5 Customer Experience Requirements Your Marketing Team Can't Satisfy

Customer experience management is the marketing team's responsibility for most retail companies. Many aspects of customer experience do fall in the marketer's realm of expertise, but in order to deliver truly exceptional customer experiences, you must look beyond the marketing department.

Marketers can only deliver an outstanding customer experience when they build them on top of the right organizational processes and back-end systems. Otherwise, an experience is just a pretty face.

Data must be cleaned, organized and stored in the right systems. Processes must be linked to the appropriate systems and streamlined. Team members must be empowered with the right information at the right time. It's the only way they can represent your organization in a manner that will delight your customers.

This is omnichannel customer experience management. It's imperative that the modern retailer looks at customer experience in omnichannel terms. To do so, you must go beyond the marketing team, implementing these five key requirements:

1. Endless aisle: This term describes giving consumers the perception that you carry infinite inventory. You cannot literally carry infinite inventory, but you can use drop-shipping to avoid ever showing that "out of stock" message to a customer. Drop-shipping means that you outsource fulfillment for some or all of your orders to your suppliers. You effectively become the middleman, avoiding the need to carry what the customer bought. With an "endless aisle," the customer experience is improved on the shoulders of your inventory management and supply chain teams.

2. Real-time product availability: Closely related to endless aisle is the ability to provide real-time product availability. Consumers and employees should always have a clear picture of what inventory resides where. Weekly, daily or even hourly updates are not accurate enough. Knowing inventory status in real time improves the customer experience by avoiding those awkward moments where your customer thought they were buying a product, but then found out you actually don't have it. Again, the experience is improved with work by the inventory management and supply chain teams.

3. Order management: Order management across multiple channels is complex in the same way inventory is. To keep customers happy by providing them accurate and up-to-date order information, you need to centralize your order data across all systems. This empowers your customer support and sales teams, e-commerce manager, and store managers to give your customers accurate updates. It also allows you to gracefully handle changes or cancellations, split orders for individual item fulfillment, and track orders more closely. It makes things easier on your customer as a whole.

4. Master data management: Your team can provide the best possible customer experience when they have a unified profile of their customer. The only way to accomplish that is to master your customer data, linking the information from different channels into one picture. Empowering your customer-facing teams to provide a better experience using master data management is the responsibility of your IT department. Yes, your IT folks impact the customer experience you provide.

5. B-to-B customer management and support. If you sell products to other business (e.g., wholesalers and manufacturers), you must be able to treat their business customers just like a person in your store. B-to-B customers just see themselves as customers, and they expect the same integrated, multichannel experience. However, that requires you to connect your systems in a way that allows you to handle B-to-B-specific challenges, like credit account management, customer-specific pricing and complex account management teams. Most of this responsibility falls on the sales/account management teams. It's also critical that executives and IT leaders put the right processes and technologies in place to support your B-to-B customers.

Implementing these requirements means the marketing department can deliver the customer-facing experiences you desire. You can execute marketing campaigns and customer loyalty programs that encompass data from all channels, as well as compete with market leaders (i.e., Amazon.com) by providing similar shipping options. Furthermore, you can delight your customers with exceptional customer experiences.

Each of these requirements for customer experience will impact the success of your retail business … and someone other than the marketing team handles each of them.

Steve Weber is the president and CEO of nChannel, a provider of multichannel management software that simplifies selling for retailers of all sizes.