A Comprehensive Customer Technology Strategy can Align your Teams and Elevate your Brand Above the Competition

Customer experiences suffer when siloed technology mandates, targets and budgets prioritize company needs over customer needs. This technology strategy might seem beneficial for the company in the short term, but it negatively impacts customer experience and ultimately the company's results in the long term.

As products and services become more commoditized, customer experience becomes the key differentiator in the market. While silos may work for non-customer-facing areas like warehousing, logistics and finance, they harm customer experiences when applied elsewhere, leading to revenue loss. Martech isn't an island and it's time for an integrated approach for customer-facing departments.

Your Technology Strategy Should Prioritize Customer Needs Over Company Goals

What makes customer technologies so different that they require a different approach? The customer, not the company, is beating the technology drum and that changes everything.

Customer technology such as Martech, Salestech and Supporttech must adapt to customer demands. In contrast, company technology such as Finance, ERP, Logistics, Procurement, Warehousing focuses on internal efficiency. The company controls users and system volumes. This traditional, siloed approach has prevented customer-centricity from taking off for many years.

How Composability Enhances an Effective Customer Technology Strategy

Company technology often dictates having one tool that replaces all others to establish a “single source of truth.” This approach is critical for maintaining stable and scalable systems in a predictable environment.

However, for customer-facing departments, this approach has been largely unsuccessful. Many IT departments dismiss common customer-facing practices as “shadow IT” or “point solutions.” As counterintuitive as it may sound, this composable approach is a best practice that desperately needs to be included in corporate policy.

Composability refers to the flexibility of combining different tools to create something new, much like Lego blocks. It makes room for the speed and agility required to follow volatile customer preferences.

Avoid These Common Mistakes When Developing Your Strategy

Especially in environments where CIOs and CTOs report to CFOs, I see customer-unfriendly decisions resulting in marginal efficiency gains on the cost side and serious losses on the revenue side.

Most companies do today consolidate different tools in an attempt to reduce overlap and redundancies. From a financial or IT governance standpoint, that makes perfect sense. But from a customer-facing and revenue standpoint, it can be problematic. Different types of tools have different sweet spots.

Three Essential Steps for Building a Winning Strategy

1. Assign One Customer Technology Owner

If possible, bring the mandate and budget for customer-facing technology into one place. Customers don't care about company departments. All they care about is that their needs are met in the most frictionless way. Ensure that MarketingOps, SalesOps and RevOps grow together and are involved in the strategy formulation phase, not just in the “fixing” phase.

2. Harness a Plug-and-Play Architecture

Unlike company technology’s stable systems, customer technology requires a layered ecosystem that is flexible and responsive. It must accommodate frequent updates, Minimal Viable Product-like adoption and rapid prototyping to keep pace with customer preferences.

3. Have One Shared Governance Policy

Governance should differ between company and customer technology. While company technology focuses on managing internal data and employee security, customer technology must prioritize customer data privacy and adapt to constantly changing trends.

Embracing a Forward-Thinking Customer Technology Strategy

Innovations in company technology are typically stable and limited, whereas customer technology is in constant flux. This evolution allows brands to stay competitive by quickly adapting to new trends and customer needs. Embrace it.