From top-heavy to bottom-heavy
Your investments in WCM, marketing automation and social engagement technologies were not made in vain. But now it’s time to take a more enterprise-wide approach that will redirect investments lower in your stack. Going forward it will matter less what you do within channels and more what you do across channels.
To do that, you’re going to need to rethink your stack and move from martech to enterprise-wide CX.
Real Story Group’s Omnichannel Stack Reference Model. Note especially the critical services in the lower “Enterprise Foundation” layer.
In particular, you’ll want to explore four key solutions for supporting the enterprise-wide customer experience. Critically, each of these platforms lives underneath your existing customer engagement solutions and ideally will serve them all independently.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), a single, unified datamart of extended attributes and segments that marketing and engagement platforms need to engage intelligently with individual prospects and customers
Journey Orchestration Engines (JOEs), to serve as a kind of traffic management system, gathering information on real customer journeys across enterprise touchpoints, and directing how and where they should be treated going forward – regardless of channel
Omnichannel Content Platforms, to support a single source of the truth for re-usable content that you can confidently and consistently syndicate across all your customer and prospect touchpoints
Omnichannel Operations Hubs, to support internal collaboration across business units, creating the right assets, coordinating the right campaigns, and measuring outcomes across channels
Key technology buyer considerations
Based on my company’s experience working with large enterprises using these platforms, we can generalize about three key considerations for technology customers.
1. These are highly fragmented marketplaces
If your enterprise is exploring omnichannel tools to deploy enterprise-wide, the good news is that you’ll encounter almost an embarrassment of supplier choices. The bad news is that your team may struggle to differentiate among them — though once you get beneath the covers, you’ll see stark contrasts in terms of architectures, performance levels, use-case emphasis, pricing models and geographic footprint.
The Customer Data Platform Market is highly fragmented…and still growing.
How’s a customer to choose? We always recommend taking a business-focused, use case-based approach. Across nine archetypal CDP use cases, the typical vendor only excels at three or four, so prioritization becomes extremely important here.
Like most marketplaces, you have a choice between large CX and marketing cloud suppliers, and a number of (typically newer, more focused, but smaller) pure-play vendors. Which brings me to…
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