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The Gist
- Prioritize ease. Delivering great CX should sit alongside building mental and physical availability as a key goal for every enterprise marketer.
- Bring tools and data together. Unify fragmented systems and datasets to better understand your customers and enable seamless experiences.
- Uncomplicate and augment. Working with the right partner, marketers should be able to simplify their martech stacks without a rip-and-replace approach.
Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow has been one of the most influential texts in marketing this century. Its argument, backed up by a wealth of science, is that brands flourish based on two core principles – mental and physical availability. Put more simply, the most successful brands are easy to remember and easy to buy.
But we now live in an age of digital abundance, when competitor brands are just a click away and potential buyers have total transparency over pricing and customer reviews. As a result, we’re seeing the emergence of a third imperative for marketers to drive growth – making their brand easy to interact with.
As Rich Foster, head of new business, CIS Americas at Tata Communications states: “If a business can engage with a customer in a more proactive, more personalized manner, they can create a more sticky, more loyal customer.” That’s where customer experience (CX) is vital.
According to Wayne Simmons, global customer excellence lead at a global pharmaceutical company and author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise (Wiley, 2024), achieving great CX means “being intentional, if not pre-emptive, about identifying and removing friction across the entire experience. In this context, experiential attributes like simplicity and ease aren’t nice to haves – it’s a competitive advantage that builds trust, earns preference, and drives performance.”
Taken together, these three rules of brand success – easy to remember, buy and interact with – create famous and fluent businesses that we return to again and again. These are the brands we buy on impulse and recommend to friends. From Amazon to Uber, they are the organizations winning in today’s world.
What the Data Tells Us
The evidence for CX’s impact is stark. According to PwC, just a single bad experience is enough to drive one in three customers (32%) away from a brand they previously loved. And consumers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 16% more for products or services with better CX. Other research from Salesforce found that nearly 90% of buyers say the experience a company provides matters as much as its products or services.
Of course, marketers are highly aware of the crucial commercial impact of good CX – and where they’re struggling to meet the mark.
A Harvard Business Review study, sponsored by Tata Communications, revealed that 94% of business leaders said delivering positive customer interactions is very important to success in their industry. But a mere 38% said that their organization is very successful at doing so.
It’s a frighteningly large gap between aspiration and reality.
Three Barriers to Success
So, if the data from customers and marketers alike demonstrates CX’s importance, what’s blocking more enterprises from delivering it? In our CX work with enterprises around the world, in sectors like retail, travel and financial services, we see a consistent pattern in the barriers to success. Three problems stand out.
- Outdated tech stacks. In a digital-first world, the key to delivering great CX is having the right tools in place. Unfortunately, many marketers are relying on legacy systems that hold them back. That means they can’t leverage data properly or benefit from the full functionality of modern platforms.
- Internal fragmentation. A big challenge with CX is that it can sit across several teams within an organization. That leads to a disjointed approach where different units – from marketing to IT – are using multiple systems and varying datasets to communicate with the same customers.
- Lack of insight. With a siloed approach to technology and internal coordination, the inevitable result is poor visibility. The organization struggles to properly understand its audience. Consequently, customer communication is not properly personalized or well targeted.
With legacy tech, low levels of collaboration, and insufficient customer insight, it’s all too easy to see why so many enterprises are delivering poor CX today. As Ankur Jain, global head and AVP, CXaaS at Tata Communications explains, without connected data and infrastructure, even the most advanced CX strategies struggle to gain traction: “It’s like having the steering wheel, with no engine underneath it.”
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That combination is what leads to the nightmare scenario for many marketers – a sales promotion email getting sent to someone who’s currently making a complaint. Not only does that kind of activity waste time and budget; it can alienate a prospect forever.
A Better Way
Thankfully, we get to see fantastic examples of best practice in CX too. For leading brands, the customer experience is powered by technology in a way that supercharges their relevance and impact.
- They bring their data together. This gives them a unified 360-degree view of the customer and lets them orchestrate user journeys across all of their brand touchpoints, from digital to in-store.
- They seamlessly coordinate their tech platforms. Whether it’s operating across different tools or multiple countries, the best companies at CX have reach, reliability and relevance baked in.
- They provide hyperpersonalized interactions. Increasingly powered by AI, these engagements reflect where the customer ‘is’ both physically and psychologically at any moment.
Sergio Tagliapietra, VP of information technology at a global fashion brand, commented: “The optimal approach to CX is to understand your clients deeply, consistently meet their expectations, and then deliver something extraordinary and unexpected on top of that – something that requires an organization united behind a clear, fresh vision.”
To some marketers, this idea might sound out of reach, even utopian. But the good news is that it’s a reality for more and more businesses today. Working with Tata Communications, global enterprises can connect to modern systems that augment, rather than replace, their existing core technology – achieving major impact without exorbitant cost or time investment.
Reimagining how your organization engages with customers is a vital part of marketers’ jobs now. With the right partner at your side, it’s possible to level up your CX and turn it into a core driver of brand growth.
For more information, visit tatacommunications.com.
