Tag: customer experience

Here’s How to Make Your Marketing Metrics Work For You

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Top 10 Global CMO for companies worth over two hundred and fifty million, top 15 CMO on Twitter by Social Media Marketing Magazine, and top 50 most influential people in sales lead management – just some of the accolades that CMO Brian Kardon has earned over decades of cutting through in marketing. Now, as the CMO of Fuze, a cloud-based communications business, he is continuing to cut through by using his vast knowledge of sales and marketing metrics. On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, you’ll learn how to build a seamless demand gen engine, and how to focus on the metrics the matter. Brian and Drew also discuss how you can understand your clients’ perceptions of your brand, and how AI is going to influence the way people create marketing initiatives.

Brian’s insights are ones not to be missed – you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of marketing metrics and so much more.

Click here to listen to the full story.

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What You’ll Learn

How do you know when your marketing is working?

Understanding how your marketing is benefiting your business is often the top priority for both CMOs and CEOs. By using the best marketing metrics for your type of business, you can stay focused on those that matter – a avoid becoming distracted by those that don’t. Brian explains the 3 main metrics he always looks for when evaluating the success of marketing efforts:

  1. Net new pipeline contributions
  2. Total marketing-influenced leads
  3. Total number of closed bookings

These 3 metrics combine to give you data that’s actually worth examining. Learning what marketing metrics work best for you and your company is a process, but it is 100% worth the investment of time and energy.

Handling the micro-marketing metrics is just as important as the big-picture metrics

Understanding the value of both micro and macro-marketing metrics will allow you close sales at both ends of your customer spectrum. Whether you’re examining data on a $1 million contract or securing a $12,000 sale, your marketing metrics are invaluable. For example, a micro-metric will allow you to see how much time a visitor is spending on certain segments of your website, while a macro-metric goes into greater depth on what types of content a specific type of client is looking at and downloading. Brian encourages other CMOs to not forget about either one when creating a roadmap for future marketing efforts.

Use these 2 metrics to help understand your clients’ perception of your brand

There are 2 main questions Brian uses to help him understand his clients’ perceptions of his brand. They are:

  1. The net promoter score of the brand’s product(s)
  2. The level of customer satisfaction with the sales and marketing process

When conducted by third-party companies, these two marketing metrics shed new light on your entire pipeline process and buying experience. For the full explanation behind these metrics, don’t miss this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

Timeline

  • [0:30] Here’s why you need to be paying attention to Brian and his team at Fuze
  • [13:37] How do you know when your marketing is working?
  • [27:14] Handling micro-measurements vs. measurements that help close a sale
  • [36:19] Understanding your customer’s perceptions of your brand
  • [39:19] Use THESE metrics when presenting to the CEO and board
  • [42:43] Lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, and customer retention
  • [48:26] Using artificial intelligence in customer acquisition and marketing metrics

Connect With Brian:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Inside the Box Marketing

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Giving customers a little something extra can go a long way. Just ask Jackson Jeyanayagam, CMO of Boxed.com. Founded in 2013, this e-commerce startup doesn’t only deliver packages – they also deliver joy. Customers who order from Boxed can expect heartwarming trinkets like handwritten notes and creativity kits that explain how to turn the delivery box into a castle for the kids. That joy isn’t limited to consumers either. Boxed.com embraces employees in a big way too:

On the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, Jackson explains how Boxed.com maintains a radiant brand image. There’s a good chance you’ll smile on more than one occasion during the episode, which you can listen to by clicking on this link. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

Here are some special Q&A selections from the interview:

Drew: Zappos delivers “wow.” Boxed.com delivers joy. Is there a difference?

Jackson: I think so. I think what Zappos did is actually amazing, especially as relates to customer service. They reinvented what customer service should be like in retail -not just e-commerce. I think we look at it as a little bit more, I don’t say fluffy because it’s more than that but it’s a little bit more nuanced so that delivering joy is obviously the product experience first and foremost. [If] the product is shit, marketing is shit. It really doesn’t matter. No matter how great I think I am or how great my agencies are, it won’t matter. But after that, it’s about delivering joy through every experience when you open the box.

Drew: What happens when I open the box?

Jackson: You see a cartoon face of our founder with a quote on it. When you see a handwritten note in a selfie of your box inside of it, when you get that delivery within a day and you didn’t pay for shipping. When you get a creativity kit where you get crayons and markers and instructions on how to make your box into a castle to celebrate Beauty and the Beast so you can do that with your kid. We do that. We offer that for free. It’s those little touches that for us is all about delivering joy, not only from your products that are there and you paid a good price for it, but all those other touch points that is a little bit more nuanced to us specifically.

Drew: What have been some things you’ve focused on to help the brand grow when you got here?

Jackson: Bringing media in-house allowed me to get closer to our acquisition efforts so we could start focusing on finding the high-value customers, and we did in a few ways. We did a pretty big segmentation [study] with the Cantor Group. It’s actually just finalizing right now where we can better understand our current customers and the potential opportunity with new consumers, [which is] something a lot of big brands have done for decades – customer research segmentation.

Drew: Then what happened?

We were lucky enough that we have first-party data. We knew a lot about our customers, but we hadn’t bubbled that up into themes and thematic around who are our four or five ideal customers based on lots of different factors. So we implemented that, and then started applying that to our acquisition efforts so we can be more focused and more specific on who and where we spend money for acquisition. The idea that okay, we’re just dropping a value-driven promo at 15% off on average and just targeting people we think would like Boxed, that’s great. But you don’t really know a lot about them and they’re really probably going to come in on the deal, and then the next time they shop they are looking for whoever has the best promo code.

Drew: What’s the goal?

What we want to do is attract you in with a great promo code. But if we know a little bit more about you, we know what drives you, we can lead with something that’s more important to you around a specific product or value prop versus me or someone else. And that’s where I really want to focus this data to drive better decisions on how we target and acquire new customers.

Drew: What’s the culture like at Boxed?

Jackson: Honestly Drew, this is one of the things that attracted me the most to Boxed. My interview [was] with Chieh Huang, CEO, one of the four founders, and my boss in the warehouse, for four hours. 90% of the conversation was about this values-driven initiative that he has undertaken with the co-founders around what this company stands for. And two examples of that are once he found out that a lot of employees were struggling with personal financial issues like sending their kids to college and weddings, which are maybe the two most expensive life things that happen in your world.

Drew: How did he help them?

Jackson: One thing that Chieh said as an immigrant, came here when he was one, his family really valued education. He had the chance to go to college himself and go to law school. He wanted to take care of that for our employees. He put his own equity, his own piece of the pie, money aside so if you’re an employee at Boxed and your kids are going to college, he’ll pay for tuition for four years.

Supersizing your Customer Service Techniques

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More and more brands are recognizing that consumers are people and have human needs. When customers raise questions and concerns, businesses should be swift with helpful responses. Dan Gingiss, Senior Director of Global Media for McDonald’s, champions customer service as a major component of the brand experience. Satisfied consumers can be invaluable assets, he believes. Since people are becoming increasingly accustomed to having their brand questions answered via social media, it’s crucial to maintain a strong and efficient platform presence.

As a published author and podcast host, Dan understands the power of communication for engaging audiences. The right approach to starting brand conversations and addressing customer issues depends heavily on the technology and manpower behind it. In some instances, Dan finds, AI provides communication solutions. In others, however, it’s necessary to provide clients with a human representative. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)  You can find Dan’s book, Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media on Amazon.

On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Dan provides expert customer service insights. He also offers podcasting advice, explaining some of the challenges and successes of his show. You can listen to the RTU episode here. These are some sample questions and answers from Dan’s interview with host Drew Neisser:

 

Drew: What is your podcast about?

Dan: The show is called Focus on Customer Service. We interview brands that are doing social customer care really while we don’t talk a ton about marketing, but it is all social media and it’s all focused on the “how do you engage with customers?” piece of it.

Drew: Tell me about an episode or two that made you go, “Oh my God, that was just so great!”

Dan: Two of them surprised me. One of them was probably one of my favorite episodes. Definitely top three out of 51 was a guy named Scott Wise who owns Scotty’s Brewhouse. If you read Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters, he’s also in that book. Scotty’s Brewhouse is about a dozen or more pizza and Brewery kind of places in Indiana, and I think he’s expanded into Florida. When I asked Scotty what business he was in, he told me he was in the customer service business. That surprised me so I pushed him a little bit and I said, “Well what do you mean? Like at your own restaurants, are you telling me that customer service is more important than the food?” “Absolutely!” he says. Like not even a question. “If you have a restaurant that has amazing food and crappy service, you have no customers,” he said. “But if you have a restaurant that has good food–great food–and incredible service, you have loyal customers for life.” He focused his entire brand on this is the place you come for amazing service. He follows through on that on social media. He told some really funny stories about people even tweeting while they were sitting at a table and he answers the tweet basically by calling the manager of the restaurant and saying, “Get over to table 48 and solve this problem!” So he was doing it in real time, which I thought was amazing.

Drew: What was the other episode that surprised you?

Dan: One other example that I really loved was the guys from Spotify. The reason I love this example is that they integrate their product into their responses. If you tweet at Spotify, oftentimes what they’ll do is respond back with a personalized Spotify playlist that when you read the titles of the songs from top to bottom are actually the answer to your question. They’ve built their own proprietary algorithms so they can sort of type in the answer and it spits out the songs. But I thought that was so clever and such a great use of the product and so I started looking. There are some other companies that are doing a nice job of this as well, integrating in their product in some way to sort of show that personality and to frankly differentiate from all the other companies out there.

Drew: When you were at Humana, you focused on generating real-time responses to customer questions. How did that translate into perceptions about Humana among customers?

Dan: Let’s all be honest. The healthcare industry is in a difficult spot in the United States and healthcare companies are not exactly the kinds of brands that people wake up in the morning hoping to engage with during the day. Frankly, I think it’s important to acknowledge that. I acknowledge that when I was a discoverer as well. Nobody wakes up wanting to talk to the credit card company. They do because they have to or because they need to. I think it was important to acknowledge that and then to acknowledge that when people need help and it pertains to their health, it’s a very sensitive personal situation that is emotionally charged. It was really important that we train our agents to understand that and to know that it isn’t really about that we declined a claim. It’s about that somebody has an illness and needs some service from a doctor and their insurance is saying no. That’s an emotional moment right there. A lot of times the reason why a claim was declined because it was the wrong code or it was some stupid thing that you could fix. I think the expectations were low because we were in this industry that people love to hate.

Drew: What happened when people tweeted at Humana?

Dan: When people tweeted at us or posted on Facebook and we responded, I think you could tell it was a pleasant surprise. A lot of times people would tweet you–almost could tell from the text that they didn’t expect us to respond. I do think that was successful in changing perceptions in that way.

CMO Insights: How to Market a Baseball Experience

Posted on by Drew Neisser
Photo by Sarah Conrad
Photo by Sarah Conrad

Marketing a sports team is a rather tricky affair.  Any given day the on-field performance can vary wildly.  This is especially true in baseball.  Even the best of the best win 60% of their games which in the course of 162 game season means 60 or so losses, 30 of which happened with home field advantage.  A favorite player can have a bad night which is often the case for hitters in a sport where going 1 for 3 all season is considered greatness! Compare this to the consistent experience consumers have with a typical packaged goods product and you’ll begin to have some sympathy for the sports marketer.

All that said, you won’t hear Dan Farrell, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the St. Louis Cardinals complaining.  First, he knows he’s riding, as they say, a great horse.  The Cardinals are arguably the winningest team in baseball this century with 11 playoff appearances, 4 National League pennants and 2 World Series rings. And second, he’s built his marketing around the entire customer experience at Busch Stadium rather than just the players on the field. In doing so, Dan has helped the Cardinals become the 2nd most attended home team in baseball in the last three years (behind the LA Dodgers) attracting over 3.5 millions fans the last two seasons. For these efforts, Dan also won the Customer Experience Award from The CMO Club and a chance to be interviewed by yours truly! Batter up…

Drew: Congrats on winning the Customer Experience Award.  Can you share the kinds of things you did to impact the overall customer experience in 2015?  

The Cardinals operate Busch Stadium based on the premise that attending a baseball game in our ballpark ranks as one of the premier attractions and serves as a genuine destination for millions of fans throughout the Midwest.  Our franchise draws from a very broad region, and while we recognize the value and importance of our local fans who average somewhere in the range of attending 8-10 games per year, we also draw nearly 1 million fans from outside the St Louis metro area.  Accordingly, we approach each game with the understanding that we will have fans who will be attending their first game at Busch Stadium, so we strive to consistently provide the highest quality guest experience possible.

The basics in our guest experience model are probably no different than most other entertainment venues: cleanliness, food and beverage quality and service, safe and secure atmosphere, helpful and out-going usher staff, entertaining scoreboard and fan engagement initiatives for pre-game and between innings, efficient ease of access, etc.  If we have a specialty, I believe it comes from a dedicated and very tenured staff that strive for superior customer service with a keen attention to detail.

Drew: How do you measure your customer experience?  How do you know if Cardinal fans are having a great experience? 

We conduct regular in-park surveys seeking fan feedback on a variety of topics, including guest satisfaction and ranking of our various service sectors. We monitor and track the data on a year to year basis to check for consistency. We also hold regular pre-game forums with our season ticket holders and our group leaders and we invite feedback and share information with these core groups of fans who are very important stakeholders of our product.

Drew:  A lot of studies suggest that only 1 in 10 unhappy customers will share their complaints with a brand. How do you process customer complaints and make sure that a systemic issue is not overlooked?  

We have a very active guest services department who monitor online complaints and also we encourage our game day usher and support staff to submit complaints or offer suggestions for service improvements.

Drew: Obviously on-field performance of the team has a big impact on customer satisfaction and you’ve been blessed with a great team for several years now. What have been your top marketing priorities in the last few years and how have they evolved?  

The Cardinals have made significant changes to our promotion programs over the past few seasons.  We have increased the number of in-park promotional dates, increased the amount of money we invest in the promotional giveaway items, increased the quantity and quality of items we give away, and focused our advertising to highlight the promotions, more of a “retail” strategy vs a brand-oriented campaign.

Drew: What other company do you think is doing an amazing job with CX and why?  

Kindle by Amazon; AT&T U-verse (surprising but I am impressed how they can trouble shoot a technical  issue in your system from a remote customer service location), Bank of America.

Drew: Looking ahead to 2016, what is the single biggest challenge that you’d like to overcome?  

Continue to learn how to monetize the digital and social media content that is so significant for a professional sports franchise.

CMO Insights: Campaigns and the Customer Experience

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Given that Lisa Bacus, EVP of Global Marketing at Cigna is a recent winner of The CMO Award for Content Marketing, one might assume that our conversation would stop there especially given my somewhat obsessive interest in the topic.  But fortunately for you, that is not the case as Lisa also provided insights into Cigna’s recent agency change, global campaign launch and the importance of addressing the entire customer experience (CX).  In fact, my favorite quote in this interview is “I believe that CX is everyone’s responsibility,” as she describes CIGNA’s approach to dealing with this thorny challenge–one that is all too often left off a CMO’s responsibility list.  But enough of the preamble, here’s Lisa.

Drew: Can you describe your primary content marketing initiatives this year and how they benefited your company?
Most of our content marketing has been through web/social/mobile platforms, and through co-branded partnerships. We are also fortunate to have authored several white papers on emerging trends, that we have turned into helpful content — videos, on-site advising, infographics, live chats — plus a host of personalized content delivered through our customer web portal.

Drew: Do you think you are doing a better job than your competition with content?  If so, how so and what does take to get to this level?
I can only speak for Cigna, and while I don’t believe anyone has mastered content marketing in our industry, we are very happy with the level of customer and consumer engagement we have had to date.

Drew: A lot of companies are just getting started with content programs.  What advice would you give them overall?
I’d start by looking within. There are probably a lot of great things that the organization is currently doing — you just need to harness it, synthesize it, and create it in a way that is compelling and consumers can easily digest it. And with good analytics/insight, you can deliver it in a way they want to receive it.

Drew: How are you as CMO staying on top of all the new digital marketing techniques and opportunities?
There is a lot to stay on top of! Personally, I do a lot of reading to understand emerging trends and technologies in order to identify those that may be able to deliver on the things we are exploring. We test a lot of new ideas and new technologies. Some that are working well, and others, though they didn’t meet our needs, provided good learning.

Drew: The trade press reported that CIGNA went through an agency review earlier this year–how did that process work for you and what lessons would you give to other marketers who are considering changing agencies?
In an industry that has been going through quite a bit disruption, we had the opportunity to strengthen our branding efforts and really leverage our global brand. Until recently, our branding was managed locally, through multiple agencies operating independently. By uniting our marketing efforts across markets and across the globe, and with the support of a global agency, we were able to gain scale, consistency and greater effectiveness in our branding efforts. We were fortunate in that we had great business partners to work with, and had a strong roster of global agencies. We started the process with the end in mind, and defined the process upfront, which served us well. Also, in the second round, we presented a challenge to the finalists, to see not only the strength of their capabilities, but how they interacted with the team in the process. It was a collaborative effort all the way around and we are very happy with the results.

Drew: Your new campaign tagline “Together, all the way,” seems to represent a major shift from CIGNA’s previous “GoYou” campaign.  Can you talk a little about the thinking behind the new campaign and how you rolled it out?
The spirit of GoYou lives on, as we believe in inspiring and championing the individual. At the same time, our research told us that we needed to tell more of our story. Those who were familiar with the brand were 19 times more likely to choose us. Among our most passionate advocates, were those who talked about Cigna helping them either get well or stay well. They talked about partnership over the long haul and Cigna having their back. We knew we had an opportunity to demonstrate to others, through many proof points, how we do this, and convey that we know how hard it is to stay well on your own. This is why we’re in it with them — together all the way.

Drew: Was there an internal component?
Absolutely. What makes this easy is that our 35,000+ colleagues live the brand every day. In fact, we feature our own employees in our ads, talking about how they have our customers’ backs. Additionally, from a series of brand rallies, to personal commitments to the brand promise from every employee scrolling on our intranet, to a crowd-sourced contest where employees could share how they partner with charities in their community to win micro-grants for the charities — the level of engagement has been terrific.

Drew: Customer experience (CX) does not always come under the control of the CMO yet can have a dramatic impact on the brand and ultimately the believability of your marketing initiatives.  How have you been able to impact the customer experience in your current role?
I believe that CX is everyone’s responsibility, though it is in my accountabilities. We have a team that is dedicated to CX to ensure that we understand what the most critical levers are that we can pull to have the greatest impact on the customer experience. We measure NPS across all of our businesses and all of our markets, and it makes the short list of most critical KPIs at the enterprise level. By identifying the top 3 parts of the customer journey that are creating the least amount of joy for our customers, we can be focused, and somewhat surgical, in our approach to improve key processes and customer impacts. The other interesting thing we do is match these up against our employee engagement survey results, to see where we have common areas of opportunity and can reshape key processes that directly impact customer and employee satisfaction.

Drew: What were a few of the major lessons you learned related to launching new campaigns that you might share with fellow marketers?
The basics — know thy brand, know thy customer, know thy market. If you do the work to understand the current state, and what your current/prospective customers need, you can build upon your assets to ensure the brand is relevant and desirable, to drive greater consideration.

Drew: In your experience, how do you know when it’s time to make changes to an organization or department?
When a team is no longer delivering optimal value for the customer or the company, it’s time to take a look at what you are doing and how you are doing it. I believe that most people come to work wanting to be great, so when the marketplace changes, or the business needs change, they are often quick to know it’s time to take action and change/improve the current approach.