For marketers, a successful customer experience strategy is all about creating, managing, delivering, optimizing, and measuring how your customers interact with your brand across all touchpoints. The customer buying journey should be seamless and fluid, leaving visitors with the impression that the brand truly understands and cares about their needs, leading to higher engagement and loyalty.
As brands try to deliver more hyper-personalized experiences to meet the increasing expectations of today’s customers, marketing teams are being tasked with finding and implementing the right processes and technologies to deliver on that expectation. And they need IT helps to make that happen.
Digitally mature organizations, and those who want to get the most out of their digital transformation, bring together their Marketing and IT departments early in the process to map out a success plan and ensure they improve the organization’s CX efforts.
But for teams that have traditionally operated independently, how can organizations start aligning Marketing and IT and make CX a shared responsibility?
Break down silos
Putting an emphasis on cross-functional leadership and team alignment helps nearly any kind of initiative, but it can’t be overstated how extremely important it is to a company’s digital transformation project.
Bringing Marketing and IT together to decide on the best course of action helps break down silos that otherwise could create friction between the departments, cause delays, or even halt the project altogether in a worst-case scenario. Setting out clear objectives and allowing for a free flow of creative ideas enhances collaboration and can result in a superior outcome.
Align on your CX strategy
One of the common reasons that CX or digital transformation initiatives struggle is a lack of shared understanding on the CX strategy between the departments. When there is no alignment on strategy, it has a ripple effect within the organization.
Getting the needed internal processes worked out early, clearly communicating them to the teams, and then defining the roles and responsibilities for the key players will go a long way toward hitting project milestones and maintaining alignment along the way.
Share your project priorities
Once the strategy is established, it is important to then bring together cross-functional teams to share the project’s goals. Doing this will provide much needed clarity on what elements take priority. Having a clear, well-communicated purpose and understanding of what needs to get done, and in what order, makes everything easier.
Invest together
Together, Marketing and IT need to build a flexible technology infrastructure of well-integrated systems that enable the marketing team to deliver personalized customer experiences. To reinforce and maintain this alignment between Marketing and IT, it is important for teams to align on the technologies needed to support customer experience and transformation efforts.
The first step is to conduct an audit of the martech stack that’s currently in place – determining where there are gaps or overlaps, as well as areas for improvement in delivering effective digital experiences. If it’s determined a new investment needs to be made, both Marketing and IT should be involved in the evaluation and decision-making process.
To meet the demands and expectations of the modern consumer, the brands that stand apart from the pack are the ones that implement an advanced digital experience platform built to maximize customer interactions across every touchpoint. Delivering a CX that is personalized, consistent, responsive, and satisfying is what fosters loyalty that endures long after the purchase.
But to execute properly, having Marketing and IT teams that are aligned early and throughout the process, is a critical factor in getting to market faster and more efficiently.
