66% of marketers believe they are highly aligned with CX teams, but . . .
Only 40 per cent of those working directly on customer service teams are on the same page in terms of customer-centricity and goals, versus a majority of marketers who believe the relationship is stronger, according to a report from Pointillist.
The Boston-based provider of customer journey management software surveyed more 1,150 CX, analytics, customer service and marketing professionals from various industries for its study, the 2021 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement report, The research covered a wide range of issues around CX measurement, budgets and other common challenges.
Overall, marketing was similarly more positive than CX teams about other aspects of alignment between the two functions. Nearly 70 per cent of marketers said they collaborate regularly with their CX counterparts on ways to improve journeys and experiences, versus about 47 per cent of CX pros.
Only 40 per cent of CX pros, meanwhile, said marketing priorities journeys and experiences over areas such as acquisition and campaign performance. Sixty six per cent of marketers were more bullish.
“When marketing and CX teams operate independently, rather than aligning their priorities and objectives, they risk frustrating customers with inconsistent, disjointed experiences,” the report’s authors said. “In addition, marketing teams believe they are more effective at certain CX capabilities than their colleagues in CX believe. In fact, 44 per cent of marketers say they’re very or extremely effective at analyzing crosschannel customer behavior, while only 32 per cent of CX professionals concur.”
360 Magazine Insight
This kind of clash in cross-functional perspectives is by no means new, nor is it limited to marketing and CX groups. However it helps explain much of the other data that’s included in Pointillist’s 35-page gated report.
Quantifying return on investment for CX, for example, was the top challenge for the third straight year since the company has been fielding this survey. If marketing is focused on conversions or impressions and CX teams want to see a bump in retention, how is a company going to effectively measure its results?
Similarly, nearly six in ten respondents continue to report that customer data is either siloed or not accessible at all, according to Pointillist. I am willing to bet that part of the issue is that marketing hoards one set of data and CX teams are collecting and managing their own. However the level of legacy platforms in many companies was also cited as a major obstacle, which wasn’t surprising.
As in previous years, Pointillist broke out the results between “top performers” and “under-performers,” but this is based on how the respondents graded their satisfaction with their CX efforts rather than any empirical data. Given that marketing had such a sunny view on their relationship with the CX team, it’s possible some of those “top performers” have some additional room to improve.
