In a series of blogs we will see how some long held marketing truths are changing in a Post Covid world.

Old Truth : Businesses need to know what their customers want now.  

New Truth: Businesses need to know what their customers want now and what they want tomorrow.  

There is an old adage along the lines that if an organisation wants to know the secret to business growth, it should ask its customers. And why not? Marketing is, after all, neatly defined by The Chartered Institute of Marketing as the process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements, profitably. The rapidly changing environment makes the ‘anticipation’ element of this more and more important for marketers and businesses as they try to ensure their relevance, either defending their market share, challenging established brands, or making the most of new opportunities. 

It is a new reality that businesses don’t now just compete with the service offering of their direct competitors, they are now being compared with the best service their customer receives from any industry. If a client can receive a seamless digital experience from their local takeaway, they expect the same from their insurer or bank.  

Recent enhancements in customer feedback and monitoring tools means that marketing can better understand customer behaviours and generate immediate customer sentiment on products and services at key moments of truth. The best businesses are utilising new technology and breakthroughs in data science and computing capability to obtain and use more data and create deeper customer insight gathered from online interactions, digital footprint, simpler and more relevant interactive surveys. But more and more businesses who have freed up customer service teams through the digitalisation of simpler processes are using them to capture richer feedback and jump on problems directly with customers to co-create solutions. 

Perhaps the bigger challenge for business is cutting across organisational boundaries to align departments, creating a customer-centred, rather than a functional, view of the customer. Advances in software and data models meant that it’s practical today to create an optimal set of customer metrics that both align cross-functional teams but also link to financial outcomes. It’s always been understood that companies could build their operations around an ideal formula, or recipe for customer success, but the barriers to implementing this approach have largely been overcome in the last few years. 

OCX Cognition, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based corporation, does just that; using a breakthrough SAAS solution to predict customer futures. OCX Cognition is pushing the boundaries, transforming what’s possible in customer experience, enabling its clients to reduce customer risk, break down silos, and drive speedy action. OCX Cognition have harnessed today’s advances in artificial intelligence, elastic computing and data science to deliver on the premise of customer-driven financial results. 

Aggregation of attitudinal, financial and operational (behavioural) data not only helps predict customer attitudes without needing to ask them, but also diagnoses the reason behind their attitude. Perhaps more importantly, that diagnosis can be expressed in operational terms; improvement of metrics and KPIs rather than broad brand attributes. In other words, the “control language” of the enterprise. 

These detailed, data-driven, and quantified insights into customer expectations and experiences are a boon for marketers. It’s a direct path to more deeply informed buying “personas” and highly relevant propositions that speak to benefits that resonate with target audiences.