• Technology is a fundamental enabler of an organization’s customer experience management (CXM) strategy. However, many IT departments fail to take a systematic approach when building a portfolio of applications for supporting marketing, sales, and customer service functions.
• The result is a costly, ineffective, and piecemeal approach to CXM application deployment (including high-profile applications like CRM).

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• IT must work in lockstep with their counterparts in marketing, sales, and customer service to define a unified vision and strategic requirements for enabling a strong CXM program.
• To deploy applications that specifically align with the needs of the organization’s customers, IT leaders must work with the business to define and understand customer personas and common interaction scenarios. CXM applications are mission critical and failing to link them to customer needs can have a detrimental effect on customer satisfaction and ultimately, revenue.
• IT must act as a valued partner to the business in creating a portfolio of CXM applications that are cost effective.
• Organizations should create a repeatable framework for CXM application deployment that addresses critical issues, including the integration ecosystem, customer data quality, dashboards and analytics, and end-user adoption.

Impact and Result

• Establish strong application alignment to strategic requirements for CXM that is based on concrete customer personas.
• Improve underlying business metrics across marketing, sales, and service, including customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction metrics.
• Better align IT with customer experience needs.