Mashed potatoes. Stuffing. Green bean casserole. Macaroni and cheese. Cranberry sauce.
According to a Campbell’s survey, Americans serve an average of five side dishes (not necessarily the ones listed above) for Thanksgiving. While some people prefer these tasty sides to the main event, the meal just isn’t Thanksgiving dinner without the turkey.
Similarly, some businesses have loaded up on customer engagement solution “side dishes.” But they lack the main course—a customer journey orchestration solution that serves up appetizing customer experiences.
Mashed Potatoes Alone Don’t Make a Meal. And a CRM Alone Doesn’t Improve CX
A customer relationship management (CRM) system stores and manages customer data and automates sales outreach. Focusing primarily on sales, CRMs don’t guide customer service and other interactions that occur after the purchase. They don’t provide the context needed to understand customer intent, and they can’t determine the right messages to send customers who are on multiple, simultaneous journeys.
CRMs are the “mashed potatoes”—the most popular side dish—on the customer engagement solution menu. According to a Forrester survey of global CX leaders, 70% of the 217 CX leaders who are using a customer engagement solution are using a CRM, making it the most widely-used customer engagement solution among survey respondents. Only 41% of CX leaders are using a journey orchestration platform (the main course).
But like mashed potatoes don’t make a balanced meal by themselves, a CRM by itself doesn’t significantly improve customer experience. Of the 217 CX leaders using a customer engagement solution, fewer than half indicated that the solution improved CX and business outcomes. This suggests that a CRM isn’t enough to get the job done.
Popular Customer Engagement Solution Side Dishes
A customer data platform (CDP) is a software platform that collects, integrates, and manages customer data from various sources—such as a CRM, contact center systems, billing, browsing history, and electronic medical records—to create a unified profile for every customer. While customer data profiles are essential for personalization, data by itself isn’t helpful. It’s how you use that data that matters. Most people don’t eat cranberry sauce by itself but adding it to your turkey sandwich gives your leftovers a tasty kick, just like adding a CDP to your customer journey orchestration (CJO) platform.
CDPs don’t send messages in real-time based on current behavior, and they don’t provide the context needed to understand customer behavior. Most importantly, a CDP by itself can’t make journey-centric decisions and send the right messages at the right time to meet customers’ needs. Knowing that someone recently compared credit cards online isn’t helpful if you don’t immediately send a tailored message encouraging the person to submit the application. If you wait a few days, the person has already applied for another bank’s credit card.
Campaign management systems aid in planning, executing, and tracking marketing campaigns. This software includes tools for creating and sending email campaigns, managing social media posts, and tracking website traffic. Focusing primarily on sales (not what comes afterward), CMSs efficiently send sales-related messages to large groups of people. However, they don’t use customer data profiles to send tailored messages. These systems can’t detect intent or predict customers’ needs.
The common ingredients that are missing from these customer engagement side dishes are the ability to:
- Determine the context of customer interactions to understand behavior, detect intent and predict needs.
- Send the right communications to customers at the right time to meet their needs.
Where’s the Turkey?
A customer journey orchestration platform brings together data from your other customer engagement systems and makes it all work together—and better. The turkey is what transforms the collection of side dishes into a special holiday meal.
A CJO platform…
- Ingests and unifies data
- Segments data in real time
- Uses intelligent decisioning to trigger the next best action in the moment, across a variety of channels
CJO analyzes data from multiple systems:
- CDP (real-time customer data profiles)
- Billing system (bill pay status)
- CRM (account type, contract term)
- Surveys (customer sentiment/intent)
- Segments
- Engagement (channel activity, web/mobile/apps)
To determine context, customer intent and…
- What messages to send
- At what time
- Over which channel
CJO executes the journey steps for the appropriate journey. It prevents sending the wrong messages (e.g., an upsell offer to a customer who is disputing a wireless bill).
Don’t Blow Your CX Budget on CES Side Dishes. Leave Room for the Main Course.
If you eat too much sweet potato casserole and macaroni and cheese, you won’t have room for turkey (a good source of lean protein, important for satiety). Likewise, if you spend too much money purchasing customer engagement tools that don’t work together, you’ll miss out on the real meat of customer experience improvement—customer journey orchestration.
CSG Xponent: Your Recipe for CX Success
CSG Xponent, our award-winning, industry-leading customer engagement software, is the centerpiece for your customer engagement side dishes. Xponent combines a customer data platform with industry best customer journey analytics and journey orchestration to detect customer intent and guide your customers towards their best next action. That’s something to be thankful for!
