customer experience a top priority in india
TRANSCRIPT
February 2014 | © Copyright 2014. Paul Writer. All rights reserved.
SNAPSHOT SURVEY REPORTCustomer Engagement
Customer Experience Top Priority in India For Indian marketers, the focus is on offering strong products and building a better experience.BY LAUREN GIBBONS PAUL
The world over, marketers need to keep their collective fingers on the customer pulse. Understanding customer priorities is key to staying
relevant to minds and wallets. Given that, a recent poll asked senior marketers in India where they believe customers would like them to invest their budgets in the coming year. The majority said clients would want them to spend on improved products/services (33 percent) and a “better experience overall” (43 percent). Indian marketers are clearly
brick-and-mortar venues—is achievable with back-end
systems that support this seamless interaction.
Survey respondents also indicated they are looking
over the horizon at giving customers greater mobile
access and improving targeted offers. “Customers
are looking for more mobility, i.e., access, through
smartphones and tablets,” said one respondent.
Additionally, prevailing marketing techniques vary
considerably from industry to industry. In business-to-
business markets, for example, many companies need
to build and maintain loyalty in their dealer network,
and targeted offers greatly aid in that pursuit. “In the
cement industry, companies do everything to make
dealers loyal. For that, better targeted offers is the
most suitable method,” said one respondent.
“As India becomes a more consumer-driven
economy, and as enabling technologies become more
widespread, we will see the focus on a good customer
experience becoming the norm, not the exception,”
Jessie Paul concludes. n
Lauren Gibbons Paul has written extensively on customer relationship management and customer experience management for more than 15 years.
This research project was funded by a grant from SAP.
becoming more tuned into the importance of building
a strong customer experience, before they venture into
more sophisticated initiatives such as targeted offers
and mobile access (see Figure 1, “In India, Marketers
Think Customers Prize the Basics”).
“While many firms still view the customer experience
as driven by the product, over the past 12 months we
have seen some futurist marketers break away and
work on the holistic customer experience from pre-
purchase to after-sales,” says Jessie Paul, CEO of Paul
Writer in India, which focuses on end-to-end aspects of
developing the B2B marketing infrastructure.
“We all keep announcing new products and services,
but what our customers really want is an overall
better experience,” one respondent agreed. Another
concluded that the best customer experience
combines quality, relevant products and price. “It’s
time to give the customer better products, service and
the best quality at an optimum cost,” he said.
Some respondents pointed to technology’s role in
providing compelling customer experiences, using
analytics to unearth customer preferences and
integrating systems to achieve consistency across
all channels, including phone, Web, mobile, instant
messaging and in-store. “Customer experience should
be about building infrastructure that allows customers
to do whatever they want through whatever channel
they choose to use,” said a respondent. Today,
delivering an ”omni-channel” customer experience—
an unbroken, continuous dialogue and consistent look
and feel (and touch and sound) across digital and
MethodologySAP and Paul Writer launched a global survey via LinkedIn in late 2013 to determine what types of investments senior marketers believe their customers most desire for the coming year. Approximately 622 respondents from India participated in the survey.
Titles included:
n CXO
n Vice President
n Engineer
n Business Owner
Marketing Investment Priorities Respondents were asked to name the marketing investments they thought their customers would value most highly.
A better experience overall
Improved products/services
Better targeted offers
Better mobile access
Other 1%
Base: 622 respondents Source: SAP/Paul Writer via LinkedIn
43%
33%
13%
10%
FIGURE 1