THRON.com
To keep pace with an evolving market that is increasingly customer-centric, businesses have to stay customer focused - we would go as far as saying that customer brand perception has become a full-on obsession; it has become imperative that target audiences receive outstanding and unequivocally memorable experiences that are guaranteed by an ability to fully customize the purchase process and, as a result, increase engagement.
To assure the success of this process, the whole organization needs to be focused on becoming a connected company and Content Intelligence can not only enable but also expedite this transformation. It organizes and extracts the most value possible from all content users share with the brand. This was message that emerged loud and clear in presentation after presentation at The Connected Experience Imperative event, held on 19 April in Piazzola sul Brenta by the Content Intelligence Network, in collaboration with THRON, KPMG and Forrester.
Four keynote speakers took to the stage in the splendid Sala delle Conchiglie in Villa Contarini, to address a packed and highly engaged audience, sharing their different but complementary perspectives on the many challenges brands will face in the future.
Paolo Capaccioni, KPMG advisor and partner, was crystal clear: we are living in the Era of the Customer. Our customers are digitally mature, and their expectations are higher. To capture their attention and emerge from the fray of our competitors, creating value in the process, we need to lay solid foundations that put customers front and center of all organizational processes. This means listening to their experiences and understanding their expectations, and the secret lies in the quality of the Customer Experience. The efficacy of actions taken in this regard depends on how connected the organization is, and how aligned departments are, with the single most important objective of restoring a solid relationship with customers.
To make the customer experience a strategic priority for businesses, KPMG devised a roadmap with meaningful metrics to steer the process and monitor progress. Called the Six Pillars Method, it provides a set of parameters with which to measure customer experience (CX).
Historical cycling brand Campagnolo provided the necessary case study, describing how it used Six Pillars methodology to measure the customer experience it offers its customers. Campagnolo’s Digital Marketing Manager, Marco Frealdo, explained the mediation between the retail and distribution stages in their business model and how they started to use digital technologies and produce content to create a two-way relationship with their audience and increase engagement and customer retention. Content Intelligence made it possible to create value from the content created and to receive strategic data, in return, that was of great help in perfecting user profiles and customizing communication.
Rusty Warner, an analyst at Forrester, drew on customer context analysis to convey how a customer-obsessed mentality is a prerequisite that must be shared company-wide. There can be no barriers between departments, they must work together and move in the same direction - towards the customer - and customers must be the drivers of all organizational processes. Content Intelligence can play a vital role in facilitating this emotional connection with consumers, who reveal much of themselves and details of their lifestyles through the touch points they choose. It blazes a trail through data tanks and maximizes the value of the content, recognizing its importance as a “receptor” of customer mood. Warner provided statistical evidence of the importance of data-driven strategies: data, which organizations already possess as content-producers, has become the most valuable tool a business possesses to get to know and communicate with its customers.
Besides, First Party Data is far superior in quality for a variety of reasons: it is owned by the company itself, is generated by content created by the company and used by consumers, and has already been analyzed and extrapolated through Content Intelligence.
Luca La Mesa, Social Media Strategist and chair of the event, echoed these thoughts when he pointed out how, in only a few years, communication has moved to disintermediated digital channels. We can now all be producers and distributors of content, which is not always a good thing as is it brings with it the risk of content shock. From his studies of the relationships brands establish with people, La Mesa highlighted the importance of social platforms in creating awareness, leads and proprietary channels, as well as in incentivizing customer retention. Since we know that content topics can be linked to consumer interests, Content Intelligence (which also gives us content performance measures) allows us to produce more detailed customer profiles and to feed this information into our content strategy and future decision-making processes.
