Mar 27, 2019

When Martech Meets Real-Time Customer Experience

Last week Servion and Selligent announced a strategic partnership, the first of its kind between a customer experience company and a marketing automation company. Let me tell you why we did it and what it means.

The 'why' stems from the realization that historically these two domains have been distinct in their approach, buying centers, technology and features. This has led to companies not extracting the full potential of either type of solutions and missing out on the opportunity to build a 360-degree view of the customer. By this, I mean knowing everything about the customer, all the time, integrating the touch points, and making the right decision on what to do.

The massively data-driven world of marketing automation revolves around email personalization and deliverability, website personalization and tracking, mobile messaging, 1-1 print, social outreach and targeting.

The world of customer experience revolves around real-time channel management, whether voice or digital, next best action determination, customer service agent support and productivity, and analytics generated from these interactions.

Combining both provides two major benefits that are impossible to reach if these solutions are not integrated: continuity of action, and consistency of customer journey data. Continuity of action, in its simplest form, is that a contact center agent on a campaign call should have full knowledge of who the customer is, and what he has received in print or visited on the website; then the agent can use the most appropriate script. Quite often, the agent should use more than one channel to reach the customer. It is common to use SMS and voice as part of the same campaign, and real-time orchestration of both is necessary.

Continuity of action and consistency of customer journey data enable better up-sells, cross-sells, proactive communications, call deflection. It means a better experience for customers and more productivity and business for enterprises.

Great advances in innovation often come from the convergence of two domains previously thought of as unrelated. By integrating the capabilities of Selligent and Servion, we are now offering a unique solution, bridging marketing automation and real-time customer experience.

Enterprises are taking a cohesive view of their digital transformation and now can implement these formerly elusive 360-degree customer views and next best action paradigms.