Cloud adoption and the evolving customer experience

Developing the right digital human experience

Positive human connections and experiences are becoming more important than ever to a brand’s success. For marketers, the traditional focus on building awareness and capturing attention needs to shift to creating relevancy and delivering genuine emotional connections. Great experiences build connections. Strong connections create loyalty. Loyalty drives business results.

Many successful CMOs realize that existing tools and tactics are inadequate for connecting with customers, employees, and ecosystem partners whose behaviors and preferences are increasingly defined by immediacy and convenience. Cloud adoption can dramatically enhance the experience for customers, employees and ecosystem partners and, ultimately, drive marketing success by:

• Shortening response times
• Speeding up product development
• Generating deeper insights
• Powering dynamic decision-making
• Allowing marketers to engage more effectively and efficiently

Cloud technology can help organizations move faster and keep up with the pace of change.

The demands of today’s marketing executive

Today, humans experience the world in physical and digital realities simultaneously without any concept of “channels.” This simultaneous experience creates three imperatives for marketing leaders to address:

1. Create differentiated human experiences while keeping up with the increasingly mobile habits of customers, partners, and other key stakeholders in your ecosystem.
2. Engage stakeholders efficiently and cost-effectively in the channel and manner they prefer.
3. Align your marketing activities and investments in this new digital world with other parts of your organization.

The key to all three of these imperatives is a robust foundation of cloud-based capabilities. The tools and advantages of cloud can result in a better, more human experience. Using the cloud can enable you to innovate and scale faster. It can help you create personalized, frictionless experiences—elevating the human experience across the company’s ecosystem.

Humans are seven times more likely to purchase from a brand that evokes a positive emotional experience, eight times more likely to trust it, and 15 times more likely to recommend it. For marketers trying to deliver differentiated experiences, cloud-enabled capabilities can be a powerful tool in the war for relevancy.

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“I’m checking out now.” Those four simple words from a hotel guest can enable a cloud-based workflow automation: The front desk immediately sends the guest folio, housekeeping is notified the room needs servicing, and the guest’s ground transportation of choice is notified and pickup scheduled

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How marketers can get things moving

The case for creating better digital human experiences is compelling—growing top-line sales, improving margins, and creating stronger brand advocacy. But migrating to a distributed cloud environment has wide-ranging implications for the entire organization. Ultimately, the CIO is accountable for the actual journey and technology transition. Marketing leadership must provide input and strategic vision to guide that journey and drive to outcomes that deliver on the brand’s ambitions.

Marketers can get started by focusing on two key initial steps:

1. Define capabilities: First, as you craft a vision for the types of experiences you want to deliver to your customers, you will also need to identify the core capabilities needed to deliver them. What is the unique expertise or domain knowledge that you need to realize your experiential vision, and do they exist in the organization today? What tools and systems enable those capabilities?
2. Quantify value: Second, once you understand the capabilities you need and the tools and systems that enable them, you can quickly assess the potential business value of investing in cloud migration. A rapid cost-benefit analysis can quickly uncover potential savings, efficiencies, and business impact that ultimately inform your decision-making process and cloud strategy.

These foundational steps represent significant progress down the path of transforming into an agile, cloud-enabled marketing organization.

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When cloud adoption and human experience come together

Humans retain more from experiences than from products or technology. How we feel is what sticks with us. Our experience imbues the world with meaning, embeds memories, and transforms our perceptions and behaviors.

Being able to create a positive, personalized feeling in someone can build trust, loyalty, and revenue. Technology—specifically cloud-enabled technology—gives CMOs the opportunity to develop, test, and refine the experiences faster and more efficiently than ever, wherever that consumer may be.

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