Phoenix Marketing International: Advancing the Evolution of Customer Experience

Phoenix Marketing International

Mark Willard, Managing Director, Phoenix Marketing InternationalMark Willard, Managing Director
As customers become savvier in working with brands and better communicating what they want and how they want to be served, delivering high-quality service with ease is critical. To accomplish this, there is a need for a holistic, integrated approach and ecosystem to propel brands beyond their current capabilities and vision to ultimately deliver a curated experience to customers. This has resulted in a to and fro shift in the balance between digital versus human aspects of the customer experience. Accordingly, a brand’s digital presence and network have to equally evolve to appropriately serve the needs of customers and attract prospects.

Reinforcing this interrelationship between brand and customer experience in the customer experience industry is Phoenix Marketing International (PMI). The company is a premier global marketing research and consulting firm offering end-to-end insights in the CX space. “We think of ourselves as the only end-to-end insights company in the CX space. We help clients build better customer experience strategies by assisting them with brand tracking and management along with uninterrupted communication via ad testing and assessments,” states Willard.

In a conversation with CIO Applications, Mark Willard, Managing Director of the Customer Experience practice for PMI, mentions how the company is driven by the needs of its clients around brand improvements, refinement of communications, and optimization of CX. Willard further adds how PMI is constantly pushing the industry boundaries and applying new approaches, tools, and techniques to enable disruptive insights in the CX space.

Please share with us the inception story of PMI.

Our company’s strength lies in taking the time to truly understand our clients’ business, identifying areas of improvement, and solving complex business problems by utilizing analytics and modeling. We were a predominantly virtual organization right from the get-go, ultimately resulting in seamless operations even during the pandemic. We believe in working directly with clients and offering the best services and solutions to them. We rely on our unique offerings and deep industry expertise to deliver consultative, impactful insights to guide clients in making confident decisions. Our work enables clients to differentiate their brands, products, and services. We help clients develop and apply new approaches, tools, and techniques to deliver faster and disruptive insights. Our client retention rate is over 95 percent, with many clients partnering with us for almost two decades.

How have you established the company in the CX space?

Our organization specializes in customer experience but it involves a lot more than just the measurement of the customer’s most recent interaction. Unlike other competitors, the Phoenix way is to see the interrelationship between customer experience and brand, ultimately improving the experience based on customers’ brand perceptions.

We are well-positioned as one of the few customer experience specialist firms that have the perfect blend of advertisements, communications, and brands in the background to foster customer experience. That is essentially our secret sauce to success


We noticed a virtuous circle created where the brand reinforces the customer experience and vice-versa, creating a positive feedback loop. Our company identifies the connective tissue between brand, customer experience, and communications to improve brand presence and overall customer experience.

We take a strategic approach at Phoenix by utilizing advanced analytics tools to measure all the interaction points between customers and brands and determine critical interaction aspects. Our ability to provide a strategic overview helps set the stage for enhancing brand and customer interactions while discerning elements that positively impact this interconnection, including increased revenue, loyalty, and the willingness to recommend.

We are both technology and methodology agnostic as we adopt a strategic view in assisting clients where strategy drives tactics. Currently, the CX industry has become very transactional and tactical, which is essential, but focusing on the transactions alone does not provide a holistic picture of the customer’s expectations and demands.

Please elaborate on your offerings that drive CX success for clients.

We believe that CX has three flavors: tactical, strategic, and competitive customer experience or competitive benchmarking. Our teams understand the various challenges in establishing and managing enterprise-level programs and have designed, scoped, launched, and managed some of the largest CX programs globally. We identify the common issues, close the loop on customer dissatisfaction with specific interactions, measure the overall relationship with the brands, and tie them back to their strategic objectives. Following this, our company can enable advanced analyses and predictor analyses to measure benchmarks and examine best-in-class brands outside the industry for perspective. After understanding how well brands are performing from the tactics and identifying the important touchpoints via the competitive benchmarking study, brands can finally determine their reputation among customers.

We are an established full-service consultancy headed by a team of researchers. With our CX research and other ongoing research, we can link brands, advertising, and CX data to reveal a holistic roadmap for clients to generate desired outcomes.

What is in store for PMI, in the future?

The pandemic crystallized our belief that all customer experiences operate on two distinct levels — the functional level and the emotional level. While most tactical programs do a decent job of assessing the functional aspects of a customer’s experience, almost all major CX metrics over look the underlying emotional components of interaction between brands and customers. As a customer experience, brand, and communications consultancy, PMI is uniquely positioned to help clients make a deeper emotional connection with their customers.

More than ever, it is vital to rethink the customer experience model in terms of the deeper emotional dimensions. In this regard, we have conducted qualitative and quantitative research on research to measure the evolution of CX with a particular emphasis on measuring emotions. We want to refine how brands can turn emotions into items they can act on through ads, brand identity, and the customer experience. Our company aims to bring this realization to our clients to try and meet customers’ emotional needs accurately as that’s the next frontier for customer experience. To generate brand loyalty among customers, companies have to go beyond only being functional and reach them emotionally. With our advanced analytics, we can make it possible and get customers who love a certain brand to advocate for that brand.

We are well-positioned as one of the few customer experience specialist firms that have the perfect blend of advertisements, communications, and brands in the background to foster customer experience. That is essentially our secret sauce to success.

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