Customer trust is a multifaceted thing. On one hand, earning and keeping it requires marketers to overcome a myriad of threats. On the other hand, trust is almost universally revered by marketers, and once obtained, the benefits are plentiful.
A new report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and sponsored by SAS, Optimizing the Use of Marketing Technology to Build Customer Trust, highlights both the importance and the complexity of earning and keeping trust, as well as the important role that MarTech can play.
Ninety-one percent of the respondents to the survey conducted as a part of the report consider customer trust to be very important to the success of their organization. The splendors are numerous; the top benefits that respondents say they realize by enabling customer trust include enhanced brand reputation, increased customer engagement, improved customer loyalty, increased competitive advantage and increased profitability, among others.
Beyond the splendors lie serious threats
On the flip side, there are threats to customer trust. When respondents were asked which factors pose the greatest threat to enabling customer trust for their organization, the top four factors revolved around customer communications. These were delays in responding to changing customer needs, inconsistent messaging across channels, messaging and content not aligned to customer needs, and inadequate customer service. Rounding out the top six were silos of customer data, data breaches and other security threats.
Protecting customer data is still important to earning and keeping trust. But I personally think that the marketers’ perceived threats to customer trust presented in the report focus strongly on an inability to understand customers well enough, and in a timely enough manner, to deliver the relevant real-time personalized communications that customers have come to expect as table stakes. My belief is further confirmed when you consider the primary benefits detailed above – specifically increased customer engagement and improved customer loyalty.
To me, these are clear outcomes of targeted and personalized communications. Linking in the top threats makes the connection even more clear. If your messaging is inconsistent, you can’t align communications to customer needs and you can’t unify your silos of customer data, so you will likely not realize many of the identified trust benefits.
Does MarTech make or break customer trust?
The overarching theme that I observed in the report – the strong ties between personalized and relevant communications and customer trust – also carried over into MarTech’s role in fostering trust. When asked to identify the greatest barriers preventing MarTech from having a positive impact on customer trust for their organization, four of the top six barriers selected by the respondents focused on the single most important item to effective personalization – data. These were poor quality data, silos of customer data, lack of real-time data access, and inability to track online behavior.
This makes perfect sense. Cleansing, unifying and accessing customer data has been a top nemesis to marketers for years, if not decades. You cannot respond quickly to changing customer needs, deliver consistent messaging across channels, or align messaging and content to customer needs if you can’t marshal your data to understand what is relevant to the customer.
Without a doubt, MarTech makes customer trust
The good news is that marketers also recognize that MarTech can be a powerful ally in the quest for trust, with 81% of survey respondents saying that MarTech has a significant or moderate impact on an organization’s ability to foster customer trust. And marketers found plenty to be jazzed about here as well. When asked to identify the key ways that MarTech enables their organizations to respond faster to changing customer needs and demands, these were their top responses:
- Analyze customer data to provide personalized experiences.
- Deliver clear and consistent messaging across multiple channels.
- Tailor content to specific customer needs for greater relevance.
- Automate routine tasks for greater speed and efficiency.
- Create a seamless experience across various touch points.
- Support real-time decision making.
Unsurprisingly, generative AI (GenAI) is also garnering significant marketer attention. Seventy-four percent of respondents indicated that integrating GenAI can enhance their organization’s MarTech stack. Maturity in using GenAI is still fairly low, with 13% of respondents saying that their organization has implemented GenAI for marketing purposes versus 45% who are piloting/exploring GenAI for marketing purposes. However, many of the current use cases that have been implemented focus on improving customer communication and protecting data, which will help overcome some of the threats to trust described above.
Of those respondents who say their organization is using GenAI for marketing purposes, 36% are using it to support a wide range of customer support needs via chatbots and virtual assistants, 30% are using it to create a more user-friendly and intuitive online experience, 29% are using it to incorporate advanced security measures to protect and secure customer data, and 28% are using it to generate personalized messaging and content in real time.
The conclusions of this report are quite clear. Customer trust is integral to an organization’s success, and MarTech plays a critical role in fostering that trust.
