Marketing teams at CSPs are struggling to gather, access and interpret the massive amounts of data needed to impact customer buying behavior, a study by the CMO Council found.
CMO Council VP of programs Liz Miller, speaking yesterday at the TM Forum Management World Asia event in Singapore, said marketers are being blocked by a lot of functional silos. "Only 5% of the marketers we interviewed said they have access to data to personalize customer experience."
Some 53% said what they really want is an overview of the subscriber experience. Yet a staggering 59% of those surveyed accessed data via meetings. "So imagine when you're being asked to personalize and enrich experiences, you have to wait for a month to get critical insights."
Another 57% are getting the info from a monthly report -- a spreadsheet delivered by email with perhaps five things about the customer last month.
Miller said the reality is that marketers from "brands are coming to invade your networks. I can't stress that enough. It is the No. 1 area of new spend when it comes to brand marketers. They will be creating more content, more experiences and driving more people to mobile devices than ever before."
The study of more than 200 CSP C-suite executives was designed to benchmark the behavior-based data being used by the marketing organization, the challenges they face and what they are doing to transform their networks.
The second key trend brought to light in the survey is that the CMO has now become the chief experience officer for many organizations. "The CMO is now the customer champion -- this is now the office that owns that customer experience."
While Miller said some organizations see OTT as a threat and data as a huge problem, marketing sees dollar signs. "They have plans to partner with, if not create new products and services for OTT, to generate new revenue streams."