The customer is king!!!!

In the current competitive business scenario, this statement is 100% correct.

When you do not have customers, to whom are you going to sell?

When you cannot sell, then how are you going to earn revenue?

All these questions direct to one answer, you need to earn the trust of your customer and make them loyal to your brand.

The process is challenging but not impossible if you have made up your mind to become a customer- centric organization. These organizations are programmed to provide the best service to their customer. They know with this act they can build up a special place into the hearts and minds of their customer.

CMOs or the Chief marketing officer, has a crucial role to play in this process. With their expertise and understanding of the customers across the world, they have attained the state, where they just know what goes on behind the marketing curtain. They further optimize it for a streamline and effective customer-centric process.

In the below image find out what most of the CMOs consider crucial for marketing operations:

customer centric marketing operations
Image source: business2community.com

In the below points, you would find out how they are transforming the process with the Chief marketing officer role:

  • Have the rich experience of understanding the data:
    With the accumulation of massive customer data over the years, marketers are getting good opportunities to unlock these data for gaining the insights needed in understanding customers on a precise and profound level. 

    Although CMOs might not themselves decipher the hidden pattern of the customer data, but they could guide the marketing team to extract the meaning of every customer behavior via the customer data. Later they can leverage the data to develop the right interaction with the customer. In most of the instances, the CMO role is to have a bird’s eye view on the whole process, and wherever required, refine it by providing the right training and guidance to the marketing team.

  • Building the right team:

    When your focus is providing better customer service, you need to build the right customer focus marketing team.

    Yes, being customer-oriented is not the responsibility of only the sales team!!!!

    While the sales team is the frontline team to first interact with the potential customer, the marketing team builds the fertile ground for a smooth communication process. The Chief marketing officers are the leaders who know how to develop these customer-centric strategies. They hire the right talent who could invest their time in understanding the complex minds of the customer.

    Find the below image to understand the skill gap as stated by CMO:

    skill gap
    Image source: marketingcharts.com

    As you can see in the image, data science and analytics have been termed as the most critical skill gap or shortage, organizations are facing with, and organizations have to hire the special resources for the analytics process.

    This takes off much load at the later stage, as the crucial part of the process is achieved, i.e., analyze and adopt the strategy that hits the right chord with the customer for increased sales conversions.

    The role of CMO has never been so versatile and interesting ever before. They are given the right platform to maximize the performance of the marketing team.

  • Listening to the customer:
    The majority of the customers complain, representatives of any organization do not listen to them. If you want to maintain a good relationship with your customer, then it is important to listen them. As for the marketing team, they have to do social listening because they do not interact directly with the customers.
                 

    What is social listening?

    Social listening is monitoring the social media channel of the brand on a regular basis. The current set of customers is more inclined to give feedback, be it positive or negative on social media. A right tracking process could accumulate these feedback, opinion, etc. for analyzing it and resolving the customer challenges.

    The Chief marketing officer could understand the root cause where the conversation went haywire or what approach could have been implemented for a smooth flow of conversation. One should know that the customer relationship process gets optimized with a better conversation.

    In the image below also you can see as part of a customer-centric approach, the feedback has been mentioned as driving continuous improvement:

    customer centricity
    Image source: cxrefresh.com

  • Aligning with the needs of the stakeholders and working with other teams:
    As CMOs have a crucial place in the organization, they need to see whether their approach is aligning with the needs of all the stakeholders in the organization. This brings all the accountable executives and decision-makers on the same page.

    They are answerable to the CFOs, the Chief financial officer for every money spend on the marketing activities, this justifies that one needs to bring all the decision-makers on the same page.

    The other example is if they want to implement marketing technology, they need to check how they can collaborate with the technical team for better service. They can discuss the same with CTO, Chief technical officer.

    Thus, you see how much necessary is it to interact and collaborate with other Chief officers.

    The CMOs in any organization is known to drive the revenue and sales, although not directly but facilitating it via the sales team process.

Conclusion:

Customers have a special place in a customer-centric organization. The whole marketing strategy revolves around them. In such organizations, CMOs are the captains of the marketing ships. They need to sail their team in the right direction to produce good business results. The above blog helps to understand how they are using evolved practices and tactics to the benefit of the organization.

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