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 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 . 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 to improve.
