If you look at what many vendors are saying these days, it’s all about customer experience. Adobe, Salesforce and Sprinklr, for instance, have redefined their identities in that direction.
But reorientation is not enough, according to IDC. Consider a vision of “Customer Experience Orchestration Services” that extend beyond the marketing department, articulated in an IDC study earlier this year from analysts Gerald Murray and Maureen Fleming:
Customer experience (CX) is simply unmanageable at most large companies. Traditional approaches to organizational design and technology deployment based on big corporate functions such as marketing, sales, fulfillment, services, contact center, or fill in the blank result in an inherently fragmented customer experience. Marketing doesn’t know how finance interacts with customers, and services doesn’t know what sales has said. Customers have to retell their stories as they move through these different points of contact.
Murray and Fleming outline two initial stages in the development of marketing/sales tools. In the first, applications were separate silos, many defined by departmental budgets. In the second, the martech “stack” moves some workloads — such as reporting or identity management — to core services.
In the third stage of CX orchestration services, customer-facing responses extend across every department in a flexible architecture that, for instance, could be based on open APIs and microservices:
IDC points to the increasingly popular “buy button” as an example of a customer-facing service that contains all of its necessary functionalities, is decoupled from a commerce system and can live across departments.
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