When it comes to tuning in to the voice of the customer, marketers are often inundated with noise, fighting through massive amounts of shouting from the crowd rather than pinpointing the crystal-clear voice of an individual customer. When the CMO Council asked marketers to rate their ability to listen to their customers, only 3 percent felt that they could do an excellent job, and 38 percent admitted that they are doing a poor to horrible job. Part of this failure to listen can be linked to a technology gap that has created a data trap, limiting the organization’s ability to access real-time queues and signals around customer behavior, motivation and intentions.

Without access to the real-time voice of the customer, marketers are left to leverage what they can reach—namely CRM, contact level data, sales data and campaign insights that are traditionally batch-based and have little link to the insights that customers are volunteering to the organization. This culminates in a bleak understanding that organizations, despite their best intentions behind CX strategies, are not able to fully deliver on contextual experiences in real time and across the omni-channel landscape of online and offline touchpoints. In fact, 53 percent of marketers admit they are not delivering…and 23 percent feel they are a long way off.

However, social media in particular presents a significant listening opportunity for marketers to gain that customer voice. And while it often remains siloed within marketing, many companies may be missing a big opportunity to leverage social media strategically across the organization to create better experiences for customers across functions like sales, service, support etc. Rather than being utilized as a push tactic, social can be integrated across the full customer journey—fueling customers through the top of the funnel all the way through the purchase decision, customer service and even repeat purchase—strengthening brand loyalty along the way.

To better understand the obstacles and the opportunity that organizations have in activating listening initiatives to create more profitable, lasting relationships with customers, this program aims to gain insights from marketing and commerce leaders across Europe to capture issues, concerns and best practices in how leading-edge brands are furthering customer experience strategies thanks to strategic customer voice listening initiatives. The findings from the audit will fuel in-depth discussions, from an interactive webcast to live executive roundtables, where marketers in key locations will be invited to gather together and share, debate and add to regional knowledge exchange.

Key issues to be investigated include:

• Transitioning social media from a push tactic to a strategic listening channel
• The impact of social media intelligence and customer voice cross-functionally—from marketing, sales, service and support to supply chain and commerce teams—to enhance the experience, build loyalty and inform future efforts
• Leveraging customer voice to improve organization decision cycles
• Customer signals that are being overlooked or left behind
• Identifying key success drivers and factors in omni-channel engagements
• Turning unfiltered crowd noise into intentional action that delivers measureable business return