CONTINUE TO SITE »
or wait 15 seconds

Blog

Why risk not using marketing technology when it's crucial to the digital CX?

Lynne Capozzi, CMO, Acquia, explains that while big challenges still exist, using technology to enhance CX simply can no longer be avoided.

Photo by istock.com

October 24, 2019

By Lynne Capozzi, CMO, Acquia

Several years have passed since the original 'tech boom' and much of the world has settled into a comfortable relationship with technology. We use it for communication, entertainment, shopping and a host of other activities that once involved much more manual effort. We use biometrics to open our smartphones, speak to Alexa, Siri or Cortana to get things done, operate our lighting and heating through voice and sensor technology. Tech is now most people's 'normal,' and new developments are greeted with enthusiasm.

It would seem reasonable to assume, therefore, that marketers are keenly awaiting the latest tech developments so they can use them optimize the digital customer experience. And yes, they are. Unfortunately, recent research by Acquia, who surveyed 1,000 UK-based customers and 100 UK-based marketers, suggests the challenges of joining legacy systems with new innovations too often stands between those marketers and their CX goals.

When surveyed, 84% of marketers said they wanted to make their technologies work together, but couldn't make it happen. That's hardly surprising, since more than half of them had 11 or more technologies in their CX portfolio.

However, while the challenge of using technology to enhance CX may be substantial, it simply cannot be avoided any more. There is a huge gap between marketers' perceptions of their brand's CX (in Acquia's study, more than 90% had confidence in it) and customers' perceptions (more than half said the brands they interacted with failed to provide a good experience, and 66% could not recall a single brand that had exceeded their expectations.)

This situation is frankly dangerous for brands. We know that CX is crucial in a crowded marketplace and Acquia's research bears this out: 71% of customers said they would transfer their custom to a competitor in response to poor CX.

Technology is the key

Technology has the potential to change this situation — if it's applied properly. Many brands are turning to solutions like AI and chatbots to personalize the customer experience and enhance CX. But two-thirds of customers in the study said automated responses sometimes felt impersonal and, despite marketers' best intentions and widespread acknowledgement that personalized experiences are the best form of CX, 75% still felt they were treated as a generic customer.

Despite this, there is strong support for tech-enhanced CX from both sides: 88% of customers said technology should enhance their online experiences with brands and 85% agreed that technology should improve brand experience generally. But the type of technology applied really matters: fewer than half of customers surveyed were looking forward to artificial intelligence (AI)-driven brand interactions, for example.

Brands also appreciate the value of tech, and are investing accordingly. When asked about their investment plans over the next 12 months, 90% of companies surveyed planned to invest in personalization technologies, 85% in the Internet of Things, 82% in AI and machine learning and 77% in links with smart in-home devices like Alexa and Apple's iHome.

The challenge lies in using current and forthcoming technology to genuinely enhance and personalize CX, without falling into the trap of making that interaction seem artificial, impersonal and/or generic. Doing that, or worse still doing nothing at all, is a sure-fire way of alienating customers who, as we have seen, are highly motivated to take their business elsewhere.

Bringing it all together

While technology can improve the speed, convenience, and personalization brands offer to customers, UK marketers often struggle to harness it. Almost three-quarters of marketers surveyed said the speed at which they can bring CX innovations to market is too slow.

We know this is often due to legacy systems, which can make the integration of new tech more or less impossible.

Thankfully, there is a solution — and it's a solution brands need to implement quickly, if they are to future-proof their business and feel confident in their ability to integrate new tech solutions into the CX as soon as they become available.

The solution for brands is to adopt a more open approach to marketing. A truly open marketing cloud offers unfettered and unconditional integrations, giving marketers the power, resources, and most importantly, freedom to do this. They will also benefit from near-constant surveillance and a more aggressive update schedule than proprietary options, including upgrades that address potential vulnerabilities in software as soon as they are discovered. 

While many digitally-minded marketers appreciate the benefits of open platforms, some are deterred by the investments they have already made in their current and legacy systems. Yet the sunk cost fallacy can be particularly damaging here. It is very clear that customers and businesses alike see technology as the way forward, the path to better CX. If a system cannot integrate the latest solutions, and thus fails to delight its customers (and according the Acquia's survey, customers are very far from delighted as things stand) then those customers will leave.

In short, if businesses want to enhance their CX and associated back-office functionality, in a context that offers ongoing support and technology and the assurance of being future-proof, then embracing an open approach is surely the only rational choice. Anything else carries a much larger measure of risk, and it seems only sensible to ask — why would any business risk becoming obsolete, if it didn't have to?

 

Related Media




©2025 Networld Media Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
b'S2-NEW'