Loyalty marketers want to know how to create actionable insights that can help drive customer engagement and customer loyalty. Distilling data effectively is a major challenge for brands.
Loyalty360 hosted a webinar on Tuesday titled, “CMO Challenge Report: The Challenge of Data, Analytics, and Creating Insight (Part 2),” that focused on the challenge of data overload, data for integration and management, and uncovering actionable insights. The report was sponsored by Parascript.
Loyalty360 CEO and CMO Mark Johnson served as the webinar’s featured speaker.
“With our CMO Challenge reports, you get to understand how a competitor might be looking at this challenge, or a company in a different industry,” Johnson told attendees. “The report looks at recurring challenges brands have with creating stronger relationships with their customers. Customer loyalty is predicated on getting actionability out of this data. It’s a huge challenge and becoming more and more challenging. It’s about creating simplicity, that corner butcher store mentality. The key is being open and truly listening to your customers.”
Loyalty360 uses the comprehensive CMO Challenge reports to gain understanding about how leading companies are integrating the cutting-edge tools, technology, and platforms to empower strategic services that lead to true customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
The report yielded four themes: Technology fragmentation, analytic talent on staff, understanding Generation Z, and Unexpected Discoveries.
Loyalty360 posed the following question: “What are the challenges you face with data, analytics, and creating actionable insights today and how has that changed over the last 18 months?” and the report contains a variety of intriguing responses from brands.
Technology Fragmentation:
Eric Messerschmidt | SVP marketing strategy, loyalty, and CRM, Ulta Beauty: “There is more data and more opportunities to collect that data. Now we have all the social platforms and customers more digitally engaged through smartphones. There are more sources of data. Trying to tap into those to identify the most relevant and useful to get a better understanding of the customer, will always be a challenge. In 18 to 24 months, there will be new sources. We are constantly looking at those new sources and trying to figure out how to bring them in, so as to further understand the development of the customer and update her customer record. That will be ongoing.”
Danny Cox | director customer support and insights, JetBlue: Sometimes we’re bringing in new sources of data faster than we can update and capture all the ways we want to consolidate that data. And we’re living in a world where now people want to Snapchat with us and build the infrastructure where we want to capture Snapchat. As that moves fast, it will continue to be a challenge getting our arms around all the disparate data.”
Analytic Talent on Staff:
Norman Vossschulte| director of fan experience, Philadelphia Eagles: “We have some smart people working for us in the organization that helps us analyze data, and you need that. If you want to look at some data, you need some smart people. We have some here, and that helps us. Are there challenges? Always, you learn as you go along and you need the right people in place to help you with that, and we do.”
Jacqui Darcy | client experience leader, NextGen: “We have a statistical analyst on staff that runs correlation analysis, which provides lends insight into our key drivers to identify the strengths and correlations. We look for what is correlating stronger and is driving client satisfaction upwards versus the detractors. We’ve adopted a triangulated approach. We use the qualitative data, and the fact that we have a researcher on staff helping us look for themes and drivers from a correlation standpoint means we can bridge that by looking at the comments and identify key causes, positive and negative intent, and we feed that into the model as well.”
Understanding Generation Z:
Scott Resnick, director of loyalty marketing, Atlanta Hawks: “One thing that is on my mind, that I would love to know how others are thinking about it, is the notion of loyalty among members of the millennial generation. I think there is an open question out there around if millennials care about traditional loyalty programs. Or, are they looking for different ways to want to feel connected and loyal to the brands that are important to them? That is something that we are starting to think deeply about here. And I would be very curious to know how others are thinking about it.”
Unexpected Discoveries:
Lisa Malat| vice president, CMO, Barnes & Noble College: “How do colleges and universities make sure they have that understanding of the student and what’s going on and to be able to make sure that student is on the right track. Four or five months ago, we announced the acquisition of a learning technology platform with a very robust analytics function. We’re starting to work with colleges and universities on bringing that product to them so they can measure student success, be able to identify the red flag very early, and then be able to intervene and turn that student around.”
The CMO Challenge Webinar Series has received an overwhelmingly positive response and can be streamed on-demand on the newly renovated Loyalty360.org. A CMO Challenge webinar on brand alignment is set for Oct. 3, 2017.
All webinar registrants will receive a copy of the report after the event.