[December 17, 2012]

Tahzoo Unveils Top 10 Predictions for 2013

Customer Experience Management provider Tahzoo today announced its top 10 predictions for marketers in 2013. In 2012, Tahzoo educated Fortune 500 companies on the importance of delivering engaging, relevant and persuasive customer experiences. The firm's roster of clients includes Costco, DirecTV (News - Alert), Nationwide, Abbott Nutrition and KeyBank.

"New Year 2013 will usher in a hyper-focus on developing successful customer experience initiatives with personalized, relevant content across any channel, device or platform," said Tahzoo CEO Brad Heidemann. "That success hinges on a number of complex factors ranging from organizational change management and governance to making mobile less of an afterthought. And the payoff will be felt in the bottom line, from sales to valuation. Next year will truly be a fascinating year to witness the successes and the missed opportunities."

Tahzoo 2013 predictions include:

1. The evolution from multi-channel to omni-channel marketing. It is no longer sufficient to reach out to consumers across distinct channels. It is the sofa shopper who will simultaneously watch TV, and shop on their tablets while texting with friends from their mobile device. Expectations are for a connected experience that not only moves from device to device, but is relevant within the context of a very limited attention span.

2. Differentiated experiences driven through the next generation of personalization. With the advance of enterprise marketing platforms such as SDL, IBM and Adobe (News - Alert), marketers are going to embrace dynamic publishing and algorithmic recommendations to deliver more engaging, relevant and most importantly, persuasive customer experiences.

3. Social marketing will enter the 4th stage of maturity. The days of simply hving a Facebook (News - Alert) page or Tweeting about your products are gone. While social media has become a powerful customer service and PR channel, its real value is as a source of social intelligence that provides the behavioral and attitudinal insight needed to add the dimensions of context and real-time to the marketing mix.

4. Organizational Change Management and Governance will become top topics for customer experience initiatives. With the increased emphasis on creating and delivering engaging, relevant and persuasive customer experiences, organizations, teams and brands will have to recognize that in addition to programs and technologies, they will need to drive cooperation, collaboration and alignment across the different parts of the enterprise. Companies will begin to look at the creation of Change Experience Management Offices (CxMO) as the means to maximize the business value and ROI of their investments.

5. Managed Service Offerings will begin to be used by large enterprises to experiment with and drive quick-to-market enterprise marketing solutions. As with other enterprise technologies, enterprise marketing suites will become available in the cloud and will enable brands to experiment with new capabilities without the need for capital investment and long and complex IT projects.

6. Mobile will become less of an add-on or afterthought from a delivery perspective and become a more integral part of the full digital experience. Mobile will evolve from a distinct channel to a strategic component of the overall digital experience. Brands will begin to integrate the experience across devices, platforms and situations.

7. Responsive Design will be coupled with contextual marketing to drive effective mobile experiences. While there will be continued growth in responsive designs for mobile (phone and tablet), the increased expectations of the mobile audiences will force brands to understand and accommodate the contextually different expectations audiences have for a mobile experience.

8. Marketing departments will become the active decision makers in the selection and purchase of enterprise marketing technology including CMS, CRM and marketing automation suites. IT departments will be more responsible to marketing / channel groups and more reliant on their budget dollars for their resources. Decisions will become focused on the business' need rather than the system architecture.

9. Global brands will embrace a balance between centralized control and local needs. Centralized global marketing organizations will increasingly become more vigilant regarding brand standards and compliance while simultaneously granting greater independence for local marketers to respond to their individual customer needs.

10. More CMOs will be recruited for their left brain skills. As companies continue to leverage data, technology and analytics to define and optimize customer experiences, they will increasingly look for leaders who have one foot in the world of technology and the other still squarely in the world of creative and brand.

About Tahzoo

Tahzoo, a customer experience marketing firm, develops and delivers strategic customer experience management consulting services from digital marketing strategy to organizational change management and technical implementation, support and optimization of integrated enterprise marketing platforms with expertise and emphasis on SDL. Tahzoo serves global 1000 clients from its headquarters in Washington D.C., a development center in Richmond, VA, offices in Amsterdam, Cleveland and Seattle and remote centers across the United States.

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