The Smart Customer Experience (SmartCX) Tech Stack
The convergence of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service tech stacks has begun. This is great for CX.
Advances in AI are forcing companies to relook at CX.
Great customer experience (CX) is a true differentiator in the world of SaaS products. Functionality deltas between products converge faster than CX deltas. This is because delivering great CX is hard and often underfunded. Building CX capabilities is seldom prioritized over building the next feature. Product Management sits closer to the throne than CX in almost all software companies today, and product engineering resources are captive to product teams, so they keep building the next thing.
The traditional silos of marketing, sales, and customer service are converging as their goals align. All these teams want to:
Understand the customer
Look at customer interactions across all touchpoints
Unblock and activate the customer within the product and outside the product on product forums and company support centers
Functional teams have gotten good at seeing their customer through their lens. Marketing teams look at the acquisition funnel. Sales teams look at their conversion funnels, and support teams monitor social, support centers, search, and other data to understand how to help the customer. However, they seldom stitch a unified view of the customer across these functions. This is because the technology that serves these views is purpose-built for either marketing, sales, or support.
AI is forcing companies to build a unified view of the customer across functions and channels so that agents and assistants can seamlessly switch intents and be relevant and effective across functions. This unification is the only way to achieve a greater ROI on AI investments and go from CX to SmartCX.
Marketing, sales, and support tech stacks now need to merge to form a unified customer experience management (CXM) solution. This convergence allows companies to build a holistic view of their customers, providing seamless and personalized experiences that drive retention, discovery, and engagement.
Benefits of a SmartCX Approach
A SmartCX approach integrates data and processes across marketing, sales, and customer service, offering several key benefits:
Enhanced Customer Understanding: By consolidating data from various touchpoints, companies gain a 360-degree view of their customers, enabling more personalized interactions through humans, AI agents, and AI assistants.
Improved Efficiency: Streamlined processes and shared data reduce redundancies and enhance collaboration between teams. Today, Social Marketing and Social Support teams at Adobe are using a unified tech stack that allows for seamless handoff from Marketing to Support and consistent reporting across teams.
Consistency Across Channels: A unified approach ensures that customers receive consistent and coherent messages, regardless of the channel.
Increased Customer Loyalty: Personalized and seamless experiences lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Who can build SmartCX?
Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Adobe are at the forefront of Experience Management today. For instance, Adobe's Experience Cloud integrates marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce solutions to deliver personalized experiences at scale. Similarly, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 offers a suite of intelligent business applications that unify CRM and ERP capabilities to help companies build and maintain customer relationships .
Companies like Medallia offer listening and VOC analysis solutions that sit in the support world, and companies like Sprinklr are trying to span across these worlds by building solutions that include CCAS, chat, and social marketing solutions that integrate with leading CMSs, CRMs, and ERP solutions .
Integrations between all these solutions are expensive and lossy. They do not enable AI at scale and certainly do not support Smarts across all customer touchpoints.
I expect all these solutions to come together pretty quickly as SmartCX.
Sources:
Adobe Experience Cloud: Adobe
Microsoft's Dynamics 365: Microsoft
Salesforce Customer 360: Salesforce
Sprinklr: Sprinklr