Last week I joined several of the Confirmit team at a new event organized by our friends at Engage Customer. The CX Marketing Summit 2018 was created as a result of research that shows that the marketing function is playing an increasingly important role in the Customer Experience as businesses are able to achieve greater customer insight, allowing them to tailor their strategies to increasingly demanding customers.
Just the place for Confirmit, then!
From the presentations and the conversations that took place at the event, it certainly seems to be the case that CX has hit the marketing agenda in a big way. The average total of marketing budgets that’s dedicated to CX is now over 20%, according to a recent CMO survey, which is huge. On top of that, Customer Experience, Customer Analytics, and Customer Retention are all top of the list of Marketing agendas for 2018. This is great stuff, but for marketing professionals who don’t have a background in CX, it’s potentially pretty daunting.
Help was at hand throughout the day though. As well as plenty of case studies to learn from, there were sessions dedicated to helping marketers find their way through areas such as customer experience analytics, customer journey mapping, and using Voice of the Customer as a driver of enhanced CX. Much of the guidance on offer not only resonated with the crowd, but was also in line with a lot of the best practices that our own CX and VoC consultants adhere to as well.
One great piece of advice was to form a CX Council, with representatives from across the business. This is something that Confirmit has championed for a long time. It’s a brilliant way to engage people with the purpose of CX, helping to create “CX Champions” who can roll out the message company-wide. It also prevents CX from being seen as “someone else’s job” which is a common problem! Other useful nuggets included the importance of conducting an audit of initiatives already in place to improve the customer experience, and ensuring you have technology in place to help you make more improvements (funnily enough, we agree strongly with that one!)
Confirmit’s own Claire Sporton also took to the stage to share her views on the death of the survey which was a big hit. I’ll leave it to Claire to blog about some of her thoughts, but suffice it to say that the Confirmit booth was very busy after her presentation with people collecting their CX Survival Kits and some brave souls nibbling on some rather… unusual… snacks we’d made available!
It was an excellent event, and we were delighted to meet so many new people and old friends while we were there. Every business will find a different “home” for Customer Experience, but marketing is increasingly looking like one of its more natural allies, as customers expect ever-more personalized interactions with businesses.
We’ll be at lots more events over the year, and hope to see you there. To find out where we’ll be – check out our events page!