The Marriage of Marketing and Customer Experience Management

As a marketing major, former director of marketing, university marketing instructor, and now a longtime industry analyst, I often reflect on similarities between the two disciplines of customer experience management and marketing management.

For example:

• Both share the common objectives of customer retention, revenue growth, brand loyalty, and fostering a reputation for superior customer care.
• Both disciplines seek to better understand customer behaviors and motivations.
• Both rely on end-user behavior and perceptions when assessing performance.
• Moreover, there is a distinct similarity in the way each discipline models consumer behavior.

Of course, there are significant differences between the two functions which must be understood to achieve collaboration:

• The customer experience function is primarily focused on supporting existing customers, while the marketing model is weighted more toward attracting new customers.
• The marketing function is much broader. The VP of Marketing may be responsible for brand management, advertising, market research, public relations, and (sometimes) even sales management. The primary responsibility of the customer engagement function is largely limited to managing the corporate contact centers.

Surveys are an opportunity for collaboration

Given the many similarities, one must ask why the marketing and customer service organizations are not more closely integrated within the enterprise? Perhaps a good starting point is to mutually address a specific function where both disciplines have a need and specialized skills.

Surveys are an ideal candidate. Experience management surveys capture the voice of the customer and have become standard practice with modern contact centers. The marketing department has long relied on third-party surveys. According to Statistica, the global revenue of the market research industry exceeded $76.4 billion in 2021. North America generated the largest share of market research revenue, representing 54 percent of the total, followed by Europe with 23 percent.

Contact center and market research managers have a lot to gain from each other:

• Market research practitioners know how to properly formulate survey questions.
• Market research practitioners know how to train individuals for proper interviewing techniques.
• Customer experience managers have the tools to evaluate agent performance and analyze large volumes of data from multiple sources.
• Because market research interviews are rarely recorded, it may be difficult if not impossible to monitor interviewer performance or track down comments that indicate potential safety issues or possible compliance violations.
• VoC surveys are available almost immediately, whereas it can take weeks or months to collect, analyze, and present information from large surveys.
• VoC surveys can collect and digest information from multiple channels and sources.
• The marketing organization can bring in indirect and inferred feedback to supplement voice the customer surveys, so CX practitioners can get a more robust view of the customer. With Verint’s advanced analytics practitioners can gain a deeper view of what factors drive core metrics such as CSAT and NPS.
• Post-call surveys conducted by agents and piggybacked after inbound calls require a modest incremental cost, but this pales in comparison to the millions of dollars large companies pay to private market research companies every year.
• Customer experience professionals have access to more sophisticated resources. We can bring to the table automation, speech analytics, artificial intelligence, and other advanced tools. While market research companies can field armies of interviewers and produce mountains of data, they do not have the tools to economically collect this information and then probe for the root causes that drive consumer behavior.

Verint solutions can help

Verint’s Experience Management VoC offering is a fully connected platform that enables organizations to listen, analyze, and act on speech, text, and operational customer insight across channels to help brands deliver standout customer experience programs.

Enabled by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics, Verint provides organizations with rich VoC insights to help improve how they measure and understand customer experiences—while also empowering them to prioritize the improvements that will have the greatest business impact.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is the world leader in serving science. They invested in Verint’s Interaction Experience solution which delivers short, context-sensitive, dynamic voice surveys via the IVR to customers immediately after their interactions with agents. “We had more than 300 subscription-based accounts using several different survey tools and platforms, with virtually no oversight,” recalls an operations specialist at Thermo Fisher. “During the evaluation process, it quickly became obvious that the Verint solution offered the most robust features and versatility.”