Customer experience
Meeting and exceeding customer expectations
Optimizing the customer experience is imperative to gaining a competitive edge in the M&C industry. With the increasing amount of content and information available to consumers, companies must focus on providing their customers with a seamless and personalized experience. Companies can drive growth and success by thinking innovatively about how to meet—and exceed—customer expectations with engaging, interactive experiences that deliver value.
Subscription fatigue as consumers tire of “bundled” streaming apps
The good news is that we cut the cord, and the hated cable bundle is officially dead—but the bad news is that people are paying for numerous apps and services they often don’t have time to use. Streaming content from various popular apps can cost consumers up to $147 per month, which is considerably more than the average $83 for a monthly cable bill, reports Fox Business.
There is simply too much content available across too many options, leading to consumer burnout. To compound the situation, few players are profiting in this new environment. Not surprisingly, we’re already seeing media converging. For example, Warner Bros. Discovery is in negotiations to license a package of library HBO titles to Netflix.
Now that walled content and walled gardens are merging, it’s likely we will see a return to “bundled” services as consumers gravitate to solutions with the best content options and the highest ease-value score.
Continued focus on marketing efficiencies
With the days of super-low interest rates in the rearview mirror, organizations are constraining marketing investments and seeking to maximize returns on current spend. In this conservative environment, there is an increased emphasis on identifying, targeting, and acquiring audiences at the lowest cost with the highest lifetime value.
In 2023, the IAB predicted ad spend would be up 5.9% from 2022, down from 9% year-over-year ad spend from 2021 to 2022. With media spend staying flat or growing slowly at best, many organizations are actively seeking to optimize media mix modeling by targeting the highest-value prospects or adjusting channel mix.
Attribution reigns supreme as signal loss begins to bite
Third-party cookie deprecation by Google is approaching, but brands are already experiencing signal loss and declining return on ad spend (RoAS). “Advertisers who think the end of third-party cookies is some sort of future state are already behind,” said Dan Taylor, vice president of global ads at Google.
As advertisers scramble for solutions, attribution has emerged as a critical goal, with brands seeking to quantify the impact of marketing activities. Across the industry, different attribution models are being tested as brands combine data from different sources, both traditional and digital, to understand what’s working and what’s not and tie ad dollars to downstream activities.
Customer360 gains popularity among marketers
Looking back, it was the COVID lockdown in 2020 that forced brands to get closer to their customers and catapulted the customer data platform (CDP) into the marketing lexicon. With cookie deprecation on the horizon and brands already experiencing signal loss, addressability levels have reportedly plunged to as low as 30%, says AdWeek. It’s back to the future in 2024 as Customer360 (C360) becomes the popular capability in marketing and customer experience (CX).
C360 refers to the ability to understand what customers are doing and how they are engaging with brands across channels and devices. Looking beyond a commercial-off-the-shelf CDP to solve basic marketing use cases, many enterprise organizations are investigating solutions that build on a data-warehouse native architecture with no movement of data to comply with evolving privacy laws. As marketing and advertising technology become more MACH and composable, expect C360 to continue dominating the discussion and take on a flavor that includes more input from IT.
Marchitecture flexes towards “composability”
Composability refers to designing components or modules that can be easily combined, mixed, and matched to create new applications or functionality. Ideally, these modules work together seamlessly to form a unified system, and developers can build more robust and reliable applications quickly and efficiently.
In the privacy-first world, first-party data—arguably a brand’s most valuable asset—is increasingly locked down with no movement in a customer data warehouse and activated through application programming interfaces and reverse ETLs. Reverse ETL (i.e., extract, transform, load) is a technology for taking cleaned and processed data from a data warehouse and ingesting it back into business applications. In the MACH model, core CDP functions such as identity resolution, storage, segmentation, and activation are performed by various solutions or processes—as opposed to a monolithic platform—offering maximum flexibility with minimum compliance and privacy risk and improved flexibility, speed-to-market, and agility.
Massive investments in D&A as leaders leapfrog laggards
For the first time, data is being used on a large scale to deliver personalized content to viewers across their preferred channels and devices. Across the industry, organizations are making massive investments in data and analytics (D&A), and those who organize internally to support these functions are gaining market share over the competition.
The key to success is an organizational commitment to develop and incent an analytical mindset that enables data-driven behaviors. In telecommunications, leaders are targeting critical use cases with current capabilities while folding in new AI-based technologies to predict moments of churn and increase relevancy. For example, leading communication service providers (CSPs) are building data-driven propensity models to send curated and meaningful offers to individual customers to reduce churn risk and drive loyalty.
In 2024, understanding this new paradigm and using it to design and deploy great experiences while ensuring transparency and privacy will be paramount to success. Leaders who accelerate towards the “engine of experience” future state of CX will be rewarded for bringing unique and meaningful touchpoints at scale.
Privacy takes center stage with a spate of new statutes
Across the industry, data privacy continues to drive CX strategies as organizations grapple with the latest spate of privacy laws, including the California Privacy Rights Act in the US and the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Art in the EU. Among other things, these sweeping consumer protection laws give consumers broad rights over their personally identifiable information (PII) while placing significant burdens—with the prospect of severe penalties—on organizations that fail to safeguard consumer data.
Advertising technology (AdTech) has been under fire, and marketers are being forced to grapple with systemic changes that include third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, and the slow demise of the data management platform, which uses third-party cookie data to build audiences for paid media. Data clean rooms are rapidly emerging as a key data collaboration solution to bridge the worlds of marketing and advertising technology while safeguarding first-party data.
In the privacy-first world that is emerging, instead of, “Should we do this?” brands are being forced to ask, “Can we do this?” while staying compliant. Expect more changes as CMOs grapple with evolving laws and their impact on MarTech, AdTech, and first-party data.
Communications customer journey gets a refresh
Post-pandemic, it became painfully obvious that the traditional linear telco customer journey model of “Learn, Buy, Get, Use, Pay, Service” (LBGUPS) had evolved and was in dire need of a refresh. Fast forward to 2024, CSPs are coming to terms with the new omnichannel customer journey that looks more like a figure-eight rather than a linear process, blurring the lines between what used to be distinct activities, with a heavy reliance on digital touchpoints.
Further, recent advancements in GenAI and large language models are creating dramatic shifts in customer experience, and many CSPs are building data-driven propensity models to send highly curated and meaningful offers to individual customers to reduce churn risk and drive loyalty. Understanding this new paradigm and using it to design and deploy great experiences while ensuring transparency and privacy will be paramount in the coming years.
With a renewed focus on CX, industry leaders seek to stand out in a crowded space, boost their share of wallet, and accelerate product innovation in a privacy-safe manner. Armed with new, better tools and a deeper analytics bench, CSP marketers will make 2024 the year they turn theory into reality and turn the page on LBGUPS.
Fan360 seeks to deliver inclusive, personalized experiences
Relying on ticket sales and large television contracts, most sports entertainment organizations have historically been slow to make investments in technology other sectors have been using for years to engage with consumers. That is all starting to change as these organizations grow their digital marketing capabilities to build inclusive, personalized experiences while monetizing first-party data.
Since 2019, for example, the NFL has partnered with AWS to implement a “cloud-based data strategy that uses analytics, machine learning, and AI to gain a deeper understanding of every aspect of the game.” AWS is also working closely with Formula 1 to transform the fan experience by providing more accurate predictions and detailed distances.
Another great example of how sports organizations are elevating and transforming fan experience is a recent advertisement for a job opening by the Chicago Cubs, which seeks an audience expert with deep experience in marketing and audience segmentation. The Cubs have made it their goal to elevate customer experience using tools like the Snowflake, so it makes sense they seek to add digital marketing talent to their roster.
Will 2024 be the year of fan experience? Recent investments in Fan360, customer record management, data and analytics, and digital marketing for sports entertainment organizations point to yes.
Slalom contributors: Josh Buchholtz, Rio Longacre
