Uniting teams & tech under ‘the one metric that matters’ – customer growth

But with the privacy shift towards first-party data and ubiquity of hybrid shopping behaviors, against the backdrop of a global recession, delivering a consistent, unified experience becomes an even bigger challenge for marketers to increase brand loyalty and deliver customer growth.

“There’s a change in what consumers expect of businesses; it used to be that they liked to talk on their own terms, but customers now expect to be able to talk to any business, anytime in the world, any time of day, from any device,” said Peter l’Bell, channel partner manager, WhatsApp, Meta. “The old ways of communicating aren’t as effective as they should be. As budgets get squeezed, [marketers] need to focus on the channels which deliver the most value.”

The challenge for brands is “to find the right balance between a machine to human experience that feels relevant, connected and authentic,” said Ido Bar Oz, senior director of tech partnerships, Braze. “The creativity comes from having that space to test and experiment – and the technology platforms that you choose have to play a key role in that.”

Uniting the mission

When every team across the business is all working towards the same north star goal, they need a unified approach to customer engagement.

“Businesses are all united under the one metric that matters – customer growth,” said Holly Payet, customer relationship management (CRM) lead at Hertility. “It’s about being customer-first, but truly meaning that and finding ways to communicate with customers. We need to have everyone involved in the customer engagement strategy to really understand who the audience are and why your brand exists to do what it does. It’s about creating space to share feedback, making sure everyone is aware, to fix, improve and make it better. Bringing all that together makes it easier to make decisions.”

It’s one thing to understand the customer, another to be able to act upon it. And often it’s an organizational issue with silos of data and information, which prevent companies from looking holistically at the consumer and create disjointed customer journeys. The opportunity is to build a cross-channel strategy around the consumer, that allows different teams to collaborate together around actionable insights.

With customer sentiment changing so quickly, customer journeys constantly need to be reviewed. “If you stand still, you will be left behind,” said Ross McKenna, senior CRM marketing manager at Klarna. “We must create a culture of understanding the value of data within the organization and address the silos. Once you get that, you can focus on the ROI side.”

The customer doesn’t care if they are talking to the customer care, service or feedback team; to them, they are talking to a brand. That’s why the customer needs to be at the center of everything. Brands need to be “customer obsessed” to be able to really understand them, said McKenna.

“When we’re doing more with less, we need to be smarter with what we have,” said Meta’s l’Bell. “Key to that is putting the customer front and center – which we maybe don’t do enough. It’s the insights you can draw from having those relationships and knowing what your customers want to see that drives value as a brand. If we understand customers better, we’re getting smarter.”

Key to being able to understand every customer is using real-time, customer-generated data to identify individual preferences and generate predictive insights that increase engagement.

Meeting in the moment

With multiple touchpoints and digital channels for brands to connect with customers, the experience customers often have with brands is inconsistent. But with cohesive, interconnected experiences powered by the right technology to engage across owned and social channels, brands can ensure they are meeting customers whenever and wherever they are.

Audience Sync from Braze, for example, allows brands to leverage their first-party data and optimize their ad campaigns across paid channels such as Meta, Google and TikTok. Bar Oz explained how KFC leveraged the integration between Meta and Braze to create lookalike audiences based on its first-party data to retarget customers who were dropping off at specific stages in their customer journey to improve retention, achieving 50% optimization in cost-per-acquisition with this campaign.

“The companies that are going to be successful are those who use the tools they have today the way they’re meant to be used,” said l’Bell. “Don’t try and change consumer behavior. Meet them where they are, be smarter with the tools and start spending money more effectively. “

Optimizing for lifetime value

With so many different points in the customer lifecycle, building a culture for experimentation and testing of the customer engagement strategy is essential. With any digital transformation, getting buy-in from senior leadership in the tech stack is important to be able to help the business understand the value of what a completely new system would bring.

“The challenge is helping the business understand the value it brings and telling a story that is easy and meaningful to understand, without the jargon,” said Tim Love, director of digital at Burger King UK. “We’re still early stage with experiments on what customers are willing to tell us and how we’re feeding the value back, otherwise what’s the point in asking in the first place? [The key is to] ladder up to the business, build that framework out to deliver something tangible.”

And with a test-and-learn customer engagement strategy, it’s okay to fail.

“The experimentation process is driven from the top down,” said Natasha Bedford, head of growth – All 4, Channel 4. “Embed the test and learn ethos, experiment in the right areas to build understanding. The journey to demonstrate value to the business is ongoing and constantly evolving. It requires patience and perseverance. Don’t be afraid to fail.”

“Putting the customer in the middle of the conversation is critical – the business outcome comes later,” said l’Bell. “Be prepared to fail. If I get 0.1% better every week, that’s progress. It’s an evolution. Do some AB testing, learn from that. Those are the companies that will be successful.”

For more speaker insights from Grow with Braze London, watch the video at the top of this page.