We can all agree that companies and their marketing have evolved, including an evolution from a more sequential “waterfall” process into a more agile one. Now let’s explore some of the developments that have transformed the customer experience and consumer behavior.

As data has become more readily available, and the platforms that companies use to store information about prospective and current customers have become more sophisticated, there has been an increased focus on creating, measuring and optimizing the customer experience using the best available tools.

The agile approach can be applied to many things other than software development, including marketing, branding, and even strategy. In this article we examine the agile brand – what it means and how it functions, along with the transformative effect agile marketing has on the practice of finding and keeping customers.

While many organizations still use outdated methods like annual employee reviews or engagement surveys, more forward-thinking organizations are tapping into tools that provide more frequent and more valuable information. Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping more and more of these organizations every day.

Successful companies have always understood that happy customers buy more and that they buy more often. They also understand the happy employees stay longer (which costs a company less money over time) and contribute to happier customers. This means that customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) have a lot to do with one another. Let’s explore three ways that customer experience and employee experience intersect and can work together.

A stellar customer experience can require a lot of pieces to be in place that span the internal-facing and external-facing parts of your organization. Customer journey orchestration allows marketers to integrate different marketing technology systems and platforms together. For instance, you can tie together your social media advertising, your website, your email marketing and your customer relationship management system  or customer database. This means you can share information between them that helps each platform take the best actions based on the specific customer or their last actions.

While we live in an increasingly digital world, to truly measure CX, we have to be able to measure both online and offline interactions. While we may use digital tools to do so, we can’t ever forget that customer experience is wherever the customer is, and whatever interaction they may be having. This would be an in-store conversation, a phone call to customer services, or, yes, a website or social media interaction.

Measuring your customer experience takes careful planning, a solid infrastructure, and clearly articulated metrics for success. These metrics are often created by looking at what the business needs, not at how the customer perceives success. We can sometimes get so focused on achieving our business key performance indicators (KPIs) that we lose sight of the central part of CX in the first place: the customer.

While your organization's leadership may all be in agreement that investing in customer experience is important, they may not always understand the far-reaching implications of an optimization effort. After all, unlike other more siloed efforts such as marketing campaigns or IT infrastructure enhancements, customer experience touches nearly everyone in your organization.