Make customer experience fly by bringing CX strategy and technology together

Great experiences come when you have all of the right components in place. For customer experience that means having the right CX strategy combined with the right CX technology.

Strategy without technology will just result in good ideas, not capable of being implemented across your business. Technology without strategy risks focusing on the wrong areas with a lack of ownership from key stakeholders.

If you really want to improve customer experience, then you need to get different parts of your business all pulling in one strategic direction. If you've got a central team in place—often a center of excellence model and approach—then this strategy might be developed by your own staff.

However, as customer experience is still a relatively new discipline, sometimes it makes practical sense to utilize expert external resources in order to make headway and get things set up more quickly. The great advantage is that external experts will come armed with proven processes to help fast-track your strategy and get all your colleagues pulling in a consistent and effective direction.

For example, Alterian partner ekino are part of Havas CX, an international network dedicated to delivering meaningful experiences across the entire customer journey. Using their "building meaningful experiences" approach, they work closely with senior management teams and stakeholders to shape and implement client strategy.

Bede Feltham, Digital Strategy Director at ekino Havas CX, notes that strategy is essential to making CX work for clients, and that ekino are uniquely placed to help their clients as they bridge the gap between marketing and technology. It's this hybrid skillset, inherent in all of their team, that adds so much value to their clients.

Consumers now expect companies to recognize them, understand them, and engage with them in a personalized, relevant way, whatever the channel they interact through. Any technology needs to be capable of plugging into your current ecosystem, listening and responding to your customers in real time at the speed they expect. After all, as consumers we are all impatient.

If you rely on technology designed for a single channel, it is designed to work best only in that channel. It won't be optimized to plug into all of your existing systems and touchpoints. Similarly, if you rely on technology for a single purpose, like marketing technology, it won't be architected for sub-100-millisecond decisions.

That is where technology platforms such as Alterian's Real-Time CX Platform, identified as a Leader by Forrester in journey orchestration, fits in. The platform allows your brand to track, analyze and influence meaningful real-time interactions within each customer's journey, to deliver in-the-moment interaction at the perfect time to optimize acquisition, engagement and retention. It is designed for speed and to integrate with all of the systems across your technology environment.

Remember, if you want to use the technology yourself—and frankly why wouldn't you—look for those rated best for usability.

With competitive pressures, consumer expectations and upheaval in many markets, speed of implementation is of the essence. We've found that most clients want an agile approach, where they can implement initial use cases in days and weeks, prove the ROI, then refine performance, and start to implement further use cases that bring value to the business.

It is therefore important to pick CX strategy and CX technology partners capable of working at the speed you want, to start giving you a rapid return on your investment.

With your CX strategy and CX technology in place, the goal is to thrive—building programs that deliver the holy grail of marketing: the right message to the right person at the right time. Beyond that, it's speed of delivery, sub-100-millisecond decisions, plus efficacy as part of an automated, personalized, always-on journey orchestration program.