness, is the most important change in the requirement profile of any marketer.

Albert Einstein explained such a phenomenon tellingly: “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” Indeed, many companies often feel overwhelmed by digitization and believe they can’t keep up with the constant change. In addition, new employee skills are required, which are difficult to find. The reconciliation of the (CRM) touchpoint diversity and the integration of the fragmented system landscape seem to be challenging, too.

Much is tracked but only a little is optimized

As much as the job profile of the marketer might have changed due to new technology, marketing decision-makers need to stay focused on implementing current technologies steadily in their day-to-day work to stay competitive.
Just look at mobile commerce: Although more and more people use the smartphone for research purposes, still hardly anyone is actually doing straight-forward shopping on a mobile device, due to lack of trust or a poor usability experience. Be assured that this will change, with more tracking that will boost the learning curve.

It’s a pity to see that web analysis is still mainly just used for reporting purposes instead of optimizing the user experience. The main reasons for not making use of the results are most probably a lack of know-how or lack of time. Anyway, this will change, since it is obvious that in the coming years only personalized websites will succeed and the customer is and will remain ‘the king”.

By Daniela La Marca