Big brand marketers take CX beyond customer service, breaking it down into customer-centricity, trust, emotion and internal structure.

The 2019 CXO Leaders Summit, held in Melbourne on 13 February hosted a range of marketing, agency, consultancy and CX professionals, whose presentations outlined their changing approaches to experience. What’s clear from their discussions is that good CX goes far beyond seamless interactions and prompt customer service resolutions. It can also be considered in a number of ways, in multiple parts of the business and should make up the core of all innovation and development.

Here’s a few highlights from brand-side marketing leaders on the day.

 

ME bank and trust in marketing

Melody Townsend, general manager – product and network marketing – at ME, delivered a presentation on the increasing importance of trust.

Aligning ME’s approach to trustworthiness to the Deloitte trust model (pictured), Townsend outlines the four ways trust in marketing can be built and considered:

• Risk management: via effective comms management and delivering on promises.
• Technology and data: using customer data, technology and social media as a vehicle to build an authentic and transparent brand persona.
• Compelling content: fun, on-brand messaging and comms that establishes ME as a bank that’s in touch with trends and its consumers.
• Being authentic: via ME’s five values of ‘go to the moon’ (aim high), ‘love Mondays’ (be passionate about the job, the bank and its customers), ‘ride the subway’ (mix and get familiar with the bank’s customers), ‘stay hungry’ (know there’s always more to be done) and ‘have a swing’ (feel empowered to try new things).

 

Forty Winks and emotional branding

Alex D’Amico, marketing director at Forty Winks shared his experience of developing the new ‘Serious About Sleep’ brand direction. It’s primarily based on a piece of insight that Forty Winks is not a brand that just sells beds, but in fact sells sleep. By leaning on sleep as the end goal for consumers shopping at Forty Winks, the brand is able to deliver an emotive message that it improves health and happiness.

The emotive ‘Wake up to Sleep’ ad drives home the brand message.

The challenge then becomes making the step from giving Australians the reason to sleep, to giving them the reason to shop. So, the relaunch became about establishing Forty Winks as experts in sleep and introducing a reason for customers to believe in the brand.

The BedMatch product and campaign leveraged the brand message and aesthetic, filtering it through to a product message and call to action.

 

Australian Red Cross on NFP CX

Belinda Dimovski, director of customer engagement at Australian Red Cross (ARC) shared her unique experience and challenges of shifting from the corporate world to a NFP organisation.

ARC is broken into about 120 initiatives including retail stores, first aid, training and certification, youth programs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community programs and many, many more. From a customer engagement perspective ARC has no way to explain all of that to all its potential customers. From a marketing and fundraising perspective, however, the existing storytelling was a bit of a ‘spray and pray.’ Dimovski and her team’s challenge write it into one story.

To make matters worse, ARC sent five million comms per year but knew nothing about its customers.

In April 2018, Dimovski hired a head of CX. ARC needed to understand supporters then create a vision to embed customer-centricity. The journey entails:

• creating and leveraging loyalty among supporters
• getting to know supporters
• acquiring new supporters
• consolidating donator database across teams and initiatives
• innovation, and
• creating new teams – CX team, acquisition team, loyalty team, product team, digital product team, marketing team.

The mission to become customer centric sat with the CX team. To manage the complexity, demographic data was required. The new approach meant that tools developed for the corporate marketplace could now be applied at the NFP.

Customer personas of what it looks like to be an Australian humanitarian revealed that ARC’s most highly-represented supporter is a middle-senior aged white person. One who was exposed to the efforts of the ARC in times of war in the 20th century and feels the need to give back. Today’s target consumer required for ARC to grow its audience has a separate range of needs and expectations. A one-size-fits-all blueprint would not be enough to apply to everyone.

A customer-centric roadmap helped outline the brand proposition, and testing and learning throughout the process enables constant optimisation.

Dimovski and ARC have learned that defining the customer is extremely challenging. A focus on cultural change was integral. Structure and internal culture too plays an important role. The new “sustainable” team has progressed quicker in the last 18 months than it did in the previous ten years, declares Dimovski proudly.

 

Australia Post and sales and marketing alignment

Chantelle Lane, head of B2B marketing at Australia Post outlined the lofty goals of CEO Christine Holgate. Affectionately referred to as the ‘Christine Challenge’, the organisation has four key breakthrough objectives set to meet by 2025:

• grow and build a $10 billion profitable revenue group (currently sitting at $6.8 billion)
• grow profit to $500 million per annum
• be the partner of choice for customers and suppliers, and
• be rated an employer of choice with world class safety results.

The company – which has long been grappling with the disruption of falling letter volumes and increasing customer demand for quick and reliable parcel delivery – under Holgate has gone from a fragmented network of silos to one team that covers all its small, medium and large scale business undertakings.

Divided into five core departments of sales, service, segment developing and marketing, sales and service excellence and customer solutions and acquisitions, the first priority is aligning sales and marketing teams. Other integral parts of the strategy include:

• strengthen parcel and letter delivery networks
• enhance role in the community
• unite innovation and product activities
• safety, health and wellbeing of personnel, and
• capture international growth opportunities.

 

Marketing is proud to be the exclusive media partner of CXO Leaders Summit. 

Don’t miss the next instalment of the event in Sydney on 28 and 29 August »