You can’t buy CXM in a box

New technology and rapidly changing customer expectations are driving irrevocable change in marketing. Brands that want to thrive in these conditions need to connect and engage with customers at any time, in any situation and across all channels. Companies that successfully negotiate the challenging rapids in this newly evolved digitally driven environment have mastered multi-channel customer experience management (CXM). These new and more complex requirements present both B2B and B2C businesses with opportunities and challenges.

This whitepaper has been developed from a focused CXM survey – conducted by marketingfinder.co.uk in association with SDL – that polled business leaders and company executives across a range of sectors, together with further market research.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we identified that customers are changing their behavior; using different devices to connect at home, at work or on the move. They experience a range of connectivity speeds when they engage with brands and have differing screen sizes and resolutions, which all impact on customer experience.

Today’s multi-channel consumer expects polished, engaging digital experiences and they have limited patience for brands incapable of delivering on these expectations. Worryingly, our survey revealed that over 40% of respondents struggle to join the dots between web, mobile and email.

When changing retailer is as easy as the swipe of a finger, brands need to start delivering now or risk being left behind. The customer must be engaged and guided on their online brand journey, wherever they engage and on whatever device they use. Apparently this is more easily said than done, with over 79% of respondents complaining of silos within their organisations which are preventing them understanding teh customer journey across all channels.

Any brand that takes their customers’ online engagement seriously must be acutely aware of these facts, and must take a proactive approach to ensure that they deliver a seamless customer experience wherever the customer comes into contact with them. This demands that companies restructure their marketing and IT frameworks.

But how can enterprises address these issues? The reality is that you can’t buy CXM in a box and you can’t implement CXM by flipping a switch. Managing and actually delivering customer experience requires a mix of strategy, people and platforms.

More than 38% of companies surveyed are planning to create a role which is responsible for the entire customer journey in the next year, whilst over 41% already have such a person in place. This shows good intent. Combine that with the fact that over 57% expect their digital marketing spend to increase and you would be forgiven for thinking that conditions were perfect. However, with 69% of respondents saying that their mobile engagement strategies are “basic” or just dont exist and only 13% delivering advanced personalisation via desktop websites, there is still a very long way to go.

Change in the Marketing Landscape

Tablets, mobile phones and TVs are just the start – as the internet of things develops and more devices are connected, your customers come into contact with your brand in more ways than ever before, whenever they want, wherever they want.

For example, Forrester predicts that tablet ownership in Western Europe is set to quadruple in the next five years from 14% to 56%, and this is just one of many channels.

IAB data shows tablet users across a range of European countries are keen to connect digitally with brands. On average over a six-month period, each tablet user made an average of 22.8 purchases via their tablets and spent around 718 Euros each.

So, with thousands of tablets out there with differing screen sizes, resolutions, capabilities, operating systems, even web browsers – how can you make sure they all get a seamless digital experience?

Thomas Husson, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, advises: “New consumer-product interface technologies will forever change the way humans and machines interact. We are opening a Pandora’s box of compelling and consistent digital experiences that extend the value of physical products into the realm of digital experience”. Good news perhaps, but these new interfaces can present a massive challenge for brands and retailers.

Customers Won’t Wait

channel is not the challenge; rather the challenge is delivering against customer expectation. With new technologies developing at breath-taking speed and the proliferation of channels, many brands and retailers are finding it hard to keep up.

Online shopping solutions that were developed with different objectives in mind are inflexible, expensive to maintain and often beginning to creak under the strain. This technology issue is also a metaphor for the organizational structure of marketing and IT departments, who have grown in silos and as such, are often not capable of meeting rapidly evolving business needs.

Thus, the only way to keep pace with customer expectation is to develop an agile technology layer, capable of responding to changing business requirements whilst re-thinking your marketing and IT departments with a view to breaking down traditional silos.

The goal is to accelerate commercial innovation without compromising resilience and to ensure that businesses are always ahead of customer adoption.

Perhaps the rewards are obvious – happier customers, more interactions, better customer experiences, lower retention/acquisition costs and higher sales are just the start.

To reap these rewards however, brands need to find practical ways to simplify mobile and tablet delivery for marketers. Brands that adapt and repurpose content quicker and cheaper than their competition can cover more channels with fewer resources.

But why is this important? Our survey found that 46% of online shoppers will switch to another retailer if they experience a 30-second delay on a website – even a 1-second delay in a page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. If you try and serve a data hungry desktop page to a user on a smartphone with a poor connection, suddenly a 30-second page load time can become the norm.

Simply put, if you aren’t delivering a consistently high-quality customer experience, your customers will find someone who is. That said, the rewards for getting the customer experience right are compelling — multi-channel consumers spend 82% more per transaction than customers who only shop in-store.

Rapid Change & Budget Control

The challenge for all businesses in this time of rapid change is not only keeping pace and delivering against expectation but also controlling costs. In many organizations, the customer experience is not overseen by any one person, so finding someone capable of taking a holistic view of the organization and addressing IT and marketing requirements is not easy.

Our research found that more than half of companies will not increase their marketing spend over the next year, but that a similar number will increase spend in digital marketing by 5-25%. It seems then that businesses are aware that investment needs to be made, even if they don’t know exactly how to go about it. Nearly 60% of the organizations we surveyed reported that there is no clear owner of the customer journey across their business, so this seems like an important consideration. 80% of respondents also answered “yes” when asked if silos within their organization prevented them understanding the customers’ journey across all channels.

Such a role, perhaps even at board level would help unify departments and ensure that systems can be developed rapidly with minimum costs. Many organizations are now actively recruiting professionals to fill the Customer Experience Officer role.

Another important factor is technology, since maintaining and adapting legacy systems in response to changing business requirements is expensive and time consuming. In many cases, it ties up resources including capital, licensing costs, hardware, staff and more.

In the same way as departmental silos inhibit organizations, technology silos present a set of problems all their own. Disparate systems, which are not fit-for-purpose and do not have the capacity or agility to respond to changing business demands prevent organizations from taking a holistic view of the customer, fragment communications and offer differing levels of customer experience depending on the touch-point. An agile technology layer upon which all applications are engineered can solve these problems.

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Upskill Your Marketing Department

Our research highlights that many companies struggle to join the dots between web, mobile and email. Only 30% of respondents claim to measure and analyze everything they do.

With legacy systems firmly entrenched in some organizations, previously creative marketers that would drive personalization programs and work to improve creative find all their time taken up with spinning plates to keep everything ticking over. This gradual creep of inappropriately deployed staff means that at board level, these costs have no visibility, hiding deep in the marketing salary line.

Whilst such staff would consider themselves to be technically capable, perhaps even indispensable, they are essentially marketers who should be investing time in improving CX and learning to maximize a company-wide technology layer in order to deliver high quality.

Now is Critical

Customers experience your brand through channels that they choose (whether you serve them or not) right now.

Greater integration of marketing and IT teams’ planning processes, and executing marketing campaigns as quickly as possible is key to the success or failure of brands to engage effectively with perpetually connected customers. This means IT staff who understands marketing and marketing staff who understand IT.

This shift needs also to be reflected in the systems that your company uses. Deploying marketing resources to operate systems is no longer a realistic strategy.

With integrated teams working on integrated platforms, marketing and IT staff can spend their time innovating – producing creative and accelerating the adaptation of campaigns and online properties that are fit for every platform.

Flexibility and agility, will allow businesses to respond to the rapidly changing behaviors and needs of customers, and to meet the complex challenges of delivery.

What Happens Without these Skills?

Companies will struggle if they do not have the skills that focus on the customer experience with integrated marketing and IT teams working on integrated platforms.

To take one core fact as an example: Research from the Baymard Institute yielded an alarming statistic – the average rate of online shopping cart abandonment is already more than two thirds – perhaps then, brands are simply not able to respond to this reality.

At the same time, data from Barclays Bank released recently shows that over a quarter of the companies surveyed said that they faced big challenges in managing relationships with customers.

With companies that trade online growing [on average] 57 times faster than the economy, and an explosion of digital channels, it’s no wonder brands and retailers are struggling to keep up.

“Customers were at one point adopting new technologies faster than we could deliver. As in any business, we wanted to adopt new technologies quickly and cheaply, but this led to a fragmented architecture developing across the business with no clear owner. Innovation often came at the expense of business tooling and flexibility - Proof of concepts and experiments would often evolve into business critical systems, leaving small teams and partners to provide 24/7 support, tying up our best resources” - Ashley Payne, Head of Digital Operations, Debenhams

Are silos preventing you from understanding the customer journey across channels?

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Is there an owner of the customer journey in your business?

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Ownership of the new environment

Addressing visitors’ multiple channel experience requires a significant shift in business culture and processes, ensuring there is continual, responsive change that puts CXM at the heart of the enterprise.

In the eye of the marketing and sales storm are the company silos. These feed the business storm but are often powerless and prone to inertia when it comes to internal effects. More than half of survey respondents (51.18%) report that there are internal silos but that they are working to remove and 28.35% say that they are working “slowly” on the challenge. Only 1 in 5 say there are no silos (19.69%).

“Too much emphasis can be placed on acquiring customers - to build a long-term business you need loyalty, so some online businesses are missing a trick when it comes to monitoring repeat buyers and behaviors. Addressing this could have significant results in terms of profit and revenue” - Sean Duffy MD, Head of Tech. Media & Telecoms, Barclays

Delivering the Omni-Channel CX Promise

So, faced with a bewildering number of channels which grows daily, less resources and a more digital savvy customer who expects their experience to be seamless, no matter the time, place or channel, enterprises have no choice but to react.

For brands, CX is not a question of “if” but “when” and “how”. When is simple – as quickly as possible. How is more difficult. Every company needs to have leader who owns CXM and who can guide the integration of marketing and IT departments. Agile, savvy brands will also need to gather new CXM skills and knowledge.

For their CX strategies to succeed, they will measure, monitor, analyze and adapt, responding quickly to the needs of customers. This means deploying the right technology, but at the same time, dismantling internal silos and changing the culture: empower IT and marketing staff to integrate whilst viewing CXM as a holistic business issue.

The good news is that early adopters and lateto-market brands are on a level playing field. Customers’ expectations are high and will only increase, so businesses with agile technology platforms that have CX at the core will succeed and grow faster than their competition.

Brands will succeed through effective CXM across all channels by accelerating commercial innovation without compromising resilience of the online delivery mechanisms if systems are developed too quickly or inadequately.

Technology Case Study: Pizza Hut

The mobile division of SDL has been working with Pizza Hut in the UK for over 2 years. Pizza Hut wanted to proactively address the challenge of device proliferation and ensure that their marketing team were able to spend their time marketing rather than operating a proliferating number of specialist websites developed on a per-channel basis.

Heavily integrated and mission critical: Pizza Hut’s desktop site was excellent and did it’s job very well. When Pizza Hut initially came to add support for the first iPhone, they realised they faced a challenge: The choices, even for this one device, included responsive web design, native apps, or another website designed specifically (and only) for iPhone users.

Such a strategy would have left them initially running two sites - every time a device came to market, from android 7 inch tablets, to ipads, to blackberry, a new solution would have to be implemented and maintained on an ongoing basis.

Naturally, this would place huge strain on the marketing team, consuming time and resources. Worst of all, the number of devices would grow exponentially over time as more devices came online, ultimately becoming uncontrollable.

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The Solution

By implementing an omni-channel technology layer, Pizza Hut were able to make substantial long-term savings, improve their understanding of the customer experience and future-proof their business.

The layer allowed them to support any type of device without having to develop systems and technology on a per-device basis. Naturally, this increased speed to market whilst reducing costs and operational resources.

Importantly, it also allowed Pizza Hut to unify their analytics systems, which in turn allowed them to really understand their customers journey across all channels. Where previously, the trail would go cold if a user switched from mobile to desktop, now Pizza Hut was able to see a complete picture.

This insight, combined with testing and agile development/management of their content allows Pizza Hut to continuously improve their digital capabilities, whilst giving them the flexibility to integrate new technologies as they come to market.

This also has repercussions in-store - once the technology layer is in place, the possibilities are endless: Staff can take orders on tablets, customers can pay using their mobile and delivery orders can be placed through TV apps.

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