Marketing accelerates at the speed of light: technologies, channels, opportunities, but can we keep up with so many new things? And  if we do, will we be able to sell this internally and then, make the most of it? Ewelina Ciach,  Senior Value Advisor & Team Lead for Customer Engagement Solutions at  SAP bets we can. And her favourite success stories come from the gaming industry. Find more on how technology can support marketing in an exclusive interview she has offered to Marketing Focus in her recent visit in Romania.

What is Marketing 6.0 and how many organizations in Europe/globally have the right tools to perform at this level? 

Marketing 6.0 is the empathic engagement of the Client. It evolved from inbound contextual communication. Before this, we had era of outbound marketing to clearly defined client What drove this evolution of marketing maturity was definitely the quest for results and rapid advancements of technology, which enabled us to use real-time predictive models. Next best action scores give 6 times better outcomes that segmentation for top 0,5% of population. Model based targeting decreases cost of campaigns due to lowering number of leads and opt-outs. Adaptation of marketing 6.0 tools among companies vary between 5 and 16%.  Just a limited segment of  5%  companies appear to face no challenges with gaining value from their customer data and only 16% of marketers currently have the capability to capture customer intent and deliver real-time, behaviour-based marketing across all channels.

   Just a limited segment of  5%  companies appear to face no challenges with gaining value from their customer data 

What vertical have succeeded to move into offering personalized service? What are the challenges and where how should they be dealt with? Could you give us some success stories? 

Technology enables delivery of personalized services in digital economy. From capturing of customer data through dynamically adjusting content to the current context to create consistent CX across all touchpoints. Deploying technology is a necessary condition but not sufficient to succeed, like at digitally saturated industries: telco, travel and hospitality. Although they adopted location based marketing, real-time product bundles and pricing optimization, it doesn’t reflect in financial results – they are 11% less profitable and 12% lower in market capitalization.

Deploying technology is a necessary condition but not sufficient to succeed

Technology enables delivery of personalized services in digital economy.

Successful offering in terms of profitability and market valuation requires to tie digital adoption with transformation of management and business operations. Hi-tech; banking and retail perform better than average 26% in terms of profitability and 12% in terms of market capitalization.

There are two groups of obstacles that companies face. From IT perspective lack of talent to analyse big data (41%) and connecting big data to existing systems (35%). Whereas from business point of view silos (80%) and project management (70%). I’d paraphrase Red Queen from Alice in wonderland - to be successful on the market, it’s not enough to run. You need to be as twice fast as your competition.

My favourite example is gaming industry. NHL gives customers ability to connect to the game how they want what resulted in 45% increase in engagement time. Clients can track statistics in real time-imagine that amount of data, which is overwhelming. NHL increased by 25% visitors traffic on their website.

What sort of problems have you experienced in the processes organizations undertake in their approach to offer an Omni channel experience?  How would you have approached them if you were the decision maker? 

An omni-channel approach involves all business processes such as marketing, payments, supply chain and service. At the organizational level problems are caused by siloed data, inflexible legacy systems and lack of process orchestration. Marketers face challenges to be truly omnichannel in both direction, to communicate seamlessly and to get responses real time. With payments there is always a trade-off between variety of mobile payment options and protecting own margins and profits. Supply chains  need to respond to customer rapidly changing needs while being compliant with SLAs. The biggest threat is card abandonment, when customer cannot find a quick answer to their questions. 77% say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service.

Marketers face challenges to be truly omnichannel in both direction, to communicate seamlessly and to get responses real time. 

I always recommend to CxO to start with consistent customer centric strategy. By discovering ‘personas’ - customers segments and their characteristics - which are beyond traditional demographic-based information. We usually describe four to six major personas which covers about 80 percent of the customer base. Than we draw a customer journey’s map to identify the important and often hidden pain points and resulting areas of opportunity for redesign.

Could you describe some meaningful customer experiences well planned and delivered from companies you’ve worked with or that you admire? 

Under Armour owns 30 e-commerce sites globally where 5 where opened last year, mobile purchases grow and generated 28% of sales in Black Friday 2015 in comparison to 19% the year before. Currently Under Armour goes beyond traditional frameworks of fashion experience and engage customers in the post-sell phase. Connecting in one platform apparel and fitness wearable devices will enable to monitor and manage sleep, fitness, activity, nutrition, weight, and feel overall well-being. Thanks to it Under Armour offers highly personalized and contextual consumer experiences and better align product innovations to how consumers actually use them. E.g. When they passed 400 miles, they send to the customers notifications, letting them know it is time to replace their shoes. It aims to protect them against injuries as trigger new sales. Large community of 200 million registered users, who keep tracking their fitness and activity on mobile apps. They can compare their results and compete against each other. It’s awesome, isn’t it?

Could you share with us one example of effective use of descriptive or behavioural data to a better segmentation or campaign response for a client that you’ve worked with? 

Dealing with big sets of customer data (including descriptive and behavioural), making sense of them into actionable insights is a rewarding challenge. Porsche struggled with 5M customers and prospects worldwide and 80M customer touchpoints. Their goal was not only to attract new Porsche owners but also retaining current owners and encouraging former one to come back to the brand. They wanted to achieve it in a way of understanding needs of each customer and its expectations. Based on this they decided to create personalized experience of both shopping and owning a car. Christian Heller, Porsche Manager of CRM said: “We have never been able to use so much data to so effectively interact with our customers and prospects.” Now Porsche uses real-time market segmentations for improved target marketing, generates better leads, and benefits from overall consistency of customer interaction across Porsche and the Porsche dealer network. Next steps is to drive omnichannel campaigns and begin to use real-time predictive analytics to further improve promotions, campaigns, and general customer interactions with owners and customers.