While great customer experiences have been shown to drive ROI, they’re not simple to deliver. Customers expect secure, useful, and personalized (but not overly personal) experiences that either flow intuitively in to their everyday routines or make them feel special when they’re trying something new. But facing mounting expectations from savvy customers, brands are challenged to offer these kinds of individualized experiences at scale. Like many clients we work with, departments are tasked to do more with less; whether that’s a flat headcount, siloed data, inefficient processes, and legacy - or underutilized - technologies. As a result, their experience quality and supply are unable to meet customer demand. 

And by failing to innovate and drive measurable value to customers in a sustainable way, many talented marketing departments risk feeling the same kind of digital transformation fatigue as reported by 43% of organizations in our recent Avanade research.

Marketers, you deserve a future-ready experience
So how can brands catch up – and ultimately, lead their industry – with customer experiences that deliver business results like sales and loyalty?   

In almost all cases, it starts with investing in the employee experience. MIT CISR research indicates a great employee experience results in more innovation, doubled customer satisfaction and a 25% increase in profitability. And from a marketing function perspective, this is no different. 

When marketers and product managers collaborate, have the necessary skills and tools at hand, and are empowered with data-led insights, they are well-positioned to create exceptional customer experiences. The brands that bring this all together successfully in a consistent, scalable, profitable way are set up to succeed and focus on their “next big thing”.

Transcending experiences in today’s day and age
Creating experiences without boundaries – the kinds of experiences that are highly contextual, channel agnostic, and even intuitively controlled with human behaviors like voice and gesture – requires a holistic approach. There is no quick fix solution or martech plug-in that can do all this. But there are a few core tenets that typically play a role:

• A cultural shift to customer-centricity 
• The breaking down of data silos and connecting data to truly understand customers
• Blended teams of creative and technology talent
• Usable, connected modern digital experience platforms
• Automation and intelligent technologies

Hear more at Sitecore Symposium
Eager to hear more about “the how”? At Sitecore Symposium (November 4-7 in Orlando, Florida), we’ll share our approach to creating exceptional experiences, and explain how we help clients drive marketing effectiveness and business results.  Whether you’re looking to entice new audiences, appeal to existing customers, prevent service calls, or launch new products, we have demos and solutions that can help you achieve your goals faster.

• Never Be Down Again! How Ameren uses Terraform to orchestrate Sitecore infrastructure and application deployments (Tuesday, Nov. 5th at 3:40 PM)
• Crawl, Walk, What Just Happened? DevOps is about culture (Wednesday, Nov. 6th at 10:30 AM)
• The benefits of negative feedback: Finding opportunities in “failure” (Thursday, Nov. 7th at 9:40 AM)

I hope to see you there.