Lori Mitchell-Keller, SAP Global Manager of Consumer Industries offers her insights on predictive intelligence and how the use of this data can help provide personal experiences for consumers.
We live in a world where consumers either become a brand ambassador following a great customer experience, or companies receive public backlash after a poor interaction. With consumers connected to their devices and living in a digital world, it’s important for brands to create great customer experiences on all platforms.
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Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.
In order to do this, brands can look to Experience Management (XM) as a method of measuring data to attribute to customer success. Experience Management combines X – experience – data with O – operational – data to ensure that every business decision is based on both facts and feelings. When discussing X-data, we think about why something happened. What were the customers thoughts or sentiment towards your brand? Were they excited or angry with an employee? O-data is the heavy hitting, raw data and numbers that tell brands about purchase orders, numbers and sales.
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Today, food and retail industries, in particular, can be greatly impacted if they adopt an XM platform. The brands I outline below have benefited from adopting an all-encompassing XM platform to listen to their customers, build trusted relationships and protect consumer data to create more relevant marketing and customer experiences. An XM platform – offered by companies, such as Qualtrics – allows customers to put the Xs and Os together through cloud technology, AI, and machine learning capabilities that share more predictive and detailed analytics.
Tried and True: A Favorite CPG Brand Launches a New and Improved Product Line
A popular consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, which is now a household name for yogurt, has dedicated its efforts to standing out in a competitive and crowded industry. In order to do so, this CPG brand set out to identify new product opportunities to sell.
With XM software, this company launched user surveys in seconds to capture customer responses (X-data) at every stage of the product lifecycle to optimize its offerings and services. The company also tested a significant number of product variations (O-data), while accelerating and streamlining the research process. Through the combination of experience and operational data, this popular yogurt brand has been able to launch products faster than competitors and that resonated stronger with customers.
The outcome of adopting an XM platform has helped this CPG brand revamp its overall marketing strategy and communicate better with customers. By acting on X- and O-data to guide decisions around concept and product development, this company has launched new product designs and built on consumer buying preferences to tailor marketing and advertising programs that would draw them in the most.
Real-time Feedback Improves Popular Athletic Brand’s Marketing Strategy
Top-performing athletic brands understand standing still is not an option. One particular retail company recently sought to create a new, breakthrough product that customers would love. Their plan? Create a robust product testing solution to see what kind of shoe their customers really wanted most.
On an XM platform, one popular athletic brand went from 100 product testers to 10,000, which produced better numbers (O-data) of what products customers were drawn to, and which they were not. The company was also able to launch new filtering capabilities to make it easy for their team to ensure that the right product is being distributed to the right athlete, every time (X-data). With its quick “click and ship” process, employees can log on, find their target audience, and ship them a product in days.
Because athletes are now able to receive – and try on – products faster, they’re also able to provide real time feedback to the company that is easy to share across its development, design and marketing teams. With a shorter feedback loop and more rounds of testing, this athletic brand is able to target and market to the right customers, leading to winning the 2019 Runner’s World Recommendation Award for its HOVR Infinite Shoe.
Learn More: More Data, More Problems? The Importance of Deep Learning in Marketing
Family-Favorite Outdoor Brand Keeps Up with Generation Changes
As interest in a family-favorite outdoor brand began to fade across younger generations, the company was determined to identify their highest-value customer segment to see what new projects would matter to them most.
For this popular retailer, it was a bit of going back to basics to learn how customers purchased their products. The company took to in-store research, polled on an app, and collected feedback from their call centers to identify a group of – what they dubbed – “outdoor family enthusiast” customers to target their exact shopping needs.
These customers consist of a diverse group of people who have a strong love for sharing the outdoors with others. Data showed that between March and May, these customers shopped for gardening supplies, so this outdoor brand updated its product selection and messaging to meet their exact shopping needs. It also launched new TV and media buys and developed new partnerships to bring more shoppers in-store.
The XM platform also offers a built-in driver analysis tool that shows consumer reaction and customer experience. By putting the customer’s voice into every step of the development process – from strategy, to launch, to tracking – the company created a more targeted marketing strategy to connect with a new tier of customers, forming an unparalleled brand experience.
X + O = Satisfied Customers
By collecting customer feedback and analyzing hard data, consumer brands have become more efficient and created more targeted marketing campaigns for specific groups of customers they are looking to connect with. Generations change, but offering a stellar customer experience never goes out of style. When brands can identify their problem areas that are setting them behind or uncover new market opportunities to explore, new doors open to refresh old marketing techniques and foster a new brand awareness.
