When Marketing Data and Customer Experience Don’t Go Anywhere
David Edelman shares an article that explores the marketing data’s limitations when it is applied to improving customer experience.
As I work with more CMO’s who are wading into broader responsibilities for driving company-wide customer experience programs, I am finding that many are slowing down because they feel they lack good enough customer data. As one expands from looking at mostly marketing data to taking a broader look across all customer touchpoints, especially those in call center, physical channels, wearables, chat, and all the broader channels beyond core marketing ones, the data gets much more diverse in nature, and often lacks a common identifier that can create a perfect single view of a customer.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways of stitching together a good enough picture for many purposes, especially for analyzing customer journeys. I’ll get into those in a moment, but let’s understand the blinders that marketers are often pushed into developing because of the tech stack they are used to.
Marketers have focused on acquisition and CRM programs that aim to coordinate the contacts out to a prospect and/or customer. They make sure the sequence and personalization across, mostly, direct mail, email, digital media, and websites create a coordinated acquisition, cross-sell, or engagement journey. The systems that support this work hard to match any records via some form of common identifier, and many of the major enterprise CRM players are extending into broader Customer Data Platforms (CDP’s), using this philosophy. This allows a clean orchestration of outbound touches across channels.
For managing marketing, this all makes good sense, but for managing customer experience more broadly, especially from a real-time journey analytics point of view, it creates significant constraints. Most non-traditional marketing channels do not have a common identifier, and as companies experiment with constantly adding new ones – moving to an expansive omni-channel experience – it takes much more effort to get the data into a shape where the marketing-oriented CDP’s can cleanly ingest it, hence marketers feeling they “lack good data” to manage customer journeys.
Key points include:
- Focused Customer Journey Analytics
- Supporting journey management teams
- Creating artificial constraints
Read the full article, To drive CX, stop waiting for the Godot of perfect marketing data, on LinkedIn.
