How many marketing technologies does your organization use? If you are like most organizations the answer is a double digit number.  In these days of big data, marketing technology has become more important than ever, however, legacy and startup technologies mesh with new technology in everyone’s organization creating spaghetti of solutions trying to create a better customer experience. 

The biggest problem is that a spaghetti technology solution reflects a spaghetti organization in terms of processes. This spaghetti of technology helps maintain the silos and politics that stifle innovation. They hold your organization back from delivering a quality customer experience to your customers. But everything must change! Data and technology are changing the experience every customer has in their interactions with your business. Creating a relevant customer experience is no longer optional, it is the base line standard.

Looking at the history of how digital marketing evolved can help us understand what has happened. In the beginning there was Marketing and in the 2000's this evolved to Digital Marketing which was first seen as a small extra channel. As new digital channels where created, digital marketing expanded with every new practice (SEO, SEM, blogs, social, websites) creating teams of experts who owned the discipline. Each of these marketing silos developed their own technology to serve the needs of the stakeholders. This evolution of functional silos created a fragmented and siloed system both in process and technology. 

Now, the industry has matured and digital marketing is not seen as an experiment, but as a core part of marketing. As these silos came under the overall control of marketing there has been greater and greater demand for integrated cross-channel digital marketing. This demand has fueled the mergers and acquisitions in the technology and agency space we have seen the last years.

As the CX industry matured larger vendors acquired smaller vendors for their technology. Often, the driving force was to create an integrated business solution. The problem is that having one vendor with multiple technologies does not create a truly a single platform that has seamless integration.  As you and your organization search for solutions you need to consider whether a single vendor solution was developed with the initial intent of being an integrated platform or whether the solution has been pieced together. The difference is that pieced together systems demand higher development costs as you move up the Customer Experience Maturity Model.

The Framework

When you think how your technology investment supports a holistic customer experience you also need to think about how the technology will enable your current people and processes to improve operational performance. Scalability should also be of a concern, but don't invest in something that does not add value today.

Here is a simple framework you can use today to assess the technologies you need to create an awesome customer experience.



ACT

Start with action and end with action. There are three key elements that enable you to take action:

1. Publish - Publish communication messages to your channels. These are the technologies that allow you to maintain your websites, social pages, emails, direct mail. Marketing communications from major vendors are designed with personalization in mind so ensure your publishing capabilities can accommodate personalization.

2. Coordinate - Create work flows between the different publishing platforms so they orchestrate consistent marketing communication between channels. One typically sees email marketing and re-targeting but there is a large need for coordinating cross-channel communication. Currently many hours are lost to managing multi-channel campaign and overall customer communication.

3. Optimize - Optimization is often thought of as part of the analysis stage but in reality it is re-publishing content to see what works best. When you do this you use split testing technologies to optimize your website, emails, and other media.

CAPTURE

Make sure your have the technologies that will record the data you need. It used to be that for every channel a different tracking vendor was needed, but with today’s technologies you can track your RFIDs and anything else you need to with most marketing analytics solutions. Leverage current technologies to minimize the overheard and create consistency across you data.

1. Record - Measure the customer interactions that will provide actionable information to your organization. Centralize information as much as possible for the marketing functions so there is one version of the truth. The typical vendors you will see here are the marketing/web analytics vendors, along with social listening technologies.

2. Integrate – In most cases integrating data is a big task for the enterprise, but it does not have to be. You can increase business value by integrating solutions between your CRM and marketing analytics. This can get you very far in your move toward delivering a single view of the customer. Here you will need connectors, data warehousing and possibly big data technologies.

UNDERSTAND

There are two levels of understanding needed in the organization, one from the analytics team to analyze customer behavior and the other from the stakeholders to act on the analysis. The key thing here is to minimize the time to insight for the analysts and smooth the communication of insights to the stakeholders.

1. Explore - Empower your analysts by giving them access to analysis ready data in environments where they can do data discovery based on their skillset. Here you will find good old spreadsheets, BI visualization software, statistical and programming languages.

2. Discover – Analysts must understand what core analytics and reports are needed to guide daily operations. They must also understand business and marketing objectives so they can search for and discover new areas for expansion or marketing improvement.

3. Communicate – Actionable communication is not a paper you give someone, but a communication of findings, insights, and recommended actions. The technologies that support this are often presentation related technologies rather than the dedicated reporting and info-graphic software.

With these ideas in mind, think of the technologies you have and consider which technologies you really need. Look for a technology vendor that can offer solutions and business processes that satisfy all the items discussed under Act, Capture and Understand.