Make Customer Experience Fly By Bringing CX Strategy And CX Technology Together Effective Customer Engagement has never been so vital. With the upheaval caused by COVID-19 leading to shifts in buying and engagement behaviour from consumers and companies alike, new approaches are needed to match expectations. Increasingly companies need to transform the way they market, sell and service customers, and ensure that every customer engagement is most effective. So, what is needed to deliver a better Customer Experience? CX STRATEGY AND CX TECHNOLOGY TOGETHER, ARE ESSENTIAL Great experiences come when you have all of the right components in place. For Customer Experience that means having the right CX Strategy combined with the right CX Technology. Strategy without technology will just result in good ideas, but not capable of being implemented across your business. Whereas technology without strategy risks focusing on the wrong areas with a lack of ownership from key stakeholders. The most successful implementations are always those that have combined strategy and technology and spent time on developing each. ADDRESSING YOUR CX STRATEGY If you really want to improve Customer Experience, then you need to get different parts of your business all pulling in one strategic direction. If you’ve got a Central team in place – often a Center of Excellence (CoE) model and approach – then this strategy might be developed by your own staff. However, as Customer Experience is still a relatively new discipline, sometimes it makes practical sense to utilise expert external resources in order to make headway and get things set up more quickly. The great advantage is that external experts will come armed with proven processes to help fast-track your strategy and get all your colleagues pulling in a consistent and effective direction. For example, Alterian partner, ekino, are part of Havas CX, an international network dedicated to delivering meaningful experiences across the entire customer journey. Havas CX, formally launched in October 2020, bringing specialised resources from a pool of 1,200 CX experts across the world. Using their ‘Building meaningful experiences’ approach, they work closely with senior management teams and stake holders to shape and implement client strategy. Bede Feltham, Digital Strategy Director at ekino Havas CX explains “strategy is essential to making CX work for clients. We’ve seen first-hand how getting the strategy right for clients such as Maersk, Twill and Carmignac, has enabled them to pull ahead of their competitors and deliver highly effective CX programs”. He goes on to say that “ekino are uniquely placed to help their clients as they bridge the gap between Marketing and Technology and it’s this hybrid skillset inherent in all of their team, that adds so much value to their clients”. CHOOSING THE RIGHT CX TECHNOLOGY Consumers now expect companies to recognize them, understand them, and engage with them in a personalized relevant way, whatever the channel they interact through. Any technology needs to be capable of plugging into your current ecosystem, listening and responding to your customers, in real-time at the speed they expect. After all, as consumers we are all impatient. If you rely on technology designed for a single channel, it is designed to work best only in that channel. It won’t be optimized to plug into all of your existing systems and touchpoints. Similarly, if you rely on technology for a single purpose, like Marketing Technology, it won’t be architected for sub 100 millisecond decisions. That is where technology platforms such as Alterian Real-Time CX, identified as a Leader by Forrester in Journey Orchestration, fits in. The platform allows your brand to track, analyze, and influence meaningful real-time interactions within each customer’s journey to deliver in the moment interaction at the perfect time to optimize acquisition, engagement, and retention. As well as being designed for speed and to integrate with all of the systems across your technology environment. Remember, if you want to use the technology yourself, and frankly why wouldn’t you, look for those rated best for Usability. As Alex Thompson, CX Product Director at Alterian explains, “Journey Orchestration technology such as the Alterian Platform makes a real and rapid differentiator for businesses. Focused around cost savings, engagement and retention, we’ve seen it helping clients such as Iberdrola deliver exceptional ROI in weeks while making every customer engagement count to exceed company goals” AGILE FOR QUICK WINS With competitive pressures, consumer expectations and upheaval in many markets, speed of implementation is of the essence. We’ve found that most clients want an agile approach, where they can implement initial use cases in days and weeks, prove the ROI, then refine performance, and start to implement further use cases that bring value to the business. It is therefore important to pick CX Strategy and CX Technology partners capable of working at the speed you want, to start giving you a rapid return on your investment. HOW TO THRIVE With your CX Strategy and CX Technology in place the goal is to thrive, building program that deliver the ‘holy grail’ of marketing: the right message to the right person at the right time. Beyond that, as already mentioned, it’s speed of delivery, sub 100 millisecond decisions, plus efficacy as part of an automated, personalised, always-on journey orchestration program. WANT TO FIND OUT MORE? Why not contact us today for an initial discussion. You can share more about your business, and we can share some case studies and explain more about our strategy and technology. About Alterian Alterian has a 20-year history of delivering leading real-time customer experience (CX) solutions to brands across the US, UK and Australia. Alterian have been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2024 and received the highest scores possible in 18 criteria, including customer journey analytics and customer journey orchestration across channels, scalability, generative AI and innovation. Key features of Alterian’s leading Real-time Customer Experience Platform: Insight and AI-driven decisioning Personalize to consumers in real-time Comprehensive real-time reporting Integrate and turbo-charge existing channels and systems Scalable model customized to business needs Read more about Alterian’s Real-time Customer Experience Platform and unique approach. About ekino and Havas CX ekino are part of Havas CX, an international network bringing specialised resources from a pool of 1,200 CX experts across the world. Using their ‘Building meaningful experiences’ approach, they work closely with senior management teams and stake holders to shape and implement client strategy. Their CX strategy specialists have a proven methodology for delivering successful digital transformation projects to clients globally. ekino specialise in delivering omnichannel communication, customer experience and technology services and solutions. Combine data, technology, and design to deliver meaningful experiences that transform businesses. A wide range of data and research informs everything they do. Inspired by insight, they craft innovative and scalable solutions, beautifully designed to really connect with people. With a team of 50 specialists in London who can easily scale to meet clients’ needs with 500 digital experts in the global ekino network plus 1,800 communication experts in the Havas King’s Cross Village (HKX). Find out more about ekino and Havas CX.