The Gist
- Unified approach. “Customer technology” is a unifying term for martech, adtech, salestech, and more, focusing on value outside marketing.
- Internal alignment. Adopting customer experience technology can improve internal alignment and external focus, enhancing audience engagement.
- Evolving needs. Shifts in customer experience technology reflect changes in client demands and the need for a holistic customer experience approach.
Last year I wrote an article questioning whether we should be using the term “customer technology” instead of “marketing technology.” Frans Riemersma of Martech Tribe and the co-creator of the current marketing technology landscape was championing this idea and had just published his book, “A Small Book on Customer Technology.”
It made a lot of sense to me, first as a unifying term for martech, adtech, salestech etc., and second, as a more meaningful way to communicate the value of marketing technology outside the marketing organization.
Customer Technology Shift Sparks Valuable Dialogue
Recently, I reposted the article on LinkedIn, which generated a number of thoughtful comments about the value this would bring to internal alignment and external focus. A sampling of some of the comments:
From Greg Boch: “The shift to the term “Customer Technology” can really reflect a shift in focus from internal operations to external customer needs. This allows for better alignment with audiences and also creates a common understanding among stakeholders. It seems that it will not only improve our ability to respond to changes in customer behavior, but also make our strategies more aligned and focused.”
From Tim Armstrong: “I’m a big advocate of this very dialogue. MarTech is no longer the right way to articulate the opportunity here. The customer tech stack becomes the nucleus of a business wide tool kit for how we collect, manage, and utilize customer data to drive value!”
From Annika Dunaway: “I believe this will pave the path for a deeper understanding of customer behavior and, hopefully, how companies see their customers as humans. Every human has different needs, wishes, ideas, routines, and experiences. We have to take that into consideration and not treat everyone the same. A shift in terminology is a big step towards that.”
From Rutger Katz: “The shift also helps with breaking silos between marketing, sales, customer support, and product.”
Championing the Customer Technology Shift
One of the most interesting comments was from Michael Klazema, chief marketing technologist at Ernst and Young (EY), who has fully embraced customer technology in response to client requirements.
“I have seen the same shift happening. Both in what our clients are asking for (Improve my Customer Experience; less Rationalize my Martech Stack) as well as in how we have internally organized our capabilities (since 2021 we organize and deliver around Customer Experience Technology). The owner of the stack is and might still continue to be the CMO, the mandate is a great customer experience.”
Q&A on Reorienting to the Term ‘Customer Technology’
I wanted to dig into this and learn how an organization had managed this reorientation and reached out to Michael to see if he’d be willing to share more about his experience at EY. The following are the highlights of our conversation.
Michael, there’s actually a lot to unpack in the comment you wrote but let’s start with what drove the shift to customer experience technology? Was there a tipping point where the organization decided it needed to change?
We have to go back a good number of years to find that answer. Back in 2016 our marketing consulting agency VODW adopted an agile marketing way for working, creating a competence focused organization and purposely assigning multidisciplinary teams to client assignments. At that point I had already been working as chief marketing technologist and got to lead one of our agency’s five competency areas: marketing technology working with our four other practices: strategy, organizational transformation, data & analytics, user experience & design. And while we were clearly branded as a marketing consulting agency, we also helped clients in the domain of customer service and sales acceleration.
Then in 2018 EY acquired us as part of an ongoing strategy to expand their customer focused consulting practice across Europe. At the time VODW had been operating for over 30 years and had become known for their focus on customer experience built on our own customer journey modeling methods.
In terms of a tipping point, I would say it happened soon after we got introduced to the other recently acquired agencies across Europe like Seren and Doberman. All of them had more of a customer experience focus and just like us assisted clients with marketing, sales and service consulting services. And as technology became more and more a foundational pillar for those areas, we chose to rename our group customer experience technology.
What was involved in making the change internally? Was an internal reorganization required? How quickly did everyone get on board? Did you need to acquire new skill sets?
The transition happened quickly and smoothly. A lot of the stars were already aligned if I can say it that way. The team expanded to encompass not only business consultants but also technology consultants that were operating in the same domain. EY had a large number of technology alliances across the marketing, sales and service domains such as Adobe, Snowflake, Microsoft, Pega and ServiceNOW. Our role was and still is to assist our clients and own teams in translating business strategy to technology across the entire customer experience and select and combine features to support value driving use cases.
In terms of skills, we realized that to be effective across the entire customer experience domain, martech category experience had to be complemented by broader knowledge across the entire customer experience stack. And for that we did not have to look far. Even in the earlier years, the martech landscape created by Scott Brinker already offered a wide scope beyond just marketing, with space for advertising, commerce and customer experience/service. Our people were trained to navigate across that entire landscape that despite its name, for us already acted as a customer experience technology map.
What was involved in making the change externally? I imagine you had to change both your messaging and marketing plan?
Because this shift happened right at the time we were acquired by EY, we used that opportunity to immediately choose this new positioning as the messaging for our role in the larger EY organization. And with the internal demand focused on customer experience solutions and consulting, our new positioning aligned perfectly with that.
Three years on, how’s it going? Has it proven to be the right move? Have you had to refine your offering along the way?
I couldn’t be happier with our positioning. Our own research shows that the importance organizations and consumers place on customer experience is growing with each generation. There are other indicators such as the recent flashpoint about analyst driven customer data platform rankings. The discussion about the accuracy is not the interesting part; the interesting part is that this particular ranking rattled so many cages; in my opinion because CDP’s play such a core role in orchestrating a personalized experience across marketing, sales and service domains.
In terms of refining our offering, I think functionally, because internally and for a lot of our customers it was and is still easy to think in terms of organizational structures like marketing, sales and service, we have decided that for our internal organization we also explicitly add commerce and content as areas of focus and expertise, aside from a transversal set of solutions focused on customer experience management and operations.
What are the challenges in reorienting the marketing tech stack to a customer experience stack? Different stakeholders? Different mentality? Different products?
I kind of have to revert a bit to an earlier answer, our stack focus — thanks to Scott’s categories — was not exclusively marketing, despite what the name might have said. So, in that sense it was first and foremost an internal communication topic to ensure that our colleagues too understood that they might hear about marketing technology, but would need to think in terms of how any technology would help orchestrate the customer experience.
How do you think about stack ROI in a customer experience context?
It actually becomes easier. Very rarely do we talk about MQLs. For us the customer is always central to our experience concepts and supporting solutioning. In measuring the impact of the customer experience and the supporting “martech” investments we combine what we call voice of customer with voice of analytics signals to measure the impact of interventions in the customer experience; ranging from large scale improvements to specific personalization tactics. With the help of AI models link experience improvements to metrics such as conversion and lifetime value.
At the same time our assessments of what we sometimes call front office technology stacks and optimization advice is always use case driven. And underpinning those use cases are clearly defined key features that are linked to particular vendor solutions. In that way we are able to link investments in specific martech tools to both overall customer experience improvements and client or segments specific KPI changes.
Have you seen any shifts in what customers want or need?
Yes, customers need less help deciding which martech solution to buy or invest in, and they ask for more help harvesting more value from existing stacks. This was one of the main topics we discussed at our inaugural Martech Breakfast Club in The Netherlands this year. What clients need help with is deciding what the right mix of tactics is to get more value out of stacks, ensure higher utilization rates and a faster scaling of use cases.
How has your thinking evolved with regard to creating an optimum customer experience over the last three years? What’s new since 2021?
Two thoughts come to mind. One: Those organizations that invest in people that combine creative with analytical skills — rather than (mar)technical only skills — will see greater success. I believe now that those skills are the most essential in harvesting value from martech.
Secondly, through the gradual maturing of the SEO field as a cornerstone element in any demand generation strategy combined with the acceleration of digital transformation in the last years, I think content is slowly yet rightfully given the same importance as data in creating personalized customer experiences.
You mentioned in your comment that stack ownership may continue to reside with the CMO. Clearly, customer experience extends across multiple functionality boundaries. What are your thoughts about what a CMO will need to do to retain ownership? Or, alternatively is there another potential owner?
Well, despite some research to the contrary, I still think that CMOs and chief digital officers, too, are the best keepers of the martech stack as they are typically the primary eyes and ears of an organization when it comes to listening to and having to respond to, changes in client preferences and behavior. To maintain ownership, CMOs need to take charge of and own not only the key martech stack categories, but also ensure that data and content are integrated and not managed as silos in their organization.
How do you see AI impacting the services you offer and the needs that your clients have?
There are obviously so many ways AI is already impacting our lives and hence how organizations use it. One major change that I expect is that AI will make it easier to unlock more value out of existing martech systems given that the conversational AI allows the business user to not be limited by their lack of knowledge of how the system works. Or easier said, the success of how well you use the tool is less dependent on knowing the entire menu structure and steps in what still can sometimes be a disjointed process in trying to orchestrate and journey from end to end.
That means that we are more focused on helping our clients create the right operating models, coach their teams in the right mindset, help lay the technical foundation and integrations for unlocking more customer data and building content value chains that make it easier and faster to create infinite personalized experiences.
We also see that clients need help defining experiences that truly offer value to a customer in each moment; as delivering value is integral to customers’ willingness to trust organizations and share data about themselves. And such consent-based relationships between organizations and consumers need to be in place to leverage the vast possibilities of gen-AI driven marketing. Because when you can have a unique conversation with every customer, you need to have something worth saying.
At the end of the day, whether we begin to use the term “customer technology” across our industry, it’s clear that there’s tremendous value in reframing what we do with our marketing, sales and service technology in the context of the customer experience. It creates cohesion across silos, makes it easier to establish performance metrics, and, most of all, puts the customer front and center in everything that marketing does.
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