How does a 100-year-old company continually reinvent itself to change how the world works? By relying on and driving a high-quality customer experience.
IBM’s current success is built around its historic roots and the customer-first culture that has existed from the beginning. For CMO Michelle Peluso, that means standing on the backs of giants while also looking towards the future.
The goal of IBM’s customer experience is to create more one-to-one interactions and move away from mass marketing and experiences. Peluso says the most important thing is seamlessness. Silos are common in large companies like IBM, but IBM avoids them by creating agile teams that are focused on a common goal. Each agile marketing team has a mix of specialists from different areas, such as IT, marketing and product design. The teams are tasked with thinking about how to sell a particular IBM product. Bringing together different backgrounds and skillsets for a common goal allows for unique perspectives and a seamless approach to customer experience across the entire organization.
Marketing plays a large role in making sure the client journey is well instrumented so that IBM gets feedback when things aren’t going well. The right client feedback at the right points highlights areas for improvement.
IBM’s customer experience is driven by data and includes new technology like AI. Peluso’s agile marketing teams use IBM Watson to get proactive alerts each morning about areas where they are underperforming. Watson also gives the teams reasons for the lack of success and suggestions for improvements. Instead of the human employees having to manually dig through endless amounts of data, Watson’s AI capabilities provide proactive alerts that allow teams to move more quickly and accurately.
Peluso says emerging technologies give customers more control and puts them in charge of their own experiences. This will only continue to grow in the future of marketing and customer experience.
Along with AI and agile teams, Peluso believes blockchain will have a large impact on the future of customer experience and marketing. Instead of moving through a complicated process like media buying with numerous moving parts and limited accountability, blockchain could potentially connect different parts of the supply chain with one record of the truth. Media buying could potentially be more accurate and targeted to provide personalized customer experiences.
A high-quality customer experience doesn’t come from a single action or person, but from the collective efforts of many people working towards the same goal. At IBM, that translates into leveraging new technology and ideas while still holding strong to brand values from the past to continually driving forward-thinking solutions customers crave and expect.
Blake Morgan is a keynote speaker, customer experience futurist and the author of two books including her new “The Customer Of The Future.” Stay in touch with her weekly on her newsletter.