Rewiring backstage technology capabilities for a more integrated customer experience

“Everyone’s been talking about digital transformation for the last 10 years – but what’s real now is that if you don’t transform, don’t embrace technology, don’t organize how your systems are working in the back end, your front end experience that customers feel is going to feel disjointed – and it’s ultimately going to lead to a loss in revenue and decline in your company,” warns Amir Malik, marketing transformation managing director, Accenture Song.

One business going through this change is BP – with approximately 17,000 retail sites around the world where customers go to fill up on fuel, buy food or recharge their electric vehicles.

“We have millions of people come through those sites every single day – so the scale is not lost on us, nor is the size of the challenge,” explains Matt Rich, vice-president for customer care and innovation at BP. “We need to make sure each one of those transactions and touchpoints is as seamless as it can be. We need to be match fit on every one of those transactions to win.”

But there are complexities in pulling everything together in terms of technology and CRM systems. “There’s no doubt that our offer is getting more and more complex as customer needs change,” says Rich. For example, a BP customer might be an electric vehicle (EV) or fuel car driver, and when visiting one of its sites they probably still want a cup of coffee, they might even need a pint of milk too – and they still probably want some loyalty points.

For BP, the focus has been on leveraging the assets it has to bring all these experiences together. “Piecing together the different needs of customers is paramount in what we’re trying to do,” says Rich. “That comes together in our data analysis, in our systems, and ultimately leads up to a customer experience and making sure we’re there when our customers need us.”

To create this ‘front stage’ experience for the customer, there’s work to be done in re-wiring the ‘back stage’ of the marketing organization. Malik suggests that in a rapidly changing landscape, brands need to embrace technology and build closer partnerships with tech companies to give them the proximity to survive change and meet the expectations of customers in today’s age.

“We’re in the age of personalization – no longer just talking about it, but doing it now and at scale,” says Malik. “But the power of these technologies really needs to be understood by not just the CMO but the CEOs of these organizations. That digital execution needs to really be integrated and adopted by brands if they want to compete on the scale that we see today.

“There’s a big opportunity for businesses to really grow their technology capability but also to track the upside into the customers and into the customer experience. Now is a good time to restructure your business – and do it, anchoring it in a digital ‘customer first’ approach.”

Watch part two ‘The Backstage Pass: treating every customer as a VIP’ and catch up on previous episodes in this series, on The Drum TV.