This article was originally written by Avanade alumn Ken Ramoutar.

Marketing technology has the potential to be your best friend and, in equal measure, your worst enemy. While a modern, flexible martech can help you give your customers exactly what they want, in our experience, a disconnected martech stack is a sure-fire way to lose sight of customers, cause internal rifts and even miss out on revenue.

3x ROI from customer experience
Marketers realize the value of helping a customer get what they need, when (or even before) they know they need it. And it takes marketing technology to make that happen. Martech provides the opportunity to connect data with systems and channels to complete the customer experience. So, whether you’re welcoming first-time visitors to your website or engaging loyal subscribers via live mobile SMS support sessions, your martech should make it easier for you to delight your customers with every interaction.

But often, something gets lost along the way. According to research carried out by Avanade and Sitecore, 95% of businesses say aspects of their customer experience are in critical need of improvement¹. The current outlook looks bleak: 61% lose revenue and 63% miss out on sales opportunities due to disconnected martech stacks.

If that sounds unacceptable to you and your business, there’s a bright light at the end of the tunnel: companies report achieving an average 3X ROI on their customer experience strategy. And even better, nearly 80% attribute that gain to adopting or upgrading their martech. For example, when Avanade helped St. Gallen Symposium migrate to Sitecore in the cloud and integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, they confirmed that the modern solution “…was a great success because we made the process for [their] customers a lot simpler and more iterative.”

So how do you connect your martech to wow your customers?

Strategy today, success tomorrow
Normal life doesn’t grind to a halt just because you need to upgrade your martech stack. I recommend taking a strategic approach to understanding and optimizing it. As a starting point, what are its strengths and weaknesses in terms of these four elements?

1. Data: See if you can get the core customer data to solve business problems. Does your martech have the kind of integrations and data capture capabilities you need?
2. Analytics: Extract insights from data to understand your customers, their needs and be able to share those easily. This will reveal where your CX revenue opportunities may be hiding.
3. Personalization: Drive a more connected, personal experience between your content and your customers, offering them more relevant information for their particular needs and lifecycle stage. A CMS with built-in personalization capabilities can make this more seamless for everyone. When Avanade helped utilities provider AGL give their customers a more personalized and actionable digital experience across web and mobile, the company saw 47% more click-throughs to their energy plans and a 29% increase in mobile conversions.
4. 4Artificial intelligence: If your martech can support them, consider integrating entry-level forms of AI and machine learning to make the experience faster and richer for customers, and less resource-intensive for you. Search relevancy and chatbots are becoming increasingly common - and expected - in modern customer experiences and are fantastic ways to test the waters of new-wave intelligence technologies.

With a connected martech stack, customers can get what they want, when and how they like it. You can test and continuously improve your content and customer journeys until you recognize impact. It helps you build and nurture a base of loyal customers who evangelize your brand, enabling growth. And you can earn more revenue – instead of watching it fly out the window.

Eliminate stress by leaning on experts
Change of this level can seem daunting. Complex solutions, endless technologies and services to choose from, risk of downtime, and the uncertainty of AI can be overwhelming. It’s no wonder that 70% of IT executives want to improve their martech stacks but don’t know where to start.

To save yourself time, money, and frustration in the long run, reach out to the digital team at Avanade to get the maximum value from your martech. Our unlikely combination of deep analytics and data scientists, business and industry strategists, user experience designers and credentialed technologists understand how to weave together the right elements for exceptional customer experiences.

Discover more about the relationship between connected martech and customer experience in the full research report.