It Takes a Village
The new marketing mantra for success is developing "great, user-friendly Customer Experiences." Make the experience as awesome as possible across product, customer service, sales, communication touchpoints and you will convert, engage, and retain your customers. So easy to say, but much harder to put into practice because it can't be done by a single hero or group of heroes. It takes a village and to align that village takes grit. At a minimum you need 3 things:
Audience First North Star - You need to all agree that the audience is at the center of all that your company does and every function understands the role it plays in converting leads to customers. Every touchpoint, every interaction must consider this role and take it very seriously.
Data Consolidation - Gone are the days when you can keep an eye on business performance by asking individual departments "how you doing"? Everyone must be able to access, touch, and use the same data to create the agreed upon KPIs that paint the business story. And this must be consistent and available on demand at all levels of an organization. This means that everyone is accountable to input and extract data into a common repository to generate reports and analytics that drive the insights the business uses to make decisions.
Break Down the Silos - The demise of functional silos and the practice of rewarding transparency is vital to drive successful business outcomes. To implement a consistent customer experience across every touchpoint requires that all functions talk to each other about what they are doing, what is working and what is not working. If one department is not onboard with this the chain is broken and you risk impacting the customer experience negatively.
And once you have these three pieces it could still not be enough. An organization must live and breathe the mantra that "the customer is at the center of our village." This is a culture issue, and if the C-suite and all management layers below are not bought into driving the best customer experience, the village will not naturally migrate to this mindset. Protectionism of budgets and territory will be prevalent among management and the front-line team members will be serving too many masters.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter if you are a B2B, B2C or B2B2C. The goal is to gain the attention and then the wallets and loyalty of our target audience. If you are in a position to lead change, I challenge you to think about what you will do tomorrow to shift your village's culture.