Customer Experience Teams Don’t Need Pricey Tech—Until They Do

The limitations of taking a low-tech approach to customer journey mapping.

Consumers’ perception of customer experience (CX) quality has never been worse, and companies are turning to automation for answers. Worldwide spending on marketing technology (martech) is projected to surpass $215 billion by 2027, even as chief marketing officers (CMOs) are tasked to do more with less.

With shrinking budgets and growing pressure to right the ship, do CX leaders really need to invest limited resources into pricey customer journey orchestration (CJO) technology?

The answer lies in who leads the solutioning: you or your tools.

In a recent CX Dive article advocating for a return to the fundamentals, analysts reminded CX leaders that there’s no shortcut to successful customer journey mapping—not even the latest technology. Without mastering the basics, teams won’t know exactly what they need, and inevitably risk overspending on high-tech features they won’t use in areas that don’t require it.

We’re glad they’re making this point. You might be thinking, wait, doesn’t CSG provide Xponent—customer journey orchestration software? Why would CSG agree that low-tech approaches should be respected?

The reality is that if any technology is applied without the principles behind low-tech approaches in mind, it won’t activate change. But it will cost you more than just the price of the investment.

The CX industry has picked up an expensive habit of delegating the legwork of journey mapping to “tech people” that return more bells and whistles than results. They lose sight of the deeply human essence of the customer journey—why a person does or doesn’t respond to that third text message, how long they’ll tolerate hold music before giving up on a support call, the frustration of clicking through the app for 10 minutes without meeting their goal—and the experience suffers.

The stakes get higher: Companies overinvesting in CX tools that don’t deliver may compound the damage if they fall into the dreaded acquisition trap.

A recent survey of B2C marketers found that 54% of respondents allocated more than half their marketing budget to acquisition, while only 13% spent more than half their budget on retention. But in their haste to win new business, they do so at the expense of retaining their existing customer base—a population that accounts for 80% of new revenue streams among the world’s most successful growth companies. Acquisition tools are designed to reach a wider audience, not individuals with unique needs and preferences. They have little impact on customer lifetime value, which requires empathy-driven CX to improve.

There’s no substitute for human-centered CX design. Applying a manual Post-it note method to the early planning stages lays the foundation for a well-built customer journey. A low-tech journey mapping approach like the one presented in CX Dive can and should be the first line of defense for CX teams.

Does that mean investing in a CJO platform is a needless expense?

Just the opposite. Introducing the right technology to a finely honed customer journey map can accelerate the benefits you see from your efforts as you scale with greater speed and efficiency. The trick is taking a low-sophistication mapping, high-sophistication data organization approach that sets you on the right course—then fast-tracks your progress.

Advancing to CJO technology is much like learning to play guitar: You wouldn’t reach for the most sophisticated instrument on the market before you’d perfected the chords. But your long hours spent practicing can be put to best use once you’re ready to progress to tools like pedals or an amp. By the same token, manual journey mapping will take you to a certain level of success—but once you’ve owned the fundamentals, adding automation and intelligence to the equation can raise your ceiling of potential.

The fact is that CX teams do need more than sticky notes and string to map journeys that can keep up with today’s customers.

It’s a science that requires user research, actual data captured in real time and an understanding of customer sentiment and intent. Customers behave frenetically online—technology helps you capture, analyze and respond to every action at a rate that’s difficult, if not impossible, to replicate by hand.

Whether your journey mapping technique is fully manual or technology-assisted, the key to success is always leading from the CX practitioner’s perspective. Don’t rely on tools to do the job of a journey management team: treat technology as an enhancement, not a replacement. As the CX Dive article recommended, first define and target the most impactful steps along the journey—then, we suggest you streamline the system by feeding an automated platform those significant metrics to prove faster returns.

Start mapping with sticky notes and markers to reach the prerequisite level of expertise, but be ready to recognize when you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. You can try to fill in journey gaps over time by connecting the dots with data—but when is the cost of labor required to keep up with your growth equal to the price of efficient CJO software? Traditional customer journey maps provide a great baseline view of the path you believe a customer may follow. But only technology can definitively reveal what customers are doing in real time. You need both to improve the state of the customer experience.