Making Personalization Possible

Back in 2009, CMO Council asked marketers a simple question about customer experience: How important is customer experience in driving business performance? Not surprisingly, 54 percent said it was essential, and 29 percent said it was becoming increasingly important.

It is also true that data is the fuel that powers the campaigns and experiences that are most relevant to the customer. In the same study outlined above, marketers shared a short list of key transformational customer experience projects that were in the works. Topping the list were critical data and analytics programs to improve customer insights and intelligence. Yet challenges were quick to emerge, specifically issues with functional silos fragmenting customer data across the organization, making it difficult—if not impossible—to collect.

Despite this commitment to customer experience and the critical role data plays in marketing’s success, personalization at scale and in context continues to challenge even the most skilled and seasoned marketers. Somewhere between the rapid evolution of digital marketing engagements and the rush to aggregate and collect data, the path from data to intelligence has been obscured and makes a state of personalized customer experience even harder to reach. In a day when the customer expects relevance regardless of channel, marketing must take a leap of faith, turn to new strategies and new opportunities, and ask even more critical questions of our customer data. It is, in short, a new opportunity to make true personalization entirely possible.

To explore the opportunity to take the next big pivot in the customer experience strategy and identify the new requirements of data, the CMO Council, in partnership with Microsoft, explored the modern requirements of tapping into the power of personalization, gaining insight into where and how marketers can advance the voice of the customer in relevant and profitable experiences that transcend one-off campaigns. This white paper and webcast series pulsed the marketing mindset to capture the best action plans of marketers looking to take the next step to personalization by leveraging the rich signals and contextual queues that customer intelligence has to offer.