BACKGROUND SCENARIO
Due to the marketing organization lacking a centralized customer experience model, their enterprise-wide marketing priorities, budgets, and technology goals were not aligned. They realized that their marketing capabilities needed to align across channels and lines of business (LOB). Previous road map efforts were too narrowly focused and did not account for corporate customer strategies, causing a cycle of unsuccessful and underutilized horizontal marketing capabilities.
There were several challenges that needed deeper evaluation:
Covalent Marketing first determined that there were individual, departmentally-driven roadmaps, analyses, and technology recommendations. None of these LOB roadmaps took into account larger goals or priorities.
Difficulty determining which capabilities were needed to achieve company-wide goals.
Departmental priorities were independent and it was unclear on how to best leverage budgets and resources.
Long-term needs were not developed and matured, therefore short-term projects clouded vision for the future.
IMPLEMENTED SOLUTION
Covalent conducted onsite workshops to identify the desired customer experience goals. This led to mapping the existing marketing technology capabilities, performing a capabilities gap-analysis, and building a tool-agnostic architectural overview. This information painted a total picture of what the organization currently had available, and what was needed to achieve their ideal customer engagement strategy.
In order to unify the channel teams and LOBs into this new, singular vision, the Customer Interaction Framework (CIF) was created. It provides an underlying purpose to the roadmap to help centralize and guide all future marketing efforts.
The CIF is a holistic framework that uses five key marketing technology capabilities enabled by a marketing delivery program to drive a positive brand experience for sustainable growth.
BUSINESS RESULTS
The client was empowered with a holistic three year marketing technology roadmap. This roadmap set the client up to successfully achieve their desired customer experience. Benefits included:
A clear understanding of the capabilities needed to pursue their customer experience goals and objectives.
The ability to focus on the order of future projects, thus eliminating the short-term blindness that would often supersede the long-term goals and objectives.
A customer experience framework that aligns initiatives across marketing teams and lines of business. This allows management to plan for, and make decisions on, projects that have both budget and resource allocation implications.