The rise of Customer Experience Management (CXM) is pushing companies to adopt multi-solution mar-tech tool stacks.  These mar-tech tool stacks can be likened to a “Swiss Army Knife” for marketing efforts and are generally cloud based tools that businesses utilize to pull together marketing and data services in a more efficient manner when planning out campaign, analysis, audiences and experiences.

An agnostic view of these tools tacks usually has businesses tying together analytics, data management platforms (DMP), email or communication platforms, experience serving or testing tools and content management systems.  As more of these Software as a Service (SaaS) based companies look to build out a full stack of services, like Adobe or Oracle as examples, they can even include advertising bidding platforms for search and display, eCommerce engines and customer relationship management tools.

These tools, each on their own, can be a lot for a team to handle, but bringing them together can be overwhelming for any company.  It also doesn’t help when the vendors sell you several tools all at one time and say, “here you go!”.  The view of selling you tools rather than bringing you solutions is common in the multi-solution mar-tech world.

So, what’s a company to do?  How do you not become overwhelmed and get beyond treading water with your new tools, to mastering them to create a top-notch customer experience management program? 

The best place to start is creating a foundation of documentation, alignment and process.  Starting with this effort first, brings together key concepts, ideas and efforts and ensures that everyone within your company can communicate with a unified message.  This unified message is especially important to analyze data with consistency and have full confidence that your data is accurate to create personalized experiences with your multi-solutions tool stack. 

Here are six initiatives to start with in your efforts to master your multi-solutions mar-tech technologies.

Taxonomy

One of the easiest, yet likely the most overlooked steps to take is to create a taxonomy for naming campaigns, experiments, segments, audiences, assets, etc.  Where companies break down in their ability to create a unified vision that can be conveyed to their customers, is that they themselves are not all speaking to the same visions, KPIs, or goals. 

Creating clear and concise taxonomies that can be translated to ensure that all teams are on the same page will break the silos that form when teams use their own jargon, goals, and measurement KPIs.  While an effort like this seems simple and a ‘no brainer’ to implement, creating a taxonomy for your company that all teams are bought into, can become a herculean task if you don’t have a clear process designed to create, roll out, train and implement all teams.   

Data Governance

The increase of data privacy legislation worldwide has created a new area of concern that companies need to deal with when it comes to the data they collect, share and utilized to create personalized customer experiences.  This even goes beyond the realm of customer personal identifiable information, to the issue of having data governance policies in place for human resourcing purposes.

Companies should be planning processes and documentation for the collection, sharing and viewing of data.  Sharing itself is a tricky area as it can include sharing your data with 2^nd and 3^rd parties, different divisions or entities within your company’s legal structure and even to what tools can share data.  Setting clear and concise policies around how your data is collected, shared and handled will be essential when implementing various tools within your multi-solution mar-tech tool stack.

Process Implementation

There’s nothing more frustrating to teams than when there’s no clear process defined to implement great initiatives, projects or campaigns.  Confusion about who’s responsible for data collection, approvals, implementations, analysis and what happens next, is the fastest way to doom any great customer experience management project, especially when many different tools and data points are involved.

Creating processes for implementing each stage of the project will benefit all teams involved in any of your customer experience management projects.  Defining clear roles, responsibilities, check points and sign offs for each initiative and tool being utilized in the efforts is also vital to working with multi-solution mar-tech tool stacks.  As new tools and technologies are introduced, processes should also adapt, so be flexible to changing the process, but firm that there is a process developed, utilized and followed.

Data Alignment & Integration

Undoubtedly your teams will be more experienced with some of the tools in your mar-tech tool stack than with others.  Some tools, like analytics have been around for quite a while and have matured.  Teams sometimes take that “knowledge” for granted and work with the ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality.  As your company works to integrate more of these tools, it’s worth the effort to both reassess and align your current data integrations and collection efforts.

Just as with being flexible with processes is important as new tools and technologies are introduced, your data alignment, integrations and collections should be flexible as well.  Initiatives implemented seven, five or even three years ago can be significantly dated, as new technologies offer new efficiencies and opportunities.  If you aren’t actively looking to align your data across all your multi-solution tool stack, you could be missing significant opportunities to utilize you tools to advance your customer experience management efforts.

Team Alignment

As you acquire more mar-tech tools and integrate them into your initiative, it’s a good time to look at your team alignment.  Years past, it was common for teams to align with tool specific subject matter experts (SMEs), however, as the industry matures and lines are blurred where tool features overlap, it’s become more efficient and productive to align your SMEs around concepts rather than specific tools.  That’s not to say tool specific knowledge isn’t necessary – some tools are complex, like Adobe’s Campaign tool and need a specific SME.

Focusing on architecture and analysis concepts is an efficient way to consider your team alignment.  Your efforts are likely going to need data architects that understand how data elements can move from tool to tool as well as tool architects that know how to set up experiences, campaigns and data collection.  On the analysis front, you’ll want to look at data analysis verses audience and journey analysis from different views.  Understanding where people are falling out in a conversion funnel onsite or in-app, versus the performance of audiences against key metrics and goals need SMEs experienced in understanding each of the concepts.

Documentation

One of the most overlooked steps with any project or company initiative is documentation.  It becomes even more vital to a company when they are implementing new tools that can share data to achieve different goals within their customer experience management efforts.  In addition, documenting the prior 5 topics is key to solving the “knowledge drain” problem when team members move onto different positions in your company or onto roles outside of your company entirely.

Key to keeping your teams functioning efficiently and on-point is their base of knowledge around how to implement against your company’s policies for data governance, data integration, taxonomies and even analysis processes.  If these are not documented and readily available, you’re likely sacrificing efficiency and consistency when utilizing your multi-solution mar-tech tool stack.  Working documentation into your processes is a proactive step in advancing your customer experience management maturity.

There are a lot of facets to consider when your company takes on implementing multi-solutions mar-tech tool stack.  Addressing these 6 areas first will put you on a path that will have your swimming laps rather than just hoping to be able to keep treading water in the customer experience management pool.