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In Part 1, I explored how and why to test for the right mix of channels.   In Part 2, I covered channel activity coordination and consistency.   In this post, I delve into using technology to achieve effective channel integration for optimal marketing decision making.

What is effective channel integration?

Channel integration is really all about intelligent data sharing for just-in-time decision making in the appropriate channel.   Marketing across channels in a way that is advantageous to both you and your customers involves efficiently sharing descriptive attributes about them that can be leveraged to make the best recommendations and personalized experiences when they are in channel, or when you are proactively communicating with them.

To illustrate, think about what you expect a business to be able to do when you go to their website.   Should they know your location? Should they be attentive to how you arrived at the site? Should they be aware of your recent purchases or activity in another channel?   What if today you achieved a new tier of loyalty?   I think we would all say that not only should they know these things (assuming proper permissions are given), but they should take them into account in the actions they decide to take in this channel interaction.

Yet too often, firms are not effective with getting the right data to the systems charged with calculating the next best actions for the channel in question.   Why is this?   From what I’ve observed, it boils down to these reasons:

• Channel ownership in terms of data and decision rule making is still done in silos.
• Channel owners are not given incentives to make changes for the greater good, but instead have measurements in place that encourage channel myopia. Without executive leadership for change, status quo remains.
• If the time to get the right data and make a decision based on it is deemed to take too long, the tradeoffs to make this work are quickly dismissed as too costly or risky.
• The analytical science, methodology and process involved to get to the right set of customer attributes for a given channel are not well understood, and there isn’t enough priority placed on solving for this.
• The candidate pool of potentially predictive data that should be tested is not readily available, and the process to make it accessible and distill it down appears to involve too much effort, time and cost.

Why is channel integration important?

Without effective channel coordination and integration, as a business you will make less relevant and timely marketing actions, and risk failing behind your competition resulting in less satisfied customers, lost customers, and declining market share.

Evidence suggests that customers expect companies to understand them, at least in terms of being aware of past interactions and information voluntarily surrendered[i].   Moreover, they are increasingly cross-channel shoppers, using more than one channel in their buying process. If consumers sense firms “don’t have a clue”, it’s not uncommon for them to feel it’s their social responsibility to broadcast digitally via reviews, social media, or blog posts.   This can have an adverse impact on a company’s brand image. Think of it as a negative promoter score – or “net demoter score” that firms should aspire to improve.

Conversely, consumers often react favorably to activities and promotions that are relevant to them, and in the short run will reward firms with higher response rates (it’s not uncommon to achieve 3x or higher), yet more importantly long-term loyalty improves because of increased levels of trust, convenience, and meeting requirements, leading to higher lifetime value and more referrals.

Consider the dilemma businesses face today and then ask if better channel integration as described helps crack this. More than ever, consumers are impatient on two sometimes opposing fronts – they expect the right answer and they expect it fast.

• It’s been said that today speed trumps quality, but actually consumers expect both, and if they don’t get both from you, they will shop around – and consumer switching, especially for younger segments, is on the rise[ii]
• What does it mean to be making decisions in real-time – e.g., providing speedy answers? I submit that what is most important is providing decisions in the right amount of time to meet true customer expectations and needs.   So if a customer is clearly seeking deeper content on a particular product, offering them alternative product recommendations in sub-seconds may be less useful to them (and to their likelihood to buy anything from you) versus providing them detailed content on that product minutes or even hours later.   This is what is meant by JIT (Just in Time) decision making.

What systems are required to achieve effective channel integration?

Channel integration as described entails a number of systematic capabilities such as:

• Maintaining a universally accessible channel preference center or data store that houses:
  • Consumer stated preferences
  • Channel effectiveness indicators organized by events and actions. For instance, if a consumer states a preference for direct mail yet data suggests they respond better to new product offers in emails, preserve and share that
  • Channel effectiveness indicators organized by timing.   Again, if its known that certain consumers have higher click thru rates on emails sent on Wednesdays between 11:30a and 1pm eastern time, codify it
• Fast access to customer behavior and demographic attributes that can be fed to a given channel decision engine
• Fast access to model scores and the ability to request recalculations as necessary for an interaction in a given channel
• Fast access to personalized content and promotions that can be suitably combined with a prescribed channel action
• Ability for one channel system to trigger transactional actions on another channel, such as when a customer is on a website, and the next best action is to send a personalized SMS
• Facility to orchestrate a series of prescribed actions across channels that are set into motion by a genesis event or action on a given channel. The resulting flow diagram enabled by such a system might look something like this (there are many such systems in the market today):

 

Comments and alternative views are always welcomed.

[i] My Buys – 6^th Annual Personalization Consumer Survey; January 2014

[ii] National Consumer Agency – Market Research Findings: Consumer Switching Behaviour; September 2013

 

In Part 1, I explored how and why to test for the right mix of channels.   In this entry, I explore coordination of channel activity

What should you coordinate?

Today more than ever, consumers have extremely high expectations regarding how they engage with businesses via the multitude of channels available.   The new engagement model both sets the bar high and includes higher risks and potential returns.   If vocal consumers sense a company “doesn’t get it”, for whatever reasons, they often spend extra time and energy letting others know about it (usually via social media and reviews), and conversely, if impressed they may spread the word.

Coordinating channel activity can simply mean doing a variety of things consistently across channels such as:

• Offering and honoring the same prices and promotions across channels
• Ensuring all of your staff across channels have access to all the consumer’s channel activity
• Maintaining a consistent branding, style, and content delivery amongst channel actions
• Always presenting various channel options at each touch point for ultimate convenience
• Honoring consumer channel preferences

Why coordinate?

Answering this question strikes me as another case of common sense that makes great business sense, but isn’t necessarily that common.   How often have you been in a store and asked if they will honor the online price and received a strange and hesitant look?   Who hasn’t found situations where you have sent and email, or called a call center and transacted with a business, only to find there is apparently no record of this activity?

So the answer becomes rhetorical.   Who wouldn’t want consumers that are extremely satisfied because the business is ultra coordinated and consistent in everything they say and do, no matter the channel?   This experience invariably leads to positive word of mouth advertising, positive reviews, and positive publicity – resulting in more referrals, better loyalty, and more business.

How do your customers see your business?

Here is the key thought of this post and something that may help you soul search on whether the omnichannel experience you are delivering is indeed exceptional across a variety of consumer opinions:

Does each different customer who you deem as important to your future strategy experience your brand in a way that thrills them?

Invariably, this question entails a number of key areas for your marketing strategy. Namely ensuring you have a well defined audience & segment targeting and value assessment approach, and also taking steps to check, in a humbling, objective and outside in way, how you are coming across to your customers.

Consider these strategies to get objective feedback that can help you improve your cross channel consistency:

• Read a sampling of reviews on different channels (e.g., website reviews, Facebook fan page).   Use a sampling strategy to ensure you are getting a good cross section of opinions. For example, if you have a 5 star approach, read a sample of reviews with ratings in each. Also, be sure to sample across time, so if you have reviews that span one year, sample some from each month or quarter.
• Remember that there is inherently a bias in the sample coming from people who post reviews, so although it’s critical to consider these (since they are out there and thus perception is reality), also consider a strategy to survey others that may never post reviews. For example, consider a bounce back survey where the consumer responds with their feedback confidentially, and receives a small compensation for doing so (e.g., some loyalty points).
• Research for views and publicity that may not be reaching your properties directly, but may have a significant positive or negative impact on how your brand is perceived. For instance, influencers in your market may be blogging, posting or tweeting about the experience they had with your brand, and considering that could be critical.
• Angle for a way to also ferret out what (hopefully there is something) you are doing right. Why? Because otherwise you may inadvertently de-emphasize this thinking it wasn’t important, when it was yet no one bothered to tell you that.   Perhaps you are doing a fantastic job documenting your customer interactions in a timely and comprehensive fashion, still no one rewards you with stellar feedback on this.   Yet if you let this practice slip, you may well hear about it, after damage is done.

OK sounds smart – but this sounds hard also?

Maybe in large complex organizations getting much of this right isn’t easy, however often fairly simple practices and incentives work well.

An ordinary call center today has reps asking how they did, or offering a short survey when the call ends, but instead consider the following question, and what it implies:

“What is the single most important thing we (as a company) could do to improve?”

This question has many great aspects packed inside.   It gives the customer the latitude to consider their experiences and opinions not only for this interaction, but for any one in any channel at any time. It also isn’t limiting them to service or marketing interactions, as maybe they have an idea to improve your product.   Additionally, it forces prioritization, asking for advice on their most important concern.

Do I need applications, systems and technology for this?

The short answer is yes you do, and especially if you are a large enterprise.   However, yet again, these systems don’t always need to be extremely sophisticated.   Having simple call logs that are sharable may be all that is required, yet providing the right incentives to guarantee every representative keeps track of all interactions is the key.

Once more, if you are trying to track and analyze feedback, employing a system that can help sample and synthesize sentiment is certainly helpful, however doing this in a more manual fashion versus not doing it all is the wise choice.

Comments and alternative views are always welcomed.

What is good omnichannel marketing?

Having been around enough to see this idea evolve, I have a certain view on omnichannel that isn’t always in vogue, but to me speaks to the essence of good marketing.   That is, that good omnichannel marketing is testing the right mix of channels for your business (not what others are doing) that represents the optimal mix for your customer’s engagement with you at a given point in time.

Let’s dissect this thought by concentrating on some key words and why I believe things may not be in vogue but represent best practices.   First, inspect the choice of the words, “your business”.   The mistake I see made by so many marketers is they flock like lemmings to the newest marketing trends, while abandoning old ones.   There is nothing wrong (and in fact it should be in your marketing fabric) with testing new ideas, but the second key word used is “testing”. So putting these thoughts together, focus on what works for you and your customers, challenge those champion channels with new ones, yet keep the right mix that returns that best current results. Always observe what your competitors and fellow practitioners are doing, however intelligently form hypothesis and then systematically test them.

Next, consider the choice of the words, “optimal mix”. How do you determine what is really optimal?   This gets into an area I’ve explored in depth for many years known as attribution.   The mistake I see many marketers making is they either choose to ignore this, saying it’s too hard, or they work it in only one area, for instance for their digital spend or separately for their general advertizing budget.   As marketers, we have to let all of our efforts compete on an equal playing field. None should be considered untouchable, nor should any be chucked into the rubbish bin because they feel old school. The reason they think it’s too hard is more about organizational challenges then technological or optimization techniques available. I’ll always remember a quote from an enterprise retail marketing executive on this, saying “changing the way we decide on marketing mix is like starting a jihad.”

Why you should fight the good fight

Although it may be daunting to some, this shouldn’t stop you from pursuing true omnichannel optimization. If you do this better than your competition, you will be more likely to succeed now and in the future.   You don’t necessarily need to use overly complicated algorithms, techniques, or systems to accomplish a more optimal mix of marketing spend across your channels. You simply need to be able to measure the effectiveness of programs executed in each, and then ensure they are fairly competing for current and future marketing budget.

Now ponder the term, “your customer’s engagement.” It’s not about what you think is best, it’s about which channels which customers want to use to engage with your business.   I picked the vital words which channels for which customers because you can’t use a one set of channels fits all segments of customers.   For example, if you have a significant older demographic segment, they may well like to engage with you by phone or even by mail. Yes mail, this thing that the post person still delivers to mail boxes every day.   Be objective with your analysis of channels effectiveness and not just trendy. Also, don’t be afraid to use fairly basic measurement techniques if needed to simplify the problem, such as first touch or last touch, or equal weight / credit, but use these differently by channel. So for example, last touch may be very effective with certain digital media, however first touch may be more appropriate for certain traditional channels, or for certain types of marketing efforts, such as lead generation.

If there is one thing that is certain, its “Change Happens”

Finally, let’s mull over the phrase, “at a given point in time”.   I included this because what I’ve seen is that marketers do something, feel confident in the answer, and then don’t challenge it often enough. For instance, perhaps you did some valuable work that shows your best mix of channels & budget for your elder demographic segment is 50% mail, 30% phone, 20% email, and 10% other. That’s great, for now. But in just one year this segment’s age has changed materially, and perhaps their preferences and behavior & habits.

So be objective, be humble, be inquisitive, and test everything.

Note:  These views are my own, and not that of my employer