The Crucial Customer Experience Tech Stack
It’s only May, but the term Customer Experience (CX) is already a strong contender for buzzword of the year. Whether you’re scaling a fast-growing startup or running a massive enterprise, you’ve probably already read, time and again, that building a demonstrably better CX than your peers will result in increased brand loyalty, trust, and ultimately, advocacy.
The stakes are high. We don’t need to re-live recent cringeworthy episodes to know that one bad customer interaction can set off a reputational crisis. On the flipside, a differentiated CX can generate tangible value through a virtuous cycle of higher-margin customers who will also be net promoters. Doing so is easier said than done, especially as customers increasingly expect a better experience, on-demand support, and no human error. Indeed, within four years, customers will manage 85% of their experiences with a company without human interaction.
This means companies need to invest in more low-touch-but-still-personalized experiences, and explains why CX promises to be the largest MarTech expenditure area between now and 2020. In the battle for the next generation of customers’ hearts and minds, the winners will be those who have company-wide, customer-centric DNA coupled with the right tech stack (and the acumen to use the stack well).
So what’s the right tech stack for the CX-forward company? Glad you asked. The well-rounded CX stack includes earned, owned, and paid marketing tools; more traditional sales and service software; as well as emerging communication and digital asset management platforms that help you stitch it all together. The following components will help you communicate with customers across all touchpoints, learn about their needs and behaviors, and leverage the data to personalize CX at scale without crossing the line into creepiness.
Social Publishing and Analytics
Spredfast
Customers discover more and more products and services on social media these days and also expect to have a conversation with brands on these channels. Social networks are where brands go to find new audiences. So being able to attract audiences along the discovery and consideration phases of the customer journey is paramount. And having a more sophisticated workflow to respond to requests and complaints from customers is now expected of larger brands.
The Social Publisher market has gone through some upheaval since the early days (way back in 2010) with new players emerging after Salesforce picked up Buddy Media and Radian6 and mashed them up to make Social Studio, Google acquired Wildfire, and Oracle added Vitrue. Since then, Sprinklr, Hootsuite, and Spredfast have filled the void. Spredfast generally requires less services and custom setup and is more Enterprise-ready than its competitors. Plus, Spredfast has a clear feature set for both Marketing and Support cases, which makes it more valuable at more social touchpoints.
Email, SMS, and Push Marketing
ExactTarget
Ah, email. It just keeps trucking and shows little sign of letting up. The average user gets 88 emails a day. But, even with that noise, email remains one of the surest ways to directly get a customer’s attention and interest.
Email’s tinier cousins, SMS and Push messaging, are also making their way into the pantheon of direct messaging, but they serve a different purpose. SMS growth comes from myriad CX opportunities from hyper-targeted marketing promotions, to 2FA authentication and to plain old customer service. Push notifications ostensibly serve timely and precious notifications to draw mobile users back into the fold. If your company has an app, and no notification strategy, then you are missing a prime chance to engage a willing customer.
There are a ton of vendors in the overall direct messaging space. But ExactTarget continues to be the bellcow, even after the Salesforce acquisition. There has been a bit of slowdown in their product development but ExactTarget was ahead in enterprise scale and deliverability (that hidden-but-crucial quality to get brands’ messages through the many internet filters).
Customer Relationship Management
Salesforce
CRM systems have gone from single-champion, year-long projects with nebulous ROI to a must-have for any company with a considered purchase cycle. While CRMs have never quite fulfilled the promise of being a system of record, companies continue to charge forward in an attempt to use them as such. In the world of B2B Customer Experience, the CRM system is the closest thing there is to having all your customer stages in one place, from lead through account expansion. Similarly, this is the one place where other customer touchpoints — whether it be from an ad click or an in-product action — are likely to be aggregated.
Does Salesforce feel old? Yeah, it does. The CRM tool that deserves the lion’s share of credit for bringing all Enterprise software into the cloud is looking and feeling a little long in the tooth. But there really aren’t great pure-play alternatives in the market. Salesforce’s ecosystem of plugins is unrivaled and makes all things from data entry to reporting more robust. For this reason alone, Salesforce still gets the nod. That UI, though! Rough. You can almost see the database behind the curtain.
Customer Engagement System
Intercom
This is a newish category but is quickly becoming indispensable for companies who want to drive user engagement and get out ahead of both Support and Marketing. The main goal of Customer Engagement Systems is to communicate with customers when they are in a best frame of mind to…well…engage. Getting answers or suggestions to a customer when they are delighted to neutral is far preferable to getting those same answers to a customer when they are exasperated.
Typically, a Customer Engagement System will have the ability to reach across multiple distribution channels both in-product and out — chat, email, and in-app messaging — and will be able to collect user information to inform basic segmentation to better target delivery. For example, a company might choose to deliver an in-app message to a prospect based on their email domain matching a currently existing account.
The Customer Engagement System category is more of a B2B category than a B2C category and does overlap with both marketing and customer service categories. Nonetheless, this category may qualify as having the most rapid growth on this entire list. And the leader of the category is undoubtedly Intercom, which has “Slack-like” growth and boasts a paying customer list of 17,000.
Customer Service
Zendesk
Over the years, Customer Service software has moved from primarily queuing call center tickets to more digital solutions like email and chat. The burden on Customer Service software has been to apply more automation to ticket creation and routing as well as improved reporting that details where tickets are and which channels are being used. Unlike CRM systems which have nebulous topline ROI, Customer Service software has a simple ROI, which is to reduce the amount of time spent per customer, ironically trying to make its own category obsolete. Nonetheless, there are 0 companies who are free of questions to answer, bugs to deal with, or complications with contracts and service.
Enter Zendesk, a company that felt new as recently as 3 years ago. Its pure customer support functions are good, it has many integrations, and has many interfaces for front-line support staff to use (iPad, etc) so that they can do their jobs from more places. Additionally, Zendesk seems to understand that Support takes many forms; it has offerings in the knowledge base space and is trying to meet Customer Engagement Systems halfway by offering in-product chat. Customer Service solutions will move further toward marketing and product functions as the general Customer Experience market gains steam. Zendesk feels the most poised of the Customer Service applications to take advantage of that move.
Data Management Platform
Krux
Data Management Platforms are more easily explained if we think of them as CRM systems for anonymous data. The growing data dominance of Facebook and Google has caused companies to rethink how they collect, store, and organize their own data so that they don’t find themselves knowing less about their customers than these two tech titans. Companies want to merge CRM data with mobile and web behavior data to create a single identity across customers’ known and anonymous user interactions. The end-in-mind is to drive better customer insights, to enhance ad targeting on Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), and to personalize content to provide the best possible customer experience.
Most DMPs started as DSPs or Tag Management Platforms and became good at onboarding and merging data. Krux is no different. If you’re a large organization with many customer touchpoints but you know 10% of what Facebook and Google know about your customers, well, you need a DMP to close that gap.
Link Management Platform
Bitly
While DMPs typically offer tag management to organize all the data that comes from on-page Javascript tags, they don’t offer link management. In fact, links are more mission-critical than tags because they are decidedly end-user facing. They actually comprise the #1 way that a customer interacts with your brand since every end user clicks, taps, or swipes on links multiple times a day.
In the modern digital landscape, the link does three important things: It provides an interface to end users to click on, gives marketers a smart way to route customers to the right content (i.e. mobile-friendly or geolocation-specific) without needing a lot of developer help, and is one of the best ways to collect user-level information for insights and retargeting. Indeed, one of the advantages of the link is that you can collect information on users inside of Facebook, Google, and Twitter (since they click on links there, too).
When you look at the rest of the stack we’re assembling here, you’ll see that links are used in every channel and communication. Advanced digital marketers have begun looking at links strategically and Bitly is the clear choice in this category. Is it cheesy to recommend my own product? Maybe. But Bitly has been in this space the longest, evolving from shortener into an enterprise-grade Link Management Platform and has pioneered this space.
Content Management System
Wordpress
There isn’t much to say about the CMS other than (1) easier is better in today’s world and (2) everyone needs one. It’s definitely true that social networks and mobile apps have devalued the good, old fashioned website by cutting into consumer time. And the market overall has trended toward commodity.
With speed to market becoming more important than building a revamped site all the time, and building blocks for websites becoming more stable, a CMS that allows marketers to make many changes with less technical input is paramount. Unless your website is your product — which is a post for a different day — you really just need to make sure that marketers can change content without developer help.
Wordpress will do just fine in this case and allows you to do 2 for 1 by adding a blog at the same time. Wordpress is still the gold standard for finding the sweet spot between power and simplicity when it comes to your web presence.
Web and Mobile Analytics
Google Analytics
Web and Mobile Analytics should be different markets but I refuse to split them here because one vendor will end up nailing most of this market, and that’s Google. Web analytics are pretty tried and true at this point (visits, uniques, etc.) and, over the years, Google has driven so deep into funnel analyses that even the most advanced digital marketers don’t use the full extent of Google Analytics’ power.
Google is now bringing their notable analytic rigor into tracking App behavior as well. There are some good names in the pure-play App analytics category like Flurry, Kochava, etc but they have had to move into other categories to make ends meet and cede the overall digital analytics category to Google.
It’s not a stretch to say that Google Analytics is the most impressive free B2B tool ever created so just give everything else a miss.
