Chapter 03
Delivering Customer Delight: Tips and Strategies
In an increasingly competitive and noisy landscape, how can marketing help an organisation to stand out, continue to grow, and build customer loyalty?
The answer for many organisations has been to deliver a customer-centric strategy supported by ABM, that engages with customers in different ways throughout their entire journey, rather than just at key stages of the buying cycle. While a first purchase might be driven by a problem the customer has at a specific point in time, this is simply a moment in a longer journey. Organisations that work closely with customers to understand the whole journey of what the customer wants to achieve in one, five- or ten-years’ time, are in a better position to create a true partnership.
Tracy Ryan, CMO at Natterbox, highlights that all members of the organisation should be putting the customer first, not just marketing. “Retaining a customer is better than getting a new one and we should be conscious that customer experience is becoming the key differentiator between price and product.”
At Automation Logic, for example, people are organised into account-based teams, with a representative from sales, customer engagement managers who are responsible for customer success, and delivery who are responsible for quality of service. Marketing is an important element of this team, says Toole. “By bringing together all of those functions, we have a really consistent and coherent go to market message, where we can just focus on customer experience a lot more,” she says.
ABM is also the strategy of choice at BlackLine. The company uses this approach for both existing and potential customers, says Botero. The strategy starts by ensuring that any target account is aware of the brand and has engaged with the brand, through some form of marketing. “It should be very rare that someone just runs into BlackLine or gets a call from us out of the blue. Marketing has to influence or touch every target account out there, creating brand awareness, and receptivity,” says Botero. “This means that when sales reaches out, the account is warm to our brand and is ready to engage.
It should be very rare that someone just runs into BlackLine or gets a call from us out of the blue. Marketing has to influence or touch every target account out there, creating brand awareness, and receptivity. This means that when sales reach out, the account is warm to our brand and is ready to engage.
Andres Botero, Chief Marketing Officer
Here, marketing can play a pivotal role in supporting sales to understand this long-term view instead of chasing short-term targets. “Marketing can aid with regards to intelligence and primary research directly with customers, to understand key drivers, use cases, and trends we are seeing. If we start to spot a trend, we can communicate to customers about it and oftentimes give them a heads up, because they weren’t aware it was coming,” says Acton.
Understanding the customer requires an organisation to build in feedback mechanisms at every point of contact with the customer, ranging from automated surveys sent after a support ticket is resolved to forums with ongoing customers, and social platforms to measure sentiment and advocacy.
Celonis recently created a company-wide competition to find the best customer success story. Executives from sales, marketing and account management were invited to pitch their best customer success story to each other. “It was such a fantastic idea,” says Beswick. “It got everyone on the same page, thinking about what customers got from our solution, what those benefits were, what the outcomes were. IT was wider than just marketing, it was getting everyone to articulate and evangelise the value of the organisation.”
This year, the marketing team at RM Results launched a new customer satisfaction programme, where an independent insight agency will gather data on how customers are feeling at every stage of the journey. The aim is to get closer to the customer and identify any areas for improvement, but also pick up on trends and issues by repeating surveys at regular points, says head of marketing Melanie Thomson. “In our organisation we have ABM teams who work closely with our customers so we are looking at ways marketing can support those teams to really get involved in improving the customer experience,” she says.
"All members of the organisation should be putting the customer first, not just marketing. Retaining a customer is better than getting a new one and we should be conscious that customer experience is becoming the key differentiator between price and product."
Tracy Ryan, Chief Marketing Officer
Alongside social listening, organisations are still using traditional feedback methods such as questionnaires, surveys and polls. NCC often holds closed door feedback sessions with customers where there is a workshop style environment giving people the chance to talk about NCC services but also their plans and challenges, trends and goals. There are also wider, open-door events that might include roundtable discussions, or breakfast briefings.
The information gleaned from customers can be used to produce helpful, relevant content, but also to shape the services that organisations provide. “We obviously have data from Forrester, Gartner and so on. Tying up that information with real data from our existing client base really helps us to get a rounded picture of what the market is doing, what the demands are, and how we best meet them,” says Davies.
At TIBCO, the company focuses on the customer relationship and journey from the first interaction, perhaps through an online advertisement, right through to the value they are adding to that relationship via different parts of the business. “It’s having a framework and knowing what we’re all responsible for,” Acton says. “How do we ensure the customer is seeing value from their investment and how do we ensure their journey with us is delightful?”
People are organised into account-based teams, with a representative from sales, customer engagement managers who are responsible for customer success, and delivery who are responsible for quality of service. Marketing is an important element of this team. By bringing together all of those functions, we have a really consistent and coherent go to market message, where we can just focus on customer experience a lot more.
Emily Toole, Marketing Director
An organisation’s culture may need to shift to ensure that every part of the company is effectively marketing the ‘brand’ by living by its customer-focused values, adds DXC Technology’s Ilgi. “Everyone is effectively marketing so the reality is your organisation is a far more effective marketing tool than a small marketing team trying to hit certain channels,” he says.
Being customer-centric can also mean collaborating with customers, whether that’s on creating thought leadership, or on product development. At Atos, the firm has collaborated with clients through its thought leadership programme that involves running primary research interviews and questions with end customers around particular topics. “Our most recent piece was about cybercrime, security and trust. We surveyed over 3,000 citizens to understand their views on how businesses could win and retain trust with their data,” says Dutton. “It’s delivered fantastic results for our clients and our business, and we also won two marketing awards in 2019 including an award for the most successfully commercial B2B marketing campaign.”
Automation Logic, meanwhile, runs networking events for customers so that they can learn from each other, says Toole. “The marketing team has led a number of client networking events, where we understand a common challenge across multiple clients. We bring them together so that they can share knowledge and ideas across their different organisations,” she says.
In some cases, true ABM and the idea that marketing should own the relationship with a customer isn’t yet a reality, says Dave Hughes, head of marketing at Ideal. “Everyone talks about customer experience now, but the reality of marketing having the ability to consistently engage with customers is a million miles away,” he says. “I think sometimes it’s that brand vision sounds old fashioned and we’ve all latched on to the CX bandwagon.”
In our organisation we have ABM teams who work closely with our customers so we are looking at ways marketing can support those teams to really get involved in improving the customer experience
Melanie Thomson, Head of Marketing
Educating customers to deliver delight
If we assume that the role of technology organisations is to help customers to get where they want to go, then educating customers is a powerful tool to creating customer delight.
When educating customers, it is important to understand particular personas and how they digest and seek out information. So, while a C-Level executive might work with analyst firms before investing in technology, other employees might research via the web, or download a free trial. Marketers can’t ignore any channel but equally must understand they can’t be everywhere all the time. “Our marketing budget would be in the billions if we needed to get every piece of content onto every medium out there,” says Acton.
At the heart of Ewan Ross’s education strategy is an annual survey that it sent out to all customers. The survey asks about current trends in the customer’s market, what issues and challenges they are currently facing, what threats keep them awake at night. “The interesting thing we found was that while the industry was all talking about external threats, customers were actually looking at insider threats,” says Ross. “So, we can get a view into that, and then create content and educate them in that way.”
Ross uses a variety of materials for education, from blogs and videos to white papers. “We are trying to create genuinely interesting information that we think is new to the market, and that’s resonating well, it’s a nice position to be in,” says Ross.
Thought leadership is an increasingly important part of the marketing strategy for many organisations. It has proven a highly effective way of targeting those potential customers. By the time a buyer has engaged with a partner such as us, they have done their research online, have thoughts figured out and are coming to a supplier with a fixed position.
Paul Riddle, Head of Marketing
Thought leadership is an increasingly important part of the marketing strategy for many organisations. Cloud service provider Altostack has invested heavily in thought leadership, because it has proven a highly effective way of targeting those potential customers. “By the time a buyer has engaged with a partner such as us, they have done their research online, have thoughts figured out and are coming to a supplier with a fixed position,” says Riddle.
Almond mentioned that he has invested in thought leadership and there is a general awareness that technology brands must move away from talking about product functionality to talking about what the future looks like, and how we get there.
A good example of this was our decision to develop and build a smart car. The point wasn’t to show that we are moving into the car market, but rather to show the future, and how our technologies might work in that future. “It was a B2B message because what’s in that car is using the 5G connectivity and showing the future in terms of how you can use things like 5G, AI, sensor technology,” says Almond.
Educating buyers through digital content is critical to NCC, says Davies. The company is constantly analysing customer feedback, looking for topics that would be of value to different people at different levels. From here, the company must decide what format information should be presented in, to varied users at different levels. “We build out buyer personas and we track and monitor how they consume content, so we know that what we create is what they’re looking for. Educational materials have proved to be a far more effective way of nurturing those contacts through to a buying decision,” he says.
"We build out buyer personas and we track and monitor how they consume content, so we know that what we create is what they’re looking for. Educational materials have proved to be a far more effective way of nurturing those contacts through to a buying decision."