• MarTech Today
  • Sections
    • Advertising
    • Marketing
    • Content
    • Social
    • Commerce
    • Sales
    • Analytics
    • Management
    • All
    • Home
  • Follow Us
    • Follow
  • MarTech Today
  • Ads
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Mgmt
  • More
  • Events
    • Follow
  • SUBSCRIBE

MarTech Today

MarTech Today
  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Commerce
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • All
  • Events
  • Newsletters
  • Home
Martech: Marketing

Subscribe to MarTech Today to receive news and insights of where marketing, technology, and management converge.

Note: By submitting this form, you agree to Third Door Media's terms. We respect your privacy.


Beyond the martech stack: It takes an orchestra to solve the customer experience

The vision of a customer-focused single entity is becoming the Holy Grail for brands.

Barry Levine on June 2, 2017 at 9:25 am
  • More

If you look at what many vendors are saying these days, it’s all about customer experience. Adobe, Salesforce and Sprinklr, for instance, have redefined their identities in that direction.

But reorientation is not enough, according to research firm IDC. Consider a vision of “Customer Experience Orchestration Services” that extend beyond the marketing department, articulated in an IDC study earlier this year from analysts Gerald Murray and Maureen Fleming:

Customer experience (CX) is simply unmanageable at most large companies. Traditional approaches to organizational design and technology deployment based on big corporate functions such as marketing, sales, fulfillment, services, contact center, or fill in the blank result in an inherently fragmented customer experience. Marketing doesn’t know how finance interacts with customers, and services doesn’t know what sales has said. Customers have to retell their stories as they move through these different points of contact.

Murray and Fleming outline two initial stages in the development of marketing/sales tools. In the first, applications were separate silos, many defined by departmental budgets. In the second, the martech “stack” moves some workloads — such as reporting or identity management — to core services.

In the third stage of CX orchestration services, customer-facing responses extend across every department in a flexible architecture that, for instance, could be based on open APIs and microservices:

IDC points to the increasingly popular “buy button” as an example of a customer-facing service that contains all of its necessary functionalities, is decoupled from a commerce system and can live across departments.

Some vendors that are taking the lead toward this CX-OS, the analysts say, include Salesforce (with its flexible Thunder event processing engine and Lightning app and interface builder), Oracle (with platform-wide identity management), Adobe (a variety of core services) and IBM (Universal Behavior Exchange for sharing customer data between solutions).

As an example of what this might mean for a customer, Murray suggested to me a scenario where a brand has an email blast lined up to upsell a new product version to current owners of that product. Just before it goes out, a customer calls and tries to return the product because of a perceived defect.

‘Raises the bar’

In an ideal world of customer experience bliss, the customer’s interaction with the call center for returning a product is immediately conveyed to the email marketing component.

Instead of the email to that customer going out with a message about “here’s an updated version of the product,” it becomes a message of: “we are working on fixing the problem with your product.”

And/or there might be a real-time communication with the customer, via a bot or a social media manager over, say, a messaging app.

In another example, Murray points to a bank that has connected its cash machine to its marketing tools. If you leave your cash card in the machine, it immediately texts you to let you know.

“It raises the bar for customer expectations,” he said.

Murray added that, even though many modern brands have become digital, few have set up an organization, tools or data that communicates as one membrane through all the departments.

It requires creating a “customer-centric organization, not just a customer-centric marketing department,” he said. Murray noted that the transformation is similar to how changes in supply chains have rebuilt some organizations, except here it is the chain of interactions defining a relationship with a customer.

Because of the complexity, he said, you “need a service layer that is designed around the servicing of the customer,” instead of just passing the data into repositories for recall later. It’s a kind of “nervous system for customers,” Murray said.

There are a variety of ways beyond CX-OS to articulate this vision, but they are converging on this same theme: the brand knows about — and responds to — the customer through all of its touch points, immediately.

The new Holy Grail

The idea of the Customer Data Platform, for instance, offers a centralized organization of customer info that similarly wants the customer’s latest interaction with customer service to be immediately available to the email marketing application. The Open Garden approach of connecting disparate organizational components through a data layer seeks to distribute information — including customer information — immediately throughout all digital tools.

But the main idea in these and other approaches is a vision that goes beyond the multiple, hopefully synchronized, lanes of omnichannel marketing.

It’s the new Holy Grail for marketing.

Just this week, for instance, a startup called Pascal 51 — run by former execs from Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and elsewhere — announced a seed round to pursue a “next-generation machine-intelligent customer experience automation platform powered by artificial intelligence and deep machine learning” that can respond to the wandering path of today’s customer journeys.

“Marketing stack” has been a way of describing the hierarchy of tools that establish the modern digital toolset. But, with “customer experience” the current refrain across many brands, perhaps the more appropriate metaphor is now an orchestra.



About The Author

Barry Levine
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

Related Topics

Channel: Martech: MarketingCRM: Customer Relationship Management

Subscribe to MarTech Today to receive news and insights of where marketing, technology, and management converge.

Note: By submitting this form, you agree to Third Door Media's terms. We respect your privacy.


We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook and Twitter.

ATTEND OUR CONFERENCES

April 15-17, 2020: San Jose

October 6-8, 2020: Boston

×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

White Papers

  • How Good Partnerships Should Reduce Your Workflow
  • The Telecom Marketer’s Guide To Mastering Display Advertising
  • How to Turn Leads into Repeat Customers
  • The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
  • Adapting digital marketing for real-world results
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • CCPA Goes Live in Weeks: Is your marketing measurement ready?
  • 4 Ways to Get Started With Agile Marketing
  • Get More Value Out of Your First-Party Data: Using AI to Connect the Online-to-Offline Buying Experience
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms
  • Identity Resolution Platforms
  • Customer Data Platforms
  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Enterprise SEO Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
See More Research
Sidebar Inbox Deliverability 2019
Sign up for the NEW MarTech Today.
Martech Today
Download the Martech Today app on iTunes
Download the Martech Today App on Google Play

Channels

  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Commerce
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • Home

Our Events

  • MarTech West
  • MarTech East

Resources

  • White Papers
  • Research
  • Webinars
  • MarTech Conference

About

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Advertise
  • Marketing Services
  • Staff
  • Connect With Us

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • iOS App
  • Google Play

© 2019 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.