Brand and Telco Partnering will drive Omni-Channel Marketing Effectiveness

New research from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council reveals that brands and communications service providers will need to become tightly coupled in order to truly fulfill their shared vision of delivering a more gratifying, valued and relevant omni-channel experience for customers.

The milestone study, dubbed “Getting Serious About the Omni-Channel Experience,” reveals a healthy interest among brands for tapping the upgraded digital infrastructures, subscriber access and enormously valuable data repositories of mobile network operators and telco carriers as they seek to deliver a more consistent, unified and enriched experience across all digital and physical channels.

More than 80 percent of brand marketers surveyed by the CMO Council in the first half of 2017 say their brands are extremely, very or increasingly reliant on global customer connectivity, secure digital communications, real-time customer interaction and multi-channel content delivery.

Almost half of non-telco marketers surveyed by the CMO Council see a potential leadership role for communications service providers to provide brands with an optimized framework for omni-channel engagement. Only 11 percent do not, and 40 percent are uncertain.

In contrast, 56 percent of telco industry marketers believe that non-telco companies are out-performing telco operators and communications service providers in delivering a true omni-channel experience. This compares to one quarter who do not.

Surprisingly, just 4 percent of subscriber-reliant telco companies believe they are giving their customers a consistent, personalized and contextually relevant experience across all traditional and digital channels by leveraging persistence of information, respecting the privacy of customers, and aligning the business needs with IT. On the non-telco side, the picture is just as dismal. A nominal 1 percent of brand marketers say they have a complete omni-channel management (OCM) model in place.

“Less than 10 percent of telco marketers believe they are highly advanced and rapidly evolving when it comes to being more data-driven, customer-responsive and digitally adaptive,” notes Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “More than 25 percent list functional integration; cultural, technical and operational hurdles; and resistance to change as obstacles to evolving to a true OCM model.”

The research shows that more than 50 percent of telcos have partnered with non-telco brands on marketing and promotional campaigns; nearly 70 percent of those report very positive, productive and fruitful relationships with good outcomes.

The CMO Council is teaming with the Open ROADS Community to create an actionable framework for more effective and consistent engagement across all customer touchpoints and channels of digital interaction. The aim of the initiative is to advocate a common model, implementation roadmap, and best practices and processes for evolving to a higher level of customer experience, value creation, retention and business performance.

“Omni-channel isn’t a simple one-way street. In fact, our very name reflects the complexity of omni-channel transformation: Real-time, On-Demand, All-online, Do-It-Yourself, and Social,” explains Trevor Cheung, COO of Open ROADS Community and Vice Chair of The Open Group. “Delivering the ROADS experience is an experience requirement and an architectural principle and it cannot be a single department fix. Marketing, technology, and customer service must work together. We believe the mindset, culture, and really the whole ecosystem needs to work together. This is necessary to handle the new consumer generation, but also the new business generation.”

The report from the CMO Council and its Customer Experience Board includes findings from an online survey of more than 250 brand and telco marketing leaders, commentary from a CMO Roundtable at the 2017 Mobile World Congress, as well as insights from interviews with senior marketers at a cross-section of companies. These include KIA Motors, British Telecom, T-Mobile, Visa, Verizon, Royal Bank of Canada, Singtel, Deutsche Telekom, Airtel and Telekomunikasi.