Q&A with Alicia Arnold: The MarTech Conference

One central theme of the MarTech Conference (coming up Tuesday and Wednesday next week) is how to use the amazing array of tools now available, from AI to data analytics, to actually enhance customer experience. Alicia Arnold is managing director and digital transformation consultant at AK Arnold and her emphasis in her Wednesday session at MarTech will be on measuring customer experience. After all, if you can’t confidently measure it, how do you know if your efforts are improving it?

Register (free) for The MarTech Conference here

The session, live-streaming on Wednesday, March 20 at 11.50am ET (then available on demand) is designed to help you:

• Go from a high-level customer journey map to understanding how to measure tactical CX performance.
• Understand how to identify key CDP use cases that will take the customer journey map from illustration to action.
• Determine which stakeholders in the organization can help you unlock the value of CX data.

Alicia will also be joining Mike Kaput, chief content officer at the Marketing AI Institute, for an informal networking conversation about AI and CX (Wednesday, March 20, 10.00am ET).

In advance of her session, we had some questions for Alicia.

Q: Can’t we measure customer experience by doing some social listening and sentiment analysis?

A: Yes, you can measure CX with social listening and sentiment analysis. An item to keep in mind is that if a brand is using owned channels for social listening, the results can be skewed. Leveraging a larger sample and listening where you can understand what customers and prospects are saying to one another can add more detail and context.

Q: What are the advantages of using customer journey maps for this?

A: Customer journey maps act like a roadmap so that you can identify the key touchpoints that are most important. They help to prioritize focus areas and what is measured so that companies can be sure improvements will ladder up to the intended outcomes.

Q: Is a CDP essential to activating insights derived from customer journey mapping?

A: While a CDP is not required, having a centralized location where data from multiple sources is unified will streamline the process.

Q: Can you give an example of something that indicates your organization is actually becoming more customer-centric?

A: An indicator that your organization is becoming more customer-centric includes positive changes in baseline CX metrics over time. You might also notice a shift in the number of customer stories that are told across the organization, an increase in the amount of time employees spend with customers, and improving customer accessibility.