Listen – Understand – Act

[svenesser]

1. 

It’s a key part of every true conversation, every marketing direction and for sure most important for CX: Listen - Understand - Act

…but what is going on in the market? Companies are investing in one frontend system after the other (often hype driven). With this they are acting better and better. But hold on… How can they act without listening and without understanding?

You will for sure say now hold on to me, they still listen, they still understand. Sure, but on which level? We all know that companies are having a huge amount of data sources and mostly using just a small part of them.  So how are they listening to their customer?

Frontend systems like marketing or sales clouds are designed to act with some “understand” functionality. But is understanding their core element? Let’s jump into marketing. We are talking about the customer journey, which is very important. The way we work with this is, that we build a defined set of journeys (5, 10,…) and try to fit every one of us into one of them. Does this work?

This is a “managed customer journey”

Wouldn’t it be better to let every single user design his own journey? Every one of us is going his own way to the left and right, forward and backward and in his own speed.

If we enable this, this is the “customer managed journey”

So, let’s see how to setup the scene for Listen – Understand - Act. What kind of systems do we need here to do it in an enterprise way?

Listen: This is the most important part of a CDP (Customer Data Platform)

Understand: This is very well done by Thunderhead, a company I trust in since a long time.

Act: Here we are with a great marketing cloud and / or our Emarsys solution

The possibilities such a setup can deliver are huge. We often start with act, but now we need to solve the understand part quickly to get the most out of our acting solutions.

This differentiation is for sure simplified, but hopefully it helps a bit to see the focus of the different systems. At the end of the day, there is much more than marketing which is important.

Happy to discuss this any time with you. Here you can reach out to me.