Unsilo Your Teams
Thought Leadership | Authors: Marlene Vicaire, Salesforce; Nicholas Pan, VMLY&R Asia.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, brands have been forced to adopt digital channels for product and service delivery as well as marketing. From the world’s largest retailers, to first time direct to consumer (DTC) brands, to eCommerce Marketplaces, this rapid shift in online demand put an increased pressure on accelerating digital transformation. But not all organisations have the infrastructure in place to deliver a world-class customer experience.
Customer experience has been here for a long time, yet no brand seems to have successfully achieved the “Last Mile”. Customers are willing to pay more for great experiences, and it’s now easier than ever to switch to a different brand if needs are not being fulfilled. Yet the majority of companies are still not delivering united marketing messages and experiences which are their customer’s foundational expectations.
The poor delivery of experiences is largely due to businesses not accelerating at the pace of their customers, held back by siloed teams with misaligned success measures, disparate and legacy technology platforms, and disengaged and unempowered employees. According to Salesforce, 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, and yet 54% feel like sales, service and marketing don’t share information with each other. Businesses not delivering on their brand promise by overlooking the needs, wants and expectations of the customers they are trying to attract and retain will risk their survival.
So how might we connect teams across different specialisations in marketing, sales, product, service, after sale across the purchase funnel in order to provide a seamless customer experience in Commerce?
Barriers to Customer Centricity
No Unified Objective and Success Measures
A large number of brands have distinct teams and departments managing their own success across their marketing efforts, as a result they are setting their own objectives and KPIs separately from each other instead of looking at blending all the channels into one overall strategy.Lack of Omnichannel Thinking
A lot of big brands don’t see digital and ecommerce as a big holistic strategy. They don’t seem to have the right connection between strategy and marketing and are missing the architecture for success. For example, a majority don’t link their social media to drive traffic to their ECommerce platforms, perhaps because social teams are working on social and ecommerce teams are working on marketplaces.Lack of Customer Experience Ownership
Years ago there was a rise of the Chief Customer Experience officer role who would focus on the customer experience, irrespective of the channels such as marketplaces, retail stores etc. However, this trend has not continued in the recent years and now there is commonly a lack of Customer Experience ownership within many organisations.Leadership Role Tenure
CMOs have an average tenure of 41 months in their leadership role. Sales numbers reflect their performance and integrating teams might not be on top of their agenda. Low hanging fruits and tactics to show sales impact rather than long term building brand equity and enhancing organisational efficiency might not be their primary objectives as some of these need years to show results.
Overcoming Fragmented Teams
Customer Centric Processes
As COVID has hit many businesses hard in 2020, some organisations took this opportunity to relook at their products, services and processes. One of our committee members from Tripadvisor said they took this opportunity to relook at their processes and systems and focused on being more customer centric and not only relook at their offering, but also ensuring the customer centricity drives their decisions rather than how they are structured organisationally.Drive by Senior Management
Breaking down walls and silos to be a lot more integrated and customer centric is not an easy task if senior stakeholders are not onboard. Organisations that have senior management and CEOs driving this customer centricity will naturally have better success in converting fragmented teams into integrated ones.Cross Functional Generalist Talent
Pulling fragmented teams together means knowing how these teams can and should work together. Knowing how Social and Commerce work together, knowing how Retail and ECommerce work together, knowing how Paid Media and Brand Activation works with both Retail and ECommerce and on top of that knowing how to attribute all marketing dollars to the right revenues. Such a leader will need to be a multi-skilled generalist. Although many organisations are hiring ECommerce Specialists to drive ECommerce revenues, what they actually need are generalists who can connect the organisation’s many departments in order to be more customer centric.Committed To Get Teams To Work Together and Share Best Practices
When fragmented teams start to want to be more customer centric, their very first challenge is to understand what each team does and where collaboration or hand-offs happen. Scaling this up to multi-brand multi-market organisations, the challenge can be overwhelming. The key is to commit to want to work together and more importantly have an environment where best practices are shared and celebrated. This then provides the necessary empowerment and momentum for organisations to be successful.Shared KPIs
The most important perspective for teams to work together in an integrated way would be to have shared KPIs. This way they bring their expertise to the table while working closely together across functional departments to bring forth customer centricity and driving business objectives together.
Now no longer will Social teams just talk about Fans and Engagement, no longer will Paid Media teams just talk about Media Efficiency, no longer will eCommerce teams just talk about their exquisite product detail pages, but all cross functional departments will be contributing to an organisational level shared business centric KPI.
In closing, we are already seeing many brands going through digital transformation in the past decade and one of their key recurring objectives is to be more customer centric. High-performers will refocus and accelerate their transformations – functionally, technically, operationally and culturally – to meet and exceed the evolving needs of their customers.
So in the pandemic year of 2021, it is now clear we are in the Customer Centric eCommerce era, Brands that embrace evolving technologies to create a more seamless customer experience will be in a leadership position post-pandemic.