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Every company has a secret sauce —it’s the differentiator that  separates one company from the rest of the pack and keeps it successful long-term. For Juniper Networks, CMO Mike Marcellin says that secret sauce centers around how the company is getting its customers to actively engage with its product.

“How someone engages with a brand, with a company, is hugely important. 84% of [consumers] said that experience that a company provides is as important as its products and services. If you're a startup going into a completely new space and you're the only game in town, then the features and capabilities are there. But if you're in a mature industry where it's competitive, the customer experience must be there.”

On this episode of Marketing Trends, Mike explains how his team has evolved over the last few years to take a more data-centric approach to its marketing efforts. He also dives into how marketers can effectively use A.I. in their decision-making, and how organizations can reduce operational costs to improve their customer experience. Enjoy!

Main Takeaways

• You Want a Holistic View of Your Customers: The best way to gain an entire understanding of who your customers are — what their buying habits are, how they like to be communicated with, and what their preferences are— the first step is to make sure all the first-party data you have on-hand about your customers resides in a single place that is clear and easy to read. This will help in organizing customer portfolios while also giving you a better idea of customer trends in real-time.
• Good A.I. Starts with Good Data: When using A.I. as a tool, whether that is personalizing certain experiences for customers or in your messaging efforts, you have to start with a solid understanding of where your data is coming from. Without good, clean data, your algorithms will give you unreliable results and skew your customer insights.
• Are you Hearing Feedback? It’s important to create consistent feedback opportunities for your customers to engage with your company, but it’s equally important to make sure you are not chasing your clients to participate in these conversations. When you have active and willing participants, that means you have stakeholders that are invested in the overall product and want to see you succeed.

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Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.