9 in 10 CMOs say they are personally responsible for the overall customer experience for their brand, according to a recent report [download page] from Neolane and The CMO Club. So what kind of tools will help them with that task? Asked the 3 most essential ones marketers need to delivery the best customer experience today, a leading 39% chose interaction management, defined as “real-time management and presentation of consistent offers and messages across channels.” Following were CRM solutions (37%) and loyalty management (35%), though priorities differed by industry.
For example, healthcare and financial services CMOs pointed to a central data warehouse (60%) as their most essential tool, while email marketing (48%) was tops among retail CMOs. Loyalty management is considered most essential by media and entertainment and energy CMOs, while campaign management gets the nod from B2B high tech CMOs.
While a range of tools are obviously helpful to marketers, one of the takeaways from the report appears to be that CMOs aren’t feeling that competent using the tools they feel are most essential. On a 5-point scale, respondents rated their competence with interaction management a 3.12, which fell behind their competence with a variety of other tools, such as call center solutions (3.36) and email marketing (3.22). CMOs are also relatively less confident with other essential tools such as predictive analytics (3.1) and loyalty management (3.08).
About the Data: The sampling method used was a voluntary sample composed of The CMO Club’s global member base that opted in to receive email communications, including survey requests. The emails were sent, and the survey responses collected, during the month of May 2013. All 204 individual responses were kept strictly confidential.
