We only set it up last November, but we’re already expanding our Customer Experience and Digital Marketing practice. The unit is run by Jean-François Mingelgrün, our experienced CRM, CX, retail and loyalty professional. The customer is at the heart of every enterprise, so we’re expecting a surge in the demand for customer experience and digital marketing consultancy.
The Customer Experience and Digital Marketing practice is especially geared towards tackling projects in the retail, automotive distribution, utilities, finance and insurance industries. Jean-François Mingelgrün: “During the past 12 months, 70% of customers have been experimenting with new sales channels and their shift to online is here to stay. An omnichannel approach is the only way to go for any industry. We’re therefore assisting our clients to anticipate consumer behaviour and lay down new rules of engagement for marketing, sales and service teams.”
Devoteam is currently working on creating a digital customer journey for a major European car manufacturer. All car brands essentially use the same tools – virtual showrooms, car configurators, credit and insurance simulators, SEM projects, social networks for interactions, etc. – so the focus is on making them truly effective. Jean-François Mingelgrün: “It’s mainly about how fast you can integrate the different tools, how fast you can develop full journeys starting from the awareness phase, how fast can you improve landing pages and online conversion tools.”
Most customers do a lot of research through digital channels before making their purchase and car dealers sell more cars online. So Devoteam is giving dealers access to customized coaching through the Customer Experience practice to develop their online skills and their new role as customer advisors rather than pure sellers. The overall results are promising. “Our client managed to maintain and develop his lead funnel in a particularly harsh competitive landscape during the recent Belgian virtual motor show, where every brand was fighting to maintain digital attention and awareness,” says Jean-François Mingelgrün.
When it comes to retailers, the user interface of the website is crucial. Devoteam has been auditing the sites of a major retailer to improve the online journeys and click-and-collect user experience. They identified a couple of strategic customer segments where they can further activate online sales.
We’re leveraging the premium partnership we have with best-in-class marketing automation tools for smoother communication flows and campaigns, which we try to improve continuously.
The overall idea is to exchange best practices between clients from different industries. “This won’t always work but we see the same patterns emerging for totally different clients,” says Jean-François Mingelgrün. His team wanted to build their competences before reaching out more actively to their clients. The practice now has a clear methodological framework and a set of toolboxes to visualize and map complete customer journeys. It collects comprehensive customer profiles and data on the main stages in their journeys. The goal is to give clients intimate knowledge of their customers. This is achieved through co-creation consultancy on a medium-term basis or workshops covering customer mapping, database audits, customer profiling, design thinking, toolkit audit, etc.
Many industries are undergoing yet another digital transformation, this time related to customer dialogue. This will probably bring more changes than expected, but the traditional ways of marketing, sales and service won’t be going away anytime soon. “They’re being complemented with new ways of interaction. We therefore recommend a thoughtful change management approach to make sure that new competences can take root without displacing existing competences,” says Jean-François Mingelgrün.
The Customer Experience and Digital Marketing practice has a close partnership with Salesforce for CRM and ServiceNow for customer service management (CSM). Jean-François Mingelgrün: “Salesforce and ServiceNow are our natural tools of choice, but we help our customers to select the most appropriate solutions for their needs and their IT environments. We’re part of the large Devoteam group, so we can support quite a lot of different technologies.”
CRM packages continue to play a major role in all ecosystems. Ideally, every interaction with every customer should be logged. This would ensure the best possible learnings, coherent campaigns, a targeted approach towards segmented audiences and appropriate reactions to customer feedback. Jean-François Mingelgrün: “It’s our job to connect all the relevant data with each other, so that we can inject powerful results and customer insights into improving every new campaign.”
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