Marketing and customer experience (CX) functions are stuck in outdated and untenable silos: Marketers focus on acquiring an ever-larger number of customers they can’t retain, while CX professionals chase better retention even when it doesn’t make business sense.

In my new report, “Five Ways To Ensure Deep Collaboration Between Marketing And Customer Experience,” I identify five strategies — and 16 tactics within them — to make sure that marketing and CX functions work together to overcome their silos and create better interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. In brief, businesses must:

  • Acquire only the customers they can keep. Businesses often try to grow their customer bases with little regard for how well customers fit the brand. Firms that do this waste resources and set up both marketing and CX teams for failure. Instead of chasing more customers, companies should focus on getting the right customers — devotees who will be deeply loyal and passionate about the brand as well as cheaper to serve and retain.
  • Renovate their organizational structure. There’s no single perfect way to organize the relationship between marketing and CX teams. However, companies should ensure that both functions report to the same C-level executive, focus on cross-silo customer journeys instead of individual channels, work together on every single project, operate in the same physical and virtual spaces, and understand each other’s tools and techniques.
  • Create a single measurement program. Companies should use a journey measurement framework that starts with customer acquisition, create shared KPIs for CX and marketing, and give the CX team goals for customer retention and enrichment. This will ensure that the two teams work together instead of retreating back into their old silos.
  • Build a single prioritization process. When marketing and CX work together, they must prioritize together to ensure that they focus on those projects that provide the greatest return on investment. Firms that do this will establish formal criteria for greenlighting projects, impanel a cross-functional group to curate the framework, and require everyone to use the framework to justify their marketing and CX proposals.
  • Take an experience design approach to everything. Marketing and CX should use human-centric experience design best practices for all their projects. A mature design approach focuses on how things work instead of just how they look, emphasizes evidence over instinct, and standardizes all interactions around a single design system.

Check out my full report for a deep dive into these five categories!

Discover proven strategies for fostering an integrated customer experience that drives business success. Register now for the CX North America live virtual experience on June 7-9, 2021.