Are you meeting customer expectations in the multichannel world?

With the plethora of instant information at their fingertips, customers are taking much more control over the buying process. No longer depending on brochures or sales pitches, they use search and social media to form their own opinions of the options available to them. If businesses are to respond to this change, they need to make a big impression quickly and deliver the right message to the right person at the right time via a multitude of customer touchpoints while creating a holistically great experience for their customers.

Your customer has adapted to the digital era. Have you?

Customers’ increasingly “digital” lifestyles are disrupting traditional customer relations, not just in terms of rising customer expectations, but in the number of touchpoints at which businesses have to meet and exceed these expectations, all while maintaining brand consistency and improving customer engagement.

With the majority of customers interacting with brands via multiple channels, omni-channel customer interaction is more important than ever, so as to deliver a cohesive customer experience that not only boosts customer engagement and encourages customer loyalty, but that has a direct effect on the bottom line.

The omni-challenge of omni-chaos. Is your customer journey a puzzle?

So the requirement of multi-channel marketing is clear. And most businesses are kitting themselves up with a whole host of tools for the task. But simply connecting with the customer at all touchpoints doesn’t provide a complete picture of the customer or their journey, nor does it enable you to deliver a truly personalized and consistent experience to them. Each tool working in isolation simply churns out disassociated data, with no insight into the customer buying process or how sales have been affected by specific marketing activities. The omni-challenge of omni-chaos.

Putting the pieces together: the holistic customer experience

For cohesive and consistent multi-channel marketing, you need all data acquired through all interactions with all customers at all touchpoints to be linked up in a way that gives a single, immediately accessible, up-to-date profile for each customer. There are two ways of achieving this. You can choose to purchase various marketing tools from multiple vendors; each specializing in delivering the most advanced tool in its field, best-ofbreed solutions, and then integrate them to enable data sharing among tools.

Or you can opt for an all-in-one (or “suite”) solution that comes with multiple tools already fully integrated, ready to manage and track customer interactions across various channels, such as website, online store, email, social media, mobile apps, etc.

The big decision: all-in-one versus best-of-breed

You have to make the choice that best fits your business and marketing needs. It’s not an easy decision as there are so many things to consider. So let’s take a look at the key decision factors and what impact they have on your choice.

Decision Factor #1: Functionality

With best-of-breed products, you can usually expect advanced functionality, as vendors have specialized in one, hopefully well-thought-out, component of digital marketing, such as Web Analytics or Marketing Automation. With all-in-one products, components can vary in terms of depth of features and may not cater to some advanced scenarios. But this isn’t a hard and fast rule — some suite vendors have invested in specific components to ensure they achieve functional parity with best-of-breed systems or have even built their allin-one products by acquiring best-of-breed vendors. If your business demands advanced functionality in multiple areas, the best-of-breed approach may win. The obvious question, though, is: Do you really need all the advanced features in every area, and are they worth the investment and cost?

Decision Factor #2: Integration

All chosen marketing tools need to be fully integrated with one another so that they can provide you with a single customer profile, as this is what enables you to deliver a personalized and consistent experience. However, you need to interact with your customers in real time, and your web content personalization efforts may go to waste if it relies on data that is synchronized every hour, or worse, once a day. So if you’re considering the best-of-breed approach, you’ll want to ask the following questions:

• How do I integrate everything?
• How do I integrate on-premise and cloud-based services?
• Is the latest version of product A compatible with product B?
• What if one of the vendors changes their API or data schema?
• Do I need to pay extra for connectors between systems or even for a system integration platform?

Best-of-breed integration can be either point to point or in a hub architecture where a single best-of-breed product becomes a central integration point. While the hub approach simplifies integration, it usually focuses only on the integration needs of the central point and omits the needs of the other components. The all-in-one approach solves most of these issues as the only integration you may need to consider is that of your existing systems, such as your CRM or ERP. You’ll rarely find one solution that supports every scenario, but if integration is a bugbear, the all-in-one solution definitely wins here.

Decision Factor #3: User Experience For Business Users

Deploying multiple products from multiple vendors inevitably means multiple applications that your business users need to access and work with. This comes with its own difficulties and can easily jeopardize the success of your project:

• Different userinterfaces lead to a steeperlearning curve, lower productivity and slower adoption.
• Unless you integrate security information or implement single-sign-on authentication (easily a major project by itself), multiple sign-on credentials mean your administrators will hear “Which user name should I use for XY?” allthe time.
• Redesigned or updated userinterfaces may mean frequent end usertraining.
• Each upgraded product willrequire further integration testing.
• Poorly integrated components may mean users face complexities such as manual copy-pasting of data between systems.

It may be near impossible to analyze data across multiple products; preparing even a simple report may require going to several applications and aggregating data manually unless you integrate everything in a single data warehouse.

In contrast, all-in-one products tend to deal with these issues more elegantly; providing users with a single, consistent user interface that can be accessed using a single login. It is important, however, to trial all the components and how well they work together before making a purchase as some vendors have pre-integrated third-party products into their suite (whether through OEM contracts or after company acquisition), often resulting in similar issues to those above.

Decision Factor #4: System Maintenance

Similar to integration, the complexity of system maintenance grows exponentially with number of products. For each product involved, you’ll need to look after:

• Upgrades
• Security
• Backup
• Availability and performance

These elements lead to significantly higher cost of ownership for a solution built using multiple best-ofbreed products than for a single suite product.

Decision Factor #5: Price And Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)

When talking about money, there are six things you need to consider:

• Product price – the price of several best-ofbreed products can easily grow to multiples of the price of a suite product.
• License costs predictability – Few vendors, whether best-of-breed or suite, provide their full price list and actual license costs may be difficult to foresee. Dealing with multiple vendors, each with a different licensing structure and their own per-user, per-server or usage-based fees, means calculating the actual price before going live can be near impossible.
• Integration costs – as mentioned in Decision Factor #2, the complexity (and therefore cost) of integration is generally much higher in the best-of-breed scenario.
• Development costs – developing a solution with multiple best-of-breed products may be much more complex due to differing architectures, APIs and even application and database platforms they run on. On the other hand, if you need more advanced functionality in one area than is available in a chosen suite product, you may spend more on customizing and extending it to meet your needs than you would buying the best-of-breed equivalent .
• System maintenance costs – see Decision Factor #4
• Hardware costs – again, it’s much more difficult to estimate overall hardware infrastructure costs when deploying several products. Also, running several best-of-breed products often leads to less efficient use of hardware resources and the integration between systems may lead to a significant performance overhead.

Decision Factor #6: Vendors

Let’s be honest, dealing with several vendors for the bestof-breed approach is a pain. The fact that you have to talk to sales people, support staff and consultants from several companies makes purchase and maintenance more complex. Moreover, when things go wrong, no single company has full accountability. Though all-in-one solutions eradicate this problem, it’s fair to say that you are relying on a single vendor, whereas with best-of-breed, you can replace certain components of your solution as and when the need arises.

And the winner is…

It is clear to see from the comparison table that an integrated marketing solution that provides all (or most) digital marketing tools in a single product prevails in most areas. Not only does it provide you with a clear 360° view of your customer and their journey, but it is cheaper, causes fewer headaches and delivers a far superior user experience.