Keith Dawson's Analyst Perspectives

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 Market Agenda in the expertise area of Marketing, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help organizations derive optimal value from business technology and improve outcomes.

Topics: Marketing, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, intelligent marketing, CDP

The technology underpinning customer experience (CX) is a hodgepodge of tools that have been developed for niche use cases and then expanded to fill broader roles. Examples include the old (CRM, help desk software and speech analytics) and the new (customer data platforms and conversational AI). This is because CX is a set of very specialized processes that happen in different parts of the enterprise, managed by people who often do not connect with peers handling related processes. Service-related activities are focused in the contact center, personalization and loyalty in marketing departments, and so forth.

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Marketing Performance Management, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, agent management, intelligent marketing, Customer Experience Management, Field Service, Conversational Marketing, Digital Experience Platform, customer service and support

A formal Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is a necessity for any organization that wants to grow its customer base and differentiate from its competitors. Unfortunately, many organizations have not updated their notion of “formal” in quite a few years.

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Digital Marketing, agent management, Customer Experience Management, Field Service, Conversational Marketing, customer service and support

Ventana Research recently announced its 2022 Market Agenda in the expertise area of Marketing, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help organizations derive optimal value from business technology and improve outcomes.

Topics: Marketing, Marketing Performance Management, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, intelligent marketing, Conversational Marketing, Digital Experience Platform

Account-based marketing (ABM) serves as a model for how a complex manual activity can be improved and automated. That does not mean it always goes well. ABM is a practice that many B2B marketers swear by, but it can be very difficult to get a technology-enhanced ABM program up and running.

Topics: Marketing, Marketing Performance Management, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, intelligent marketing, Conversational Marketing, Digital Experience Platform

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications, as well as technology that contributes significantly to the improved processes and performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations to advance business and IT.

Topics: Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Collaboration, Data Governance, Data Preparation, Information Management, Data, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, Digital Commerce, blockchain, data lakes, intelligent marketing, Conversational Marketing

Field service is one element of the service-delivery process that an organization must get right or risk alienating important customers and causing friction in the relationship. The customer experience is directly affected by the timeliness, speed and accuracy of on-site work. Consequences of poor performance can hurt revenue, particularly in B2B situations where failures may cause expensive shutdowns or delays in conducting business.

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Commerce, Subscription Management, agent management

Customer experience (CX) tools are going through a transition, from piecemeal applications designed to solve narrowly defined problems, to broader suites with integrated functionality. This is occurring along multiple fronts in CX. Software for managing inbound interactions and customer issues is being gathered into CX suites sometimes described as Customer Experience Management (CEM). On the marketing side, the phenomenon is seen in the creation of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs).

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, Digital Commerce, intelligent marketing, Conversational Marketing

When we speak of the “customer experience,” we are really referring to the results of a broad spectrum of activities that collectively we describe as a journey or a lifecycle. In the past, how we spoke about customers was largely determined by the limited view of what transpired during short, contact center interactions. Customer experience (CX) evolved as a way to incorporate more facets of behavior into an assessment of the customer’s ultimate value and intent than is possible by looking only at an isolated interaction.

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, Digital Commerce, Subscription Management, agent management, intelligent marketing, Conversational Marketing

Since customer data platforms (CDP) emerged in the marketplace about five years ago, there has been debate about what roles they fill, especially within customer service organizations. They were originally developed by small software firms to provide marketing teams with a comprehensive view of customer records. Those records could be scattered throughout an organization, siloed by system and department. CDPs were an attempt to shortcut integration processes that are long, expensive and often custom-designed.

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Data Governance, Data Lake, Data Preparation, Information Management, Contact Center, Data, intelligent marketing