The joint necessity and difficulty in relating customer experience initiatives to the company bottom line is causing many chief marketing officers to worry about their job security according to a new report by the CMO Council.
“The State of Engagement: Bridging the Customer Journey Across Every Last Mile,” released on April 30, done in partnership with RedPoint Global, found that while 76 percent of marketers view revenue growth as the primary measure of success for their customer experience strategy, 80 percent are either unable or only sometimes able to connect their strategy to its impact on their business.
This isn’t just an academic issue, either. According to the CMO Council’s findings, 52 percent of marketing executives say that they may lose their jobs if their customer experience strategies fail, and 48 percent say the same if their technology investments don’t deliver.
“CMOs have picked up the mantle of owning the development and execution of the customer experience strategy and are fully aware that their jobs depend on the success of these initiatives,” stated Liz Miller, Senior Vice president of marketing for the CMO Council, in a press release. “But many are rightfully questioning the patchwork assembly of point solutions that have been amassed in the marketing technology stack.”
Of the marketers the CMO Council surveyed, 65 percent agreed that their organizations need a single data record per customer in order to best engage their audience, but 26 percent doubt that such a “golden record” is even possible.
“While marketers have sought a “golden record” for years, there has been little movement toward data and intelligence unification,” the report states. “In reality, the path to resolution has typically been paved with technology implementations that have added complexity, cost and fortified silo walls separating pools of data.”
This data siloing has very real consequences for marketers: only 5 percent of the marketers surveyed believe that their organizations are doing an “exceptional” job at providing a quality customer experience, while 47 percent rated their companies at “not very good.”
“The failing grade that marketers are giving to the current state of engagement is, in some part, based on their struggles to connect individually developed and deployed campaigns into a connected and cohesive customer journey,” the report reads. “This is further exacerbated by an organization’s challenges specific to their ability (or inability, as the case may be) to collect the most valuable data about the customer that can be leveraged to craft journeys and improve the state of engagement.”
The difficulties marketers are encountering are not due to a lack of effort, either. According to the CMO Council, 47 percent of marketers have replaced their martech platforms in the past because of failure “to connect data and channels in the way that was promised.”
The CMO Council’s findings align with multiple surveys conducted earlier this year by OnBrand, Bynder and PointSource, which found that the vast majority of marketers it surveyed identified their greatest challenge going into 2018 as their difficulty in finding the proper martech platform for their needs.
