This is the first in a series that we will run across the next eight weeks. Crispin explores the Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation and in the weeks ahead he will take an in-depth look at each of the seven sins with input from other leading customer experts.
Perhaps the ‘holy grail’ for most brands is achieving marketing ‘evangelism.’ Evangelism, in the business sense, is evolving the casual customer into a loyal fanatic of a product or brand, so they preach its benefits and entice others to try it. The conversion of an evangelist is largely accomplished by delivering exceptional experiences and fantastic engagements which increasingly elevates customer loyalty. However, very few brands achieve this level of customer motivation consistently. This is largely because they’re committing some level of the Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation.
Whilst calling these issues ‘deadly’ is perhaps dramatic, they can cripple a business. Often committing one ‘sin’ leads to a second, and perhaps a third etc.. Failing to address these issues can eventually lead to a brand becoming trapped in customer ‘hell,’ unable to fully understand, effectively engage and ultimately motivate customers through data-driven insight.
These ‘sins’ are further exacerbated by the ‘Age of COVID’. This has increased the complexity of customer decisions, behaviours, engagements and preferences. Therefore, avoiding these ‘sins’ is even more critical to gain a holistic understanding of customers in order to understand, engage and motivate them, whilst focussing on evolving their loyalty into evangelism. With a sound plan, strong partner and proven platform, businesses can incorporate intelligence solutions that help them connect with customers and increase revenue.
Here’s a look at the ‘Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation.’
1. Intimidation
Many organisations allow data’s sheer complexity to hinder their ability to get a handle on essential intelligence. Understandably, that this is a daunting task given a Market Pulse survey revealed a typical business deals with over 400 different data sources.
Many of these data sources can and should feed an organisation’s data analytics, customer insights and business intelligence. Unfortunately, the size and scope of this is often too intimidating for organisations, so they don’t know where to begin. However, committing this sin leads to organisations being blindly paralysed, often leading to further sins.
2. Ignorance
Internal and external dataset’s low visibility across an organisation is too commonplace nowadays. These datasets are generally siloed, sitting in individual departments. It reduces the transparency regarding the datasets that exist on a company-wide basis.
These data sources include point-of-sale systems, app metrics, social platforms, online sites, loyalty programs, complaints data, customer surveys and external benchmarking reports etc. Businesses must assess and inventory their datasets and sources to understand what information is available to help develop intelligence and evidence strategies deployed throughout the business.
3. Assumption
Some organisations simply ignore data-driven intelligence’s precise insight, often assuming how customers behave and interact with brands, can be based on gut instinct or past experiences. This is often due to an assumed simplicity in place of a perceived complexity of data-driven intelligence. Too often, marketer’s forget Mark Ritson’s rule of market orientation: you aren’t the customer.
Today, particularly in the ‘Age of COVID,’ customers’ attitudes, behaviours, interactions and preferences are evolving fast. Therefore, assumptions no longer work and should be tossed aside to focus on evidence-based data that reveals actual customer activity. Evolving customer complexity needs data-driven intelligence to guide an understanding of the actions businesses need to take to develop strong customer connections to effectively motivate behaviour.
4. Improvisation
Generally, assumption-based analysis leads to improvisation-based decision making. It essentially transforms into a reactionary and ineffective ‘wing-it’ approach. This then boils down to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that doesn’t motivate, let alone effectively engage, the broad spectrum of customer types.
Improvisation’s sin is one that leads to companies making misguided decisions, ill-advised strategies and ineffective execution since it’s often rooted in a lack of insight and evidence.
5. Fragmentation
Failure to bring dispersed datasets together, even if they’re fully inventoried, to integrate into a single-source view of products, markets and customers is a major sin for many businesses. It isn’t enough to just identify these sources. Rather, pulling them together with advanced intelligence technology, is critical to gaining insight that guides decisions, drives strategy and directs innovation.
The need to ultimately synthesize these systems is critical to avoiding the fragmentation sin. It also facilitates overlaying various datasets to gain unique, powerful purviews of the customer and market.
6. Impersonalisation
Not delivering tailored experiences and engagements based on customer’s actions and behaviors is the basis for the impersonalisation sin. According to Gladly’s 2020 Customer Expectations Report, 84% percent of consumer respondents say “they spend more with brands that provide personalised customer service” and 77% say “they’re more likely to recommend a brand to friends and family if personalised experiences are provided”.
Consumers generally value personalisation from brands since it conveys that they’ve greater importance to the brand while delivering an enhanced overall experience. So, avoiding the impersonalisation sin is critical to brands, and makes embracing data-driven customer understanding more important.
7. Procrastination
Delaying the steps required to fully understand and motivate the customer with exceptional engagements is the most ‘deadly’ sin since markets and customers become more complicated, and competitors become more savvy. Therefore, taking the steps to avoid these customer sins require immediacy to gain an effective and sustainable competitive advantage.
Despite the daunting challenges of data, the technology exists to help ingest, synthesise and overlay diverse datasets to gain powerful customer perspectives, and democratise this intelligence across the organisation. This allows for a consistent foundation of evidence for every department, from marketing and product to sales and CX and the C-Suite, to guide decisions, set strategy, deliver experiences and drive innovation.
The good news for brands is that avoiding these seven deadly sins is achievable and, once achieved, can lead to customer redemption. Whether your organisation is an industry leader or a new brand, setting a data-driven foundation to gain insight on your customers and intelligence on your business, leads to smarter marketing and more effective experiences to motivate your customers like never before.
