By: Vinodkumar Subramanian

The reinvention of chief marketing officers (CMOs), their teams, and the marketing functions will be the theme for successful CMOs in 2021, based on Forrester 2021 predictions.

Over the last few years, communications service providers (CSPs) worldwide have been transforming their traditional marketing functions and processes to improve efficiency and revenue. CMOs now need to go one step further and drive customer obsession at their companies, putting the customer at the center of everything they do, including leadership, strategy and operations.

This requires all marketing teams to be able to access and reference the online digital image of their customers and their experience across all the different stages of the customer lifecycle and its touchpoints.

According to Forrester, “spend on loyalty and retention marketing will increase by 30 percent as CMOs assert control over the full customer lifecycle.”

Accessing valid data

Almost every CSP claims to provide an end-to-end perspective to its customers. In reality, they struggle with any sort of business data processing. Similarly, they struggle with understanding and processing network data, so a holistic approach towards customer experience remains a constant challenge for them. One of the most common examples is that marketing teams are unable to get the network experience and usage data of subscribers, so their promotions lack a critical dimension—and aren’t as effective as they could be.

Marketing teams have not been able to personalize campaigns using customer satisfaction across touchpoints as a key input for targeting. The wrong campaign then goes out and is targeted to the wrong customers, for example to upsell to unhappy customers. In fact, 74 percent of marketing leaders still struggle to scale their personalization efforts.

Marketing teams have also not been able to accurately check the effectiveness of campaigns in terms of customer experience on a daily basis. This makes it difficult to reach the right customer with the most suitable offer exactly at the right moment in the customer journey when the probability to accept the offer is at its peak.

According to a recent Google survey on marketing personalization, 90 percent of marketers say personalization significantly contributes to business profitability. Nonetheless, before personalization can happen, marketing teams need to be able to access valid data and understand and analyze it properly to guide personalization activities.

Every customer is unique

The perception of an experience with any service like video streaming, gaming or social sharing depends a lot on the individual’s profile. For example, a man in his 40s who stays mostly at home working remotely will perceive differently the same network performance versus a teenager who moves around the city and is a casual gamer.

It is crucial to address needs one by one and understand these individuals’ sensitivities and expectations to get a 360-degree view of the customer. To adapt accordingly, it is also essential to learn the changing dynamics at the CSP’s network, customer cluster, or market. The key is that CSPs can easily identify detractors and promoters daily, and the changing drivers behind satisfaction for the whole customer base, different clusters or individuals, depending on the user need.

To illustrate, let’s say the marketing team wants to understand what their customers’ satisfaction with gaming is. To get an accurate view of the customer’s experience, it is vital to understand the behavior of the individual gamer as well, in order to approach the customer with the best possible offer at the right time in the customer journey.

Cloud gaming has become more and more popular since the start of the pandemic, and it has the potential to significantly “change the game,” so to speak, for operators due to its high bandwidth and low latency requirements. It only works if the connectivity is good.

Also, cloud gaming means a broader segment of players globally, according to Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO: “For every person in the world that games on a professional desktop, there are probably three who can’t afford one. . . Our hope is that (cloud gaming) is expanding the market, not just being a replacement market.”