The CX Tech Integration Challenge: “We Bought All This Software, Now What Do We Do with It?”

Neil Michel, Chief Strategy Officer at Wire Stone, addresses the fact that marketers have tremendous technology at their disposal yet struggle to orchestrate it, and how agencies can help

There’s a surprising-but-definitive trend underway in the enterprise: Gartner is in the midst of a prediction that marketing departments will eclipse IT as the leading spender on technology products in 2017. As I see it, two factors are driving this sea change. First, traditional IT infrastructure is becoming virtualized through “X-as-a-service” solutions, reducing IT department burdens and associated costs. The larger factor in play, however, is that marketing tools have become increasingly sophisticated and self-service.

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Marketers are now in full command of technologies that deliver web analytics, CRM, distributed content, and more. Marketers are also increasingly cracking the code for how best to deliver customer experiences across multiple touch points, customized by audience segment and lifecycle stage. Companies can’t invest fast enough in technology that promises this holy grail. But, frustratingly, most marketers still do not possess the capability to orchestrate these on-target, pitch-perfect experiences. Many enterprises – even if they have the technology – still face the challenge of making all that shiny martech work together.

Perhaps the most acute problem is that so many of those powerful marketing tools were originally built as point solutions. Enterprises must tangle with tools designed and implemented to function as piecemeal solutions: a web CMS for the main website, an automation platform for email and landing pages, listening and community management tools for social, advertising technology for outbound investments, CRM for the sales department, etc. Even if the tools themselves work flawlessly, marketers struggle to construct a single view of their customers because the data coming out of these multiple systems remains in multiple silos.

Where a unified, holistic solution is necessary to reap the full benefits of their CX strategies, many companies operate more of a patchwork of tools producing a fundamental disconnect between a customer’s experiences with different faces of a brand. And these disconnects are growing at a time when consumer expectations are rising; they want to be recognized anywhere, anytime. Amazon and others have set an increasingly high bar for 1:1 marketing experiences that don’t break down as customers move between brand channels, challenging all other brands to attempt to play at their level.

Alas, IT departments – the likely candidate for marketing technology integrator – have difficulty approaching this challenge because many IT departments are still designed around traditional, lower-value IT tasks. The marketing department's #1 problem can’t be solved by provisioning servers, installing software, or anything else out of the standard IT playbook. While some vendors like Adobe and HubSpot do offer more holistic marketing tech solutions, enterprises are understandably opting to make the most of their existing martech investments – many of which are better as point solutions than what the integrated vendors can offer. Even for companies willing to wipe their martech slate clean and start fresh, putting every egg into one vendor’s basket provokes anxiety. In leading IT circles, "heterogeneity" is the new black; spreading IT investments across multiple services is a model that actually reduces risk, increases agility, and shortens time to market. Said another way: IT may not see a problem in the marketing department's heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

In my opinion, agencies have a leading role to play in fusing the divisions between martech tools and services. What companies need most right now are experts who can stitch together vision, execution, and data across tools to deliver a more seamless customer experience. Strategists must map experiences, creatives must connect them, and technologists must deliver and report on them. In many cases, what's missing is a central customer data warehouse where all the teams can test and learn together over time. Integrated digital marketing agencies are finding a valuable role in helping companies design and implement these data pools, a critical requirement for developing the kind of testing programs that drive cross-channel experiences.