Meiro Breakfast Session - Driving Customer Experience in the Digital Era

We are most grateful for the chance to start our first ever Meiro breakfast session on the topic of customer experience. Companies are aware that they need to provide value to the consumer in terms of experience. However, as the number of ways a customer can interact with your brand increase and evolve, it starts getting more challenging for brands to manage, control and design a good experience for their customer. Because we love live interaction with the community, we hosted this event in the cosy cafe space of The Hive at Carpenter Street, Singapore. Over 40 participants listened in eagerly to our panel of speakers. We had Mei Mei Lam (Head of Digital for Shell’s Commercial Lubricants business in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East), Eugene Yap (Senior Director of Kantar), Shantanu Dasgupta (Chief Strategy Officer, S.E.A., ADK) and Pavel Bulowski (COO of Meiro, Co-founder She Loves Data) share their own strategies on tackling customer experience in this digital age. Here is a short summary of the session.

The quest to find a persona.

"Data and marketing cannot work as separate functions." - Shantanu Dasgupta, Chief Strategy Officer of ADK

One of the very first few tasks a marketer has is finding the characteristics of their customer. Building personas or segments of customers helps you better understand your customers - Who you are talking to and how you can reach out to them. This is often based on the experience of sales managers and the sales team. Much of this information is often outdated and not scalable, making it challenging to derive a hyper-targeted persona. The journey to find a customer persona starts with keeping a high engagement with your consumers. Reach out to those interested in the larger story of what your brand does and get to know them as individuals.

Man? Machine?

“Use technology like how a drunk person uses a lamp post - For support.” - Eugene Yap, Senior Director of Kantar.

It should never be a case of man versus machine but man and machine. The role of a marketer and technology is different. The responsibility of developing a sense of who a business is reaching out to and putting that into cultural context still largely lies in the hands of a marketer. Technology plays the part of helping process large pieces of information and testing hypotheses. By putting assumptions to the test, it helps marketers reduce the risk of sending the wrong message to the wrong person. Despite sounding promising, poor understanding of a consumer is often a result of a lack of understanding of technology and also the fact that a lot of data is still kept in silos.

It always starts with the customer.

"Marketers sometimes forget that they are consumers too." - Mei Mei Lam, Head of Digital of Shell

Harvard Business Review defines the customer experience to be “...the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand...”. Every interaction – after-sales care, advertising, offline stores, salesperson, affect a consumer’s impression of the brand. Creating a truly great customer service strategy begins with gathering data that helps understand a consumer on a more granular level. At Meiro, we’re lucky to be working on a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that helps businesses deliver more personalised experiences. Meiro’s CDP consolidates data from every data source – Online, offline, CRM, DMP. It unifies the information and makes it actionable. As your organisation gets more informed about the customer, you will be able to fully leverage customer experience as part of your value proposition. If you are interested in using data to design a better customer experience, contact us at hello@meiro.io.