Kunal Aman
Head Marketing & Communications, SAS India

The evolving role of CMOs 
Customer experience defines how customers perceive (– both conscious and subconscious) their relationship with your brand. Resulting from all their interactions with your brand during the customer life cycle.
As a B2B CMO or CX Head, that essentially means taking a serious look at how the dots are being connected across the ecosystem – right from our engaging prospects through our website/ live chats through to frontline Sales to successful onboarding and delivery through our Partners/ Consulting division and providing our customers the right support – whether it Is on the technical front or business front. SAS is moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric focused organization. Within our marketing function, our Marketing Sciences team along with the Analytics deployments we have done over the years gives us that edge allowing us to adopt a more holistic approach to the customer journey in real-time and improving the hit rate of our marketing campaigns. We deploy our own platforms and solutions within our MarTech suite and data that is gleaned from external as well as internal channels are blended to allow for a 360-degree view of our customer right from prospecting to the point where they become a customer and then hopefully an advocate. With SAS analytics, we are in a much better position to deliver value to the customer right from tailored content that fits the customer’s journey - be it whitepapers, digital content or events. We have seen that this data driven approach has helped us boost customer profitability, streamline our communications while also fostering retention and loyalty.

Contribution towards strategic business discussions
As companies confront newer consumer behaviour and diverse target markets, the role of a CMO has diversified in many organizations to lead company wide change in response to consumer buying patterns, managing complexity of customer interests and building new marketing capabilities to impact evolving needs of customers. In addition to brand custodians and frontline defenders of the brand, marketers are expected to be customer champions, stewards of internal morale and culture, and most importantly drivers of the company growth initiatives. Expectations have also changed on the technology side of the equation. Today’s CMO needs to be very comfortable operating at crossroads of marketing and technology and the expectation is that she/he needs to be very data-driven in her/his approach. The driver behind this change is that analytically driven CMO who help build insights-driven marketing organizations that can read customer signals at scale and make them actionable in real time. So the modern CMO is not only playing the role of a Chief storyteller but an innovative catalyst in building marketing capabilities and technologies to transform customer experiences into customer success for both the end user and internal stakeholders.

Real-Time Marketing to Drive Sustainable Growth
There is no denying that data has become the centre of every business strategy and decision-making and plays a key role in creating personalised communication, and tailored solutions. With the volumes of data being generated and the technology now available to harness it, brands can deliver on hyper-personalised customer experiences in real-time. The key to a successful customer experience for a brand is an integrated marketing technology stack, which can unify its data coming from multiple sources and gently nudge the customer to take action. With the right tools in place, brands also need to align the right people and processes in place to circumvent the challenges mentioned above.