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Current Marketing Technology Fails to Retain Customers says Survey

September 12, 2014

Findings from a survey of more than 300 senior executives in North America show that 94 percent of respondents prioritize keeping customers for life within their organization. However, 49 percent of respondents are unhappy with their current marketing technology’s ability to retain customers.


The above were part of a new study by Forbes Insights and Sitecore which also including a rather interesting finding that only 38 percent of companies are focused on retaining repeat customers for revenue growth.

Given the hyper competitive and global nature of business in the connected world, Forbes and Sitecore say the survey results highlight the need for companies to orient themselves towards creating and keeping customers for life to survive. Some of the context for this is the view that about 49 percent companies are focused on gaining new customers and customer experience is set to surpass product and pricing as the key differentiator for businesses by 2020.

“This study shows that many companies fall short of their potential when it comes to nurturing the full customer lifecycle,” said Bruce Rogers, chief insights officer and head of the CMO Practice for Forbes Media. “A lack of internal collaboration and integration of systems often leaves them with siloed data, crippling their efforts to maximize customer lifetime value and leading to chaos and complexity.”

Apparently companies want to progress in this area but face challenges while developing a single customer view due to technical issues such as multiplicity of systems and fragmentation of data. Companies also find it difficult to keep track of data among multiple systems, data redundancies and silos.

Other food for thought in the survey include:

  • 16 percent of respondents said they don’t prioritize a single view of the customer, while 53 percent consider it a high to very high priority.
  • 24 percent of all respondents said that customer communications and data gathering systems are fully integrated while 13 percent said there is no level of integration in their company.
  • 37 percent of respondents agreed that the teams responsible for customer acquisition and interfacing regardless of lifecycle stage, are completely integrated.

“Fostering the personal relationships and compelling experiences that lead to customer loyalty is now a requirement for achieving market leadership,” said Michael Seifert, Sitecore CEO. “However, many organizations are held back because they’re unable to achieve a 360-degree view of the customer.”




Edited by Peter Bernstein



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