Customer experience is the most important differentiator for brands in a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete on cost and features alone. Yet, the environment in which marketers operate is complex, and delivering customer experiences that meet consumers’ expectations is challenging.

The amount of customer data we have at our fingertips is growing exponentially, but it is often not stored in a centralised or standardised manner. We’re seeing the number of devices, screens, and channels that customers use multiply, meaning more data and more data sources.

Multiple channels result in multiple uses of data

That trend will only accelerate as new 'Internet of things' devices like Amazon’s Alexa become a feature in more homes. The result is that customer journeys are fragmenting across multiple channels, which may be powered by different databases and systems in your marketing environment.

For example, someone might begin researching a holiday on a smartphone in a waiting room, while asking their social team a question on Twitter, then book a trip from the computer – and then manage the trip on a mobile app. Currently, it is a challenging for most companies to tie the customer’s booking back to the social query or to the search ad that converted them.

The use of fragmented channels

What’s more, digital and physical channels are starting to blur together thanks to technologies such as facial recognition, beacons, and augmented reality. We have already seen some retailers in the United Kingdom experiment with in-store facial recognition technology.

They can use demographic factors like age and gender to tailor in-store ads to people; they can even tie facial recognition to loyalty card data for personalisation at an individual customer level.

Putting a customer experience architecture into place

This is all about mapping the various elements of your digital marketing and sales environment – the systems, the databases, the channels, the assets, the processes, and more – to your customer journey and to the experiences you wish to offer at each point.

A customer-centric architecture gives you a view of the customer engagement environment, from acquisition to retention, to content and experience management, to analytics and reporting, to customer data management and marketing automation.

It also helps you to understand where you need integrating data systems and workflow to get a complete view of customer engagement. Another benefit is the alignment of technology, touchpoints, and operations, as different people and teams are involved in the customer experience delivery — your IT team, marketing, the content producers, the call centre, and the analytics and insight teams.

The benefits of architecture maps

A good architecture maps your organisation’s customer data, technical, and operational requirements across all channels. This allows you to start understanding who your customers are and identifying them in different channels, whether these are the retail point of sale, your website, social media, or paid media. It also helps you to gain a view of how they engage with your brand at different touchpoints and in different parts of the customer journey.

You can achieve a more granular and detailed understanding of your customers’ needs and behaviour so that you can use each touchpoint and each piece of content to deliver more meaningful engagements with your audience in an automated manner.

This turns customer data analysis and insight into the driver for content and experience management. It maps all of this back to the return on investment and this, in turn, gives you the insight to deliver the right experience for every context, at every touch point, and at every step of the journey.

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