Two key tenets of Digital Transformation are that you need to focus on the overall customer experience, and the customer’s experience is the sum of all their interactions with your brand. This means a customer’s experience with you is not just based on your web site or your mobile app.
A customer’s experience includes the call to your call center, the advertisement you placed in their game, the product description displayed in Amazon, and so on. In order to manage the overall experience you need to focus on all the customer experience platforms or systems at your organization.
How do you get a handle on all the different systems that impact the overall experience? At Perficient we created our Customer Experience Platform Framework to help.
The CX Platform Framework shows major groups of capabilities (marketing, sales, content, etc.) and specific capabilities within each area. We purposefully tried to name these capabilities in business terms as much as possible. We also do not refer to any specific vendor or system in the diagram. While the framework doesn’t include 100% of the capabilities we see in the market, it covers the major ones.
CX Platform Framework, Copyright Perficient 2018
How to use the CX Platform Framework
First, as you look to digitally transform your organization, you need to understand all the customer touch points. The channels and devices at the top of the page remind you that there are many ways customer experience your brand. Your customers may not use all these channels, so we can tailor the framework to your specific needs.
Second, as you look through the various high level categories, you can determine whether your company uses them, has gaps or has a need to improve them. For example, you may have a good handle on eCommerce, but are having issues in Sales.
Diving into sales, you may identify a gap or need for better proposals, or your renewal process is awful. Maybe you know that data is an issue, so do you have a Customer Data Platform or Data Warehouse? By looking across all the high level categories you might be able to quickly identify gaps.
Third, we often see companies struggle with delivering consistent messages or content across channels. When you look at the framework, you see several different capabilities within the Content Management box.
Maybe you decided to implement one Web CMS and thought that would solve the problem. However, as you go outside the content management box, you’ll find that many of the other areas have platforms that require their own content and don’t use that system you just implemented.
For example, the campaign management tool may have its own set of content it uses for emails. The social marketing team creates its own content in the tools they use. The contracts system has yet another set of content distinct from the Web CMS. So the CX Platform Framework can help you identify other areas of the company that might have overlapping capabilities.
Fourth, as you look to implement new customer experience capabilities, it is important to understand what a CX platform will deliver and what it won’t. Vendors are pushing more and more “Cloud” based platforms that offer many capabilities, but no vendor offers everything in our CX Platform Framework.
If you are looking at a CRM platform, you have to understand how that platform impacts the other aspects of the overall customer experience. For example, will it have its own customer database that conflicts with your marketing segmentation database? Does that platform work well with your existing call center platform?
When you look at which CX platforms have been implemented at your company, its not uncommon to find 50, 80 or more different systems. As you gain an understanding of this bigger picture of all the customer experience capabilities that you may need, you can start to make better decisions about which platforms are right for you.
