Atlas Copco

Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your current role and responsibilities in your organization?

I am the Vice President of Customer Experience for our general vacuum divisions in the Vacuum Technique business area of Atlas Copco. I am responsible for driving our organization to achieve our mission of embedding customer centricity into all that we do, and ultimately delivering customer lead growth A tenant of our approach is integrating our digital customer experience across multiple touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. This means connecting our digital customer engagement with our traditional off-lines sales processes and enabling our teams with the tools and data needed to deliver a unified customer experience regardless of the channel of engagement. As our customers have and are continuing to shift toward learning more about our businesses online, we are striving to shift toward a personalized, consistent journey for them. If successful, they do not feel any disruption from their very first touchpoint onward, whether that be via the web, phone, email, or in-person. So, anything that touches the customer and anything that could help our sales and digital teams be more effective in delighting our customers falls under the scope of Customer Experience for Atlas Copco.

What are some of the significant pain-points you have witnessed in the market lately? Has the pandemic brought a new kind of pain point?

We are a manufacturer. Our products are highly technical. The biggest pain-point that we find in the multi-channel marketing and sales approach is transitioning something that was sold exclusively in-person to providing that expertise, consultation, and resource digitally to our existing and potential customers.

Customers generally expect that we already know about their unique, individual needs and understand them before engaging with them in a sales conversation. So, another hurdle one needs to cross is using technology to market their products so that the sales people are given the insight necessary to pick up the buyer journey from where they left off online and then continue it further through an off-line channel, knowing that the customer may continue their online journey throughout the entire buying experience and long-term relationship with our brands.

The pandemic has accelerated our need for digital engagement and lead generation. A team of salespeople who previously relied on a feet-on-the-street prospecting approach is now forced to be tied to their desk as they are not able to travel as freely as in the past. On the brighter side, our digital sales channels have been forced to progress ahead of their prior expectations and plans. Our sales teams are embracing the need for virtual events, enhanced email communications, digital meeting tools, and digital asset management. Our marketing teams are able to better score and engage leads using marketing automation tools thus improving the quality of leads flowing to the field.

According to you, what are the emerging technology trends that are capable of tackling the marketing pain-points that companies face in the market?

One of the most popular trends is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics by companies to create seamless customer experiences. Another technology adopted by many (must more successfully in the B2C world) is live dynamic personalization, where we can automatically detect the prospect or customer’s habits and preferences and present a more personalized digital experience and match them at the current stage of their buying journey. Tactics such as predictive lead scoring are helping to bridge the gap between sales and marketing as we now must work together to deliver a unified experience for our customers and reach out to them proactively when we know they are most likely to convert. This advancement also drives the need for organizations like ours to improve our marketing analytics capabilities so that we can make use of a much larger pool of data, which in-turn drives an increase in our return on marketing investment (ROMI).

Any advice that you want to give to your peers working in the marketing field?

The pandemic has forced the more traditional organizations that were significantly lagging in their digital transformation, to accelerate the execution of their digital strategies just to stay in touch with their customers. After taking the giant leap forward, many industries are now taking a pause and reviewing what they've learned during the transition so that they can start utilizing the different tools they have put in place.

There is no doubt that we have not only arrived in a “new normal,” but we have employees, prospects, and customers with an entirely new set of expectations around the use of digital tools. As leaders, we need to establish a new baseline and pace for continuous improvement and ensure that we are continuing to create meaningful, value added experiences for our customers, despite the radical changes that we have just been through. Here, measuring the baseline is not about the number of users engaging on our websites or the number of leads passing to the sales team. It is about conversions, revenue generation, and improving Customer Lifetime Value. One thing that has not changed is that without our customers, we would not be in business. We must continue embracing changing expectations and driving innovation in the way that we address customer needs. The time is now to focus on creating real moments of delight, rather than being continually bogged down in “fixing” the broken processes. This is what will allow for increased win rates and customer loyalty.