With ever more pressure on Customer Experience (CX) professionals to deliver measurable, predictable business results at scale one of the most important success factors is the CX technology you use, a subset of your enterprise technology architecture often referred to as your CX Tech Stack. This companion guide to our CX Tech Selection Guide describes the three key ‘layers’ of the CX Tech Stack; Design, Execution and Measurement & Improvement and where ~50 of the leading solution brands fit within the overall CX Tech Stack.
The three key layers of the CX tech Stack are:
- CX Design & Visualization – The least mature of the CX Tech Stack layers these tools support the creation of and definition of persona, segments, audience, journey maps, interactions and experience designs including the relationship between these components and the operating model elements of people, process, org, tech and data that deliver experiences.
- CX Execution – The most robust portfolio of technologies are those that actually deliver experiences within or across interaction channels. Incorporating digital experience platforms, contact center platforms, store and branch platforms, kiosks, AI, IOT, Chat, Marketing Automation and others including corss channel experience delivery.
- CX Measurement & Improvement – Customers’ experience expectations are constantly changing due to technology innovation and experiences delivered by your competitors and influencers in other industries. Measuring how well you deliver on customers’ expectations is a constant process and is similarly being impacted by evolving measurement capabilities. Traditional Voice of Customer (VoC) Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys were launched in 1968 by JD Power in the automotive industry and became widely adopted and was joined by Net Promoter Score (NPS) invented by Fred Reichheld of Bain Consulting in 1997, a group branded as Satmetrix in 2001 (and acquired by Nice Systems in 2017). Customer Effort Score (CES) was added in 2008 (now owned by Gartner). Voice of Analytics (VoA) has grown in the past 20 years especially through digital analytics tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics and more recently has been joined by semantic analysis of emails, contact center voice conversations, social media and others. Integrating all these measurement sources and aligning them with business metrics and scorecards has become an increasingly important element.