It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM. To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience. What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.
Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.
Rose says "... guess what? Right now, CXM is the sexiest thing that everyone is demoing and no one is actually doing. Now that doesn’t mean the technology doesn’t work. No, in fact many of the software companies have truly amazing capabilities to drive contextualized digital content experiences across channels. It just means that marketers aren’t ready for it yet." Emphasis mine.
My conclusion is that marketers don't care, because they don't need it. They have already figured out how to deliver experiences for their customers (or they're working on it) and they didn't need CMS vendor technology to do it.
He goes on to say "Today’s global 5000 company uses parts of Google Analytics with their Omniture implementation, and runs Hootsuite next to WordPress and Drupal, except for landing pages which are managed in Marketo...Marketers are up to their eyeballs in technology that means nothing to them."
My conclusion is that marketers are up to their eyeballs in technology that they are using and finding results with. Measurement tools (like Google Analytics), social media tools (like Hootsuite) and marketing automation tools (like Marketo) are getting all of the attention from marketers because they are the tools they actually use and need. It's not that CXM features don't mean anything to them, they just don't need them. At least not from CMS vendors.
He goes on to say that "Digital marketing software companies (WCM, Marketing Automation, Email, et al.) are all eyeing each other warily and trying to out “more” each other. Read the marketing materials. It’s all about more engagement, more measurability, more flexibility, more scalability etc., etc. What it adds up to is more software and more complexity."
I couldn't agree more. From my perspective, CXM (within the context of WCM/CMS) is nothing more than a feature arms race between companies that have latched onto a false "next big thing". These features were not developed in response to actual customer needs or requests. I never hear anyone talking about CXM except for CMS vendors and analysts.
So, "Does this mean that marketers should throw up their hands and ignore this CXM thing until the hype wears off?"
My conclusion is "yes".