In addition to promoting and selling a product or service, it’s crucial for the marketing function to fulfill a brand’s promise beyond the acquisition stage. Through collaboration, CX professionals have an opportunity to develop a congruent experience at every touch point of the journey.
“There is tremendous benefit to the customers when the Marketing and CX team partnership is well-aligned and synergistic.” - ‘Effective Collaboration Between CX and Marketing, A Guide to Strengthening CX Together’
Not only is there a tremendous benefit to this, but a misaligned relationship between Marketing and CX teams can prove costly for the brand’s reputation, turn-off customers, and negatively impact revenue.
Here are a few examples of such synergies you can find in this helpful guide. And when applied effectively, greatly enhances the overall experience resulting in increased customer loyalty.
- Data and Insights; Both Marketing and CX have a responsibility to collect data points about a customer. Integrating this knowledge into both the acquisition and onboarding stages can enhance the overall experience and strengthen the connection between consumers and the brand. Establishing metrics that take into account acquisition as well as customer satisfaction and churn, helps to understand what is driving growth. Acquiring new customers is great, but not at the expense of having them leave out the back door.
- Personas; While the mindset of a buyer and a customer may be different at the time of interaction, there is still the underlying desire of a problem to be solved. Looking at persona’s more holistically and developing correlations between Marketing and CX helps to strengthen a consistent message across the customer’s journey with a brand. Sharing customer persona insights with Marketing helps to improve products and services and provides the CX professional with an opportunity to create more personalized experiences.
- Journey Mapping; Companies often view journey mapping as a CX function. Of course, the overall strategy can be bestowed upon the CX team, but a customer’s journey begins well before an exchange of money for service. Collaborative efforts between Marketing and CX allow for the buyer messaging to accurately reflect the delivery of a product ensuring the experience meets the customer’s expectation.
Additional benefits of collaborating with Marketing allow the CX professional to extend beyond just shared responsibility. The teams become a common unit with a shared vision and streamlined processes. When a company functions with siloed departments, a lack of shared goals and inefficient productivity ultimately results in a poor customer experience. But through intended collaboration we are able to;
- Understand the customer’s needs more holistically
- Develop a unified customer communication strategy
- Create congruent and timely messaging throughout the customer journey
- Enhance the customer experience through personalization based on user behavior
- Meet or exceed customer expectations
- Decrease any double work and overlap between teams
Through a more collaborative partnership, the CX professional has an opportunity to greatly improve internal processes, build brand loyalty with streamlined customer experiences, and increase a company's bottom line through a keen focus on mutual KPIs that drive growth.
Spencer Tyler is the Director of Customer Retention at Investor's Business Daily, and a winner of CXPA's 2022 Emerging Leader Awards. The book Effective Collaboration Between CX and Marketing: Strengthening CX Together, is available for free online reading to CXPA members at www.cxbookstore.com Not a member? Learn more and join today.