Editorial
The Gist:
- Break down silos. A successful customer technology strategy requires creating an integrated approach that aligns all customer-facing departments to better meet customer needs.
- Embrace composability. This allows for greater flexibility and agility, enabling your brand to quickly adapt to changing customer preferences and market demands.
- Prioritize customer-centricity. Shifting priorities will help companies avoid common pitfalls of internal-focused approaches, ultimately driving better customer experiences.
Martech isn't an island. Customer experiences suffer when siloed technology mandates, targets and budgets prioritize company needs over customer needs. This technology strategy might seem beneficial for the company in the short term, but it negatively impacts customer experience and ultimately the company's results in the long term.
It's time for an integrated approach for customer-facing departments. As products and services become more commoditized, customer experience becomes the key differentiator in the market. While silos may work for non-customer-facing areas like warehousing, logistics and finance, they harm customer experiences when applied elsewhere, leading to revenue loss.
Your Technology Strategy Should Prioritize Customer Needs Over Company Goals
What makes customer technologies so different that they require a different approach? The reason is shockingly simple: The customer, not the company, is beating the technology drum. And that changes everything. It is a different ballgame altogether.
Customer technology — like Martech, Salestech and Supporttech — must adapt to customer demands. In contrast, company technology (like Finance, ERP, Logistics, Procurement, Warehousing) focuses on internal efficiency. The company controls users and system volumes. This traditional, siloed approach has prevented customer-centricity from taking off for many years.
We need to pivot from company-focused to customer-focused. As a result, we will see a shift in brands sharing fewer messages about "what companies want customers to hear" and more about "what customers want to hear from companies." Less sending; more listening. Less monologue; more dialogue.
Related Article: Listen to Your Customers, and They’ll Keep Listening to You
How Composability Enhances an Effective Customer Technology Strategy
Company technology often dictates having “one tool that replaces all others” to establish a “single source of truth.” This approach is critical for maintaining stable and scalable systems in a predictable environment.
However, for customer-facing departments, this approach has been largely unsuccessful. Many IT departments dismiss common customer-facing practices as “shadow IT” or “point solutions.” As counterintuitive as it may sound, our recent research shows that this approach is a best practice that desperately needs to be included in corporate policy.
This customer technology best practice is (unofficially) based on “composability” principles. Composability refers to the flexibility of combining different tools to create something new, much like Lego blocks. It makes room for the speed and agility required to follow volatile customer preferences.
In daily practice, many company stacks resemble solar systems, with a sun, planets and moons. The further away from the sun, the more flexibility there is. And that is a good thing.
In our research, companies use a few designated center platforms like CRM, MAP, CDP and CDW, and over half of these are platforms where other solutions can easily integrate. Eighty-three percent of companies admit to having duplications of tools and features in their stack by design. Believe it or not, the duplication of features reduces costs, leads to better functionality and user experience, and is easier to govern.
Avoid These Common Mistakes When Developing Your Strategy
Especially in environments where CIOs and CTOs report to CFOs, we see customer-unfriendly decisions resulting in marginal efficiency gains on the cost side and serious losses on the revenue side.
For example, if we apply company technology wisdom to customer technology, like most companies do today, we might end up consolidating different email systems in an attempt to reduce overlap and redundancies.
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From a financial or IT governance standpoint, that makes perfect sense. But from a customer-facing and revenue standpoint, it is a recipe for disaster. Different types of email systems have different sweet spots. Here are some everyday examples:
- Migrating email platforms specialized in newsletter capabilities (e.g., MailChimp) to other platforms might result in higher bounce rates, lower deliverability or blacklisting.
- Migrating a transactional email system (e.g., SendGrid) to support service and financial messaging to other platforms might increase costs and decrease deliverability due to the high volumes.
- Transitioning specialized eCommerce email systems to different platforms could reduce the ability to deliver highly personalized promotions, dynamic pricing strategies and real-time messaging, especially with regards to targeting abandoned carts.
Related Article: 5 Slick Moves to Dominate B2B Email Marketing
3 Essential Steps for Building a Winning Strategy
1. Assign One Customer Technology Owner
If possible, bring the mandate and budget for customer-facing technology into one place. Customers don't care about company departments. All they care about is that their needs are met in the most frictionless way. Ensure that MarketingOps, SalesOps and RevOps grow together and are involved in the strategy formulation phase, not just in the “fixing” phase.
2. Harness a Plug-and-Play Architecture
Unlike company technology’s stable systems, customer technology requires a layered ecosystem that is flexible and responsive. It must accommodate frequent updates, Minimal Viable Product-like adoption and rapid prototyping to keep pace with customer preferences.
3. Have One Shared Governance Policy
Governance should differ between company and customer technology. While company technology focuses on managing internal data and employee security, customer technology must prioritize customer data privacy and adapt to constantly changing trends.
Embracing a Forward-Thinking Customer Technology Strategy
Innovations in company technology are typically stable and limited, whereas customer technology is in constant flux. This evolution allows brands to stay competitive by quickly adapting to new trends and customer needs. Embrace it.
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