Aligning marketing, product, commerce, and service to drive better outcomes through CX

Customer experience (CX) is a team sport, enabled by a culture of collaboration to achieve your desired business outcomes.? In many organizations, CX leaders report to the Chief Marketing Officer, but need to collaborate with others in sales, operations, IT, finance, HR and other functions.? In research I led recently to build a benchmarking tool for CX capability maturity with MMA Global, the trade association focused on the future of marketing, we found that roughly half of CX teams report up through the CMO.? In other organizations, CX leadership is sponsored by C-level executives other than the CMO, such as a Chief Experience Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Growth Officer, or Chief Digital Officer.? Regardless of the lines and boxes in the organization chart, getting CX right requires executive sponsorship given the breadth of stakeholders involved, and the importance of culture in making change efforts successful.

In his best-selling book, the 10-Second Customer Journey: The CXO’s Playbook for Growing and Retaining Customers in a Digital World, Todd Unger , CXO of the American Medical Association (AMA), shares his perspective on how CXOs or other C-level sponsors of customer experience can build a growth flywheel at their organizations, championing a holistic approach to CX that cuts across marketing, product, commerce, and service.? The book shares valuable insights for why the CXO needs a talent stack drawn from multiple disciplines and needs to act as a change agent to build a customer-driven culture.? I highly recommend the book to C-level sponsors of CX or leaders of a CX team!? Be sure to also check out my podcast with Todd that will air in the next few weeks.? I’ll be posting short video reels with links to the full episode, which you can find at www.cxandcultureconnection.com along with other podcast episodes.

Todd’s journey of discovery has included a varied set of roles across disciplines prior to taking on the CXO role at AMA.? Todd shares some great stories in the book from his time at P&G and Leo Burnett in brand marketing.? He continued to develop the breadth of his talent stack working in digital product at AOL, Lifetime and some gaming startups.? This prepared him well to serve as the CMO at the Daily Racing Forum, helping transform a storied print publication into a digital platform for horse racing enthusiasts.? He then applied his experience to his current CXO role at AMA, helping lead the AMA to its highest membership levels even as they navigated a significant period of change during the pandemic.? Along the way he and his team at AMA won several awards in the CX space.

The core premise of the book is that the way customers engage on their path to purchase has fundamentally changed due to the widespread adoption of mobile, social, and ecommerce experiences.? The marketing funnel has compressed, and customers spend as little as 10 seconds before progressing from an ad to your content to your checkout page.? It’s never been more important to ensure alignment across all the experiences a customer has and to reduce reasons for customers to drop out of the funnel.? This requires integration across marketing, product, commerce, and service, as well as experiences that no single function owns.

The 10-Second Customer Journey is organized around a pragmatic playbook for C-level sponsors of CX and their teams.? The first step in the playbook is rethinking your target audience in a way that taps into actionable insights into customer emotion and drivers of loyalty.? The second step is a digital-ready brand proposition, product concept, and storytelling platform.? The third step is engaging stakeholders across the organization, shifting from a “break-fix” approach to a more holistic approach that addresses the root causes of friction and creates sustained alignment across the organization between your strategy, your operations, and your culture.

Todd shares some of his own journey of discovery to learn from other thought leaders.? He credits Lou (Lewis) Carbone , a friend and mentor of mine, with introducing the discipline of experience management in his article co-authored with Stephan Haeckel in 1994 in Marketing and Management titled “Engineering Customer Experiences.”??? You can find my podcast episode with Lou here (episode #5 for the CX & Culture Connection), and my book reviews for Lou’s book Clued In and Stephan Haeckel’s book The Adaptive Enterprise here.? Around the same time as their article launching the field of experience management, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote The One-to-One Future, painting a vision of more personalized engagement based on data and interactive technologies.? Todd emphasizes how experience management and more personalized and data-driven approaches to digital marketing and ecommerce shaped the way businesses build brands to drive growth.? He also gives a shout out to Bruce Temkin , former analyst at Forrester , co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, and former head of the Qualtrics XM Institute (see episode #37 of my podcast here with Greg Melia, CAE , CEO of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) , and episode #3 with Sid Banerjee , former Chief Experience Officer at Qualtrics here).? Todd calls out Bruce’s focus on how a company’s culture and organizational processes, not just its technology, impact the results they get from their investments in CX.

Early in the book, Todd defines customer experience as “the seamless integration of product, marketing, commerce, and service to acquire and retain customers.”? He introduces a visual framework based on the letter X to show the intersection between the customer and the organization, with one on each side of the X.? The CXO needs to pay attention to all four corners of the X, including marketing, product, commerce, and service.??? This is a powerful framework that reinforces the need for a holistic approach to CX, and why it’s such a team sport.

The rest of the book is organized around the playbook for how to drive growth through focus on experience.? Let’s dive into each of the sections of the playbook in turn, then close things out with some more insights that Todd shares about a “friction free future."

Build Deeper Insights into the Emotional Drivers of Product-Market Fit

First things first, you need to ensure you are focused on the right target audience, or you will waste a lot of energy.? If you have the wrong audience, not only will you waste media spend, but your return on product innovation investment will be diluted.? Todd calls out the importance of taking a more data-driven approach to personas, and not relying on “fake personas” that define an attractive segment but aren’t connected to actionable insights grounded in data that you can then extend into scalable audiences.? I couldn't agree more! Stay tuned for some educational content I'm collaborating on with CXPA that will be available this Fall on how to build more data-driven personas and customer journeys.

Todd learned from his experience reimagining media companies for the digital age that you need to super-serve the interests of your target audience, providing them with content and experiences that helps meet their goals.? Similarly, brands are now publishers, too, and need to super-serve the interests of their target customers.? Todd also learned that you build deep insights into your audience based on how they engage with your content.? What used to take months to build insights through more bespoke research can now be achieved much faster through digital experimentation.? We’ll dive deeper into these insights as we continue to round out the playbook.

Get the Nod

Once you have developed upfront insights into what drives an emotional connection with your target audience, you need to translate this into a brand proposition that goes beyond the functional benefits of your product or service, tapping into deeper meaning and community around the brand based on how it makes your customers feel.? In today’s digital world, you only have a few seconds to “get the nod,” which occurs when your brand proposition is crystal clear, and you have removed friction that gets in the way of customers taking action.? Todd recommends distilling your brand proposition down to a single line, supported by no more than three bullet points.?

In the book, Todd shares examples of how he leveraged insights into product-market fit to get the nod across a diverse set of industries.? For Glad-Lock plastic containers, the insight was the anxiety that target users felt that they would need to replace damaged containers, or those that others fail to return after borrowing them.? For AMA, getting the nod involved positioning AMA as a trusted partner to address physician burnout, administrative burdens, and health disparities.

Customers are buying a solution and taking the time to distill things down results in better experience design that evokes the right emotions.? Developing these insights is at the core of great advertising creative, product marketing, shopper marketing, or any experiences that are meant to create habitual customer behavior and loyalty.? The insights help you understand the emotional connection that will make the cue-behavior-craving-reward loop work.?? For more on how habit building mechanics apply for customer experience, and the role that culture plays in scaling the right behaviors in your organization that enable a culture of experimentation, see my book reviews for The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear here.

Creating Products that Don’t Suck

Todd shares insights he learned from Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, for how startup companies need to get two questions right with the fastest time to insight and least investment: who the target customer is and what is the right value proposition.?? See my book review of the Lean Startup here.? Without answering these two questions, you won’t achieve product-market fit and no investment in marketing communications will drive sustained growth.? Unfortunately, most startups fail to get their product-market fit right before they run out of money, and many larger companies waste resources rushing ahead without a clear answer to both questions.?

Part of the problem is that companies invest too much time and energy in making things and not enough in building upfront insights into how to market them.? Starting earlier on the latter and rebalancing your efforts to be closer to 50/50 throughout all stages of product development, helps identify where further effort is needed to build alignment between marketing, product, commerce, and service.? CX is a team sport that requires attention to all the players' valuable perspectives.? Beyond developing insights on where to focus, Todd also reminds us to make tough decisions earlier and de-fund things that won’t work, freeing up resources to invest in the most promising opportunities.

Telling Your Story

Digitization of the customer experience is not only compressing the marketing funnel, but also amplifying the importance of good storytelling to engage customers with more stimuli competing for their attention.? Search was the most disruptive change to storytelling, as it reveals customers’ intent and provides a way to match them with the right content, while also making your marketing ROI more measurable.? Similarly, ad exchanges provided a way to track users across sites and target more precise behavioral profiles.? Social media advertising taps into the same data-driven approach and unlocks the potential of your organic social efforts that are now tied to having a paid presence.? Content marketing builds on these other paid media approaches, using content and narrative to build towards a purchase.

Todd shares a 6-S approach to weave these puzzle pieces together.? The 6 Ss are: Search, Social, Site, Streaming, Subscriptions, and Spend.?? You need to win at search to tap into the insights for how customers engage in your category.? Social complements search, as the majority of your traffic comes from search and social. You need a well design site to convert this traffic.? Streaming is about having good, low-cost video content to evoke a stronger emotional connection.? Subscriptions is about building relationships vs. just closing transactions.? Spend reflects the need to have some minimum level of paid spending to complement organic search and social.

Fix Your Check-Out Page

Building great insights into your product-market fit, what emotions to evoke, and how to tell your story is not enough if you have a low conversion rate on your check-out page.? Yet the average rate of shopping cart abandonment remains as high as 70% across product categories!? This is a huge missed opportunity.? To fix this problem, Todd calls out the need for greater experimentation and data-driven testing.? Many successful lean startups are focused on ecommerce, where daily experimentation is the norm.? Across industries such as gaming and travel and hospitality, leading companies can engage in more than one hundred thousand experiments each year. There is no magic number for how many experiments you should run. What is key is building a culture of experimentation and taking a lean startup approach where you continually learn and create a self-funding flywheel for growth.

Your customers leave extensive digital footprints across their customer journey, if you are focused on collecting and acting on the data.? Todd talks about the value of building insights not just to launch a new product, website, or loyalty program, but to drive continuous improvement efforts.? You can look for red flags for where you need to intervene and make changes.? You can also drive a steady set of 1% improvements, which can lead to double digit improvements each year in your business objectives.?

Developing a Test-and-Learn Culture

A lot of these opportunities require cross-functional collaboration.? Bruce Temkin recognized that customer experience problems often sit in the gaps in the customer journey that nobody owns, in processes that people aren’t empowered to change.? Todd emphasizes building a culture of collaboration and experimentation as the path to overcome this challenge.? You’ll never fully address it by playing with the lines and boxes in the organization chart.? Yes, you can make some headway by moving elements of product, marketing, commerce, and service into the same team.? But there will always be blind spots that require cross-functional collaboration to address.? With the right testing mentality and plan, together with a modern approach to customer listening that taps into an expanding set of experience and operational data across the customer journey, you can drive a steady stream of improvements that makes your CX investments self-funding.

Testing and learning become something more than what you do once or twice.? By focusing on cultural behaviors, it becomes who you are as a team.? Todd emphasizes how liberating it can be to not have to be right all the time, or to have to win the argument with those who are resistant to change.? He also calls out the value of sharing insights regularly via a well-defined set of dashboards.? This provides quick access to team members who need it and empowers them to think of other things to do that can be tested and for which results can be tracked regularly.? He advocates investing the time needed to get broad-based buy-in within the organization on what experiments to run and the outcomes to track in your dashboards to monitor progress.

The Journey Ahead: The Friction Free Future

Todd closes the book with a vision of a friction-free future, where customers enjoy more personalized experiences with flawless handoffs and consistent omnichannel experiences.?? A future where companies use data to build a stream of insights into how to optimize their brand proposition and build alignment across product, marketing, commerce, and service to deliver on it with the least friction.? A future where companies use predictive analytics to prevent service failures before they happen and to put in place retention mechanisms that boost loyalty and customer lifetime value.? He emphasizes that the future is here already, though requiring effort to integrate data and technology and drive organizational change.

To help companies overcome inertia and achieve this vision for the future faster, Todd shares the Five As: Automate, Augment, Analyze, Act and Align.? He encourages us to view the customer experience as a series of events for how your customers interact with your products and your organization across moments that matter.? He refers to event-based analytics as “what would happen if A/B testing and predictive gaming software got together and had a data baby.”? He emphasizes that a culture of experimentation is key to unlocking this opportunity, and that AI will free up time to focus on the most valuable things to improve the customer experience.? The role of the CXO is to lead the organization in collecting, employing and acting on data.? The CXO needs to build a movement in the organization that is broader than their own team, building a culture of collaboration and experimentation that drives growth through focus on experience.

I hope you enjoyed this book review and that you’ll get even more out of reading the full book.? Be sure also to keep an eye out for my podcast episode with Todd in the coming weeks!