Editorial
The Gist
- Tech meets CX and EX. The CMSWire CONNECT conference highlighted the importance of technology and its role in the future of Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX).
- Tech overshadowing brand identity. There is a caution against over-reliance on technology that may overshadow maintaining brand identity.
- Brands be brands. There is an imminent need for brands to maintain their distinctiveness amidst the rush of digital transformation and automation. The risk of brand experiences becoming indistinguishable and commoditized was raised, with a call for thoughtful preservation of brand differentiation at multiple touchpoints.
Austin, Texas was swampy in the way waterfront cities get when the winds quit. There was a density to the atmosphere. A palpable weight and heat that fell into my lap when I swung the car door open under the scant shade of the JW Marriott’s porte cochere. It would prove an appropriate metaphor for the next three days, and beyond.
CMSWire’s CONNECT conference last month was not my first rodeo. Nor was it the CONNECT team’s, which has hosted similar professional gatherings since 2015. But COVID had imposed a three-year moratorium, and this event marked the conference’s comeback after many virtual gatherings.
My strategy was to simply show up. No prior research, no preconceptions. There would be margaritas. That was enough.
Full disclosure: I attended the conference as a guest of its founder, and my longtime friend, Brice Dunwoodie, who asked me to attend and share my observations. Let the chips and salsa fall where they may.
Making Sense of Martech Madness
On Day 1, I fell in with the herd of caffeine-buzzed registrants around the tables, eyes ricocheting about in search of familiar faces. Being an ad person, my attention was on the signage: design, color palette, typography, and how people reacted to the messaging., which was clear, consistent, and on-brand.
Registration went smoothly. I hung the requisite I.D. badge around my neck, downloaded the conference app, and fortified myself with breakfast before attending my first session: Master Class: Technology Choices for the New Omnichannel Era. I had no idea this talk — and many of those that followed, like the Neuroscience of Communication, Serendipity, and a panel discussion on Transforming Workplace Engagement — would cling to me, like Austin’s humidity, and that I would stew on them even after the show.
Having recently parted ways with a large CRM company that purported to offer a complete omnichannel solution that spanned both CX and EX, I was interested in seeing an alternative vision. Speaker Tony Byrne of Real Story Group did not disappoint in his master class on technology. One of the first slides he flashed onto the screen was called, “The Subway Map.”
This is an apt name for two reasons. First, it did resemble a subway map — reminiscent of Tokyo’s — with variously colored “lines” denoting tools or services, such as Digital Content Management (purple) and Journey Orchestration Engines (blue), and “stops” along the lines, represented as circles, indicating the companies selling those solutions.
Second, as maps do, this one was designed to help people reach their destination, which in this case is a vision for a perfectly orchestrated, highly automated, customer-centric future. It also proved to be a useful navigational framework to overall the conference.
Staring at the subway map, it wouldn’t be difficult to get a little lost, take the wrong route, or encounter delays for any number of reasons. The future? It’s complicated, and it’s coming at us faster than ever.
Related Article: Hype, Time Machines & Healthcare: Insights From Scott Galloway's CONNECT Conference Keynote
Growing Need for Hybrid Roles in Customer, Employee Experience
One telling indicator is what Mr. Byrne sees as an emerging need for a senior-level role that might be called Head of Enterprise Design. This position would be situated on the rapidly converging border between EX and CX. EX people, like HR directors, get it immediately. Happy employees (read: empowered) equal happy customers. They would be charged with ensuring consistent, on-brand experiences across the enterprise, inside and out.
Another proposed cross-functional role combining analytical and marketing skills, along with some technical understanding, is that of Marketing Data Operations Manager. This person would define, elevate and expedite issues that fall between marketing and engineering. One example might be prioritizing a marketing-initiated ticket to identify customers’ half-birthdays for a last-minute special promotion. Instead of taking weeks to complete the request, Marketing Data Ops Manager could flag the ask as a high-priority item, pushing for resolution in days instead of weeks.
The growing need for hybrid positions such as these not only illuminate the challenges that companies face as they attempt to find their way through a bewildering thicket of technologies at ever increasing speed, but the difficulties brands encounter as well.
Let me switch metaphors to make a point.
Imagine the martech stack as a giant wood chipper, with its huge yawning mouth perpetually open and hungry for content. Next, imagine the brand is a beautiful tree, a pine tree, made up of carefully manicured branches — broadcast, print, web, email, mobile, social, Alexa (or Apple or Google), chat, call center, PoS and IoT.
Now throw the whole tree into the martech chipper and unleash the violence of “orchestration.” The brand is summarily shredded into optimized bits and sprayed across the entire length of the customer journey where its residue will hopefully conform to the multitude of containers designed to collect it.
If customer experience is brand experience operationalized and extended, I worry that the attention being paid to the brand at each of these digital waypoints will shift to optimizing the tool or silo in question. The brand, frappéd into pulp, ceases to retain any semblance of its original identity. Pine tree, pecan tree, palm tree — it’s all just plywood dust in the end. Attention will likely be focused on empirical performance metrics like call length, repeat call count, resolution %, escalations, etc. While these metrics can be hugely important, in part because they’re easily quantified, they run the risk of eclipsing squishier KPIs like brand continuity or consistency. Forest and trees.
Customer Experience Is Ultimately on You, the Brand
Who cares?
The company in question. Because what happens when Brand A’s call center experience is indistinguishable from its closest competitor? If the robots are all the same in terms of functionality, who tunes the chatbot’s “personality” to be on brand? Who choreographs the dance at POS? All of these touchpoints are vitally important because they make a brand real. Spoiler alert: maybe the answer is you.
With no perceptible differentiation at the experiential level, competing companies risk becoming commoditized — and then it’s a brief, ugly, pitched battle of features before the price-propelled race to the bottom begins. Nobody wants their company or their client’s company to go into freefall on their watch.
The upside is — and it’s huge — if thought is given to how brand differentiation can be preserved across the plethora of touchpoints, and the resulting customer interactions captured and fed back to inform the brand at the top level, the entire customer experience can be aligned and fine-tuned to produce even more love. And loyalty. And sales.
From my notes: the conference gave us an overview of the territory ahead, our charge is to map a course through it.
Think of Apple. Its power is in its elegance and simplicity at every customer intersection. User Interface on the iMac? Simple. iPhone, the pocket computer you can even make old-fashioned telephone calls on? Simple. iTunes, a massive music ecosystem comprising artists, distribution, purchase, recommendations, playlists, sharing, and devices. Bafflingly, mind-bogglingly simple. The stores? Simple. Tech support? Simple.
The elegance and frictionlessness is the brand. Everywhere. Always. No matter what product or service is on offer. Evidently they have cracked the code on unifying BrandX, EX and CX to deliver a singular, unique and powerful EXperience writ large.
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Let’s say Apple decides to do something seemingly preposterous, like open a bank. So does Microsoft. Assuming they both offered 4.5% interest, where would you put your money? Exactly. And a nearly $1,000,000,000 bank is born almost overnight. Now, if they’d just take the brakes off the Apple Car.
This was just Day 1, Class 1 of CMSWire’s CONNECT conference. (Thankfully, there were margaritas that evening.)
Don't Fight the Future
Day 1 was followed by an equally packed Day 2 with talks on everything from AI to revolutionizing retail to the power of serendipity, and capped with a sometimes hilarious, always incisive keynote by professor, author and entrepreneur Scott Galloway that divided the world into “overhyped” and “underhyped."
Day 3 culminated in a grand finale by OG, soldier, bank robber, rapper, comedian and actor, Ice-T, who evidently knows a thing or two about transformation.
He left us with a quote attributed to Quincy Jones, “If you want to lose a fight, fight the future.” As I said at the start, things were hot and heavy. Days after the conference, as I continue to map my own path toward the tech-propelled, convergent future of CX/EX and maybe BrandX, they’ve stayed that way.
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